Word: stalins
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This year it is Ilya Ehrenburg's turn in the spotlight. Ehrenburg, probably unknown to most Americans only 30 years after his death, was one of the most famous Soviet writers from the 1930s to the 1960s, serving as the USSR's main cultural emissary to the West under Stalin and Khrushchev. While he wrote dozens of novels and books of verse, he became best known as a correspondent for Izvestia and other Soviet newspapers during the Spanish Civil War and World War II, when his fiercely anti-Fascist sentiments made him a favorite of Red Army soldiers...
...title of the biography indicates, Ehrenburg's life is of so much interest precisely because his loyalties, his principles, are so hard to determine. He was a Jew who prospered during the anti-Semitic Stalin years, while other notable Jewish writers were judicially murdered; he was a poet and novelist who won the Stalin Prize while his personal friends Osip Mandelstam and Isaac Babel were sent to the gulag. Clearly, Ehrenburg was no beacon of conscience...
...namely, that Ehrenburg used his public image as "a harsh spokesman for Soviet interests" as "a cover to pursue his ultimate goal: to challenge the limits of Soviet censorship, revive Russia's connection to European culture, and restore to living memory the names and works of those whom Stalin first killed and then erased from history...
Citing a quotation by Josef Stalin, Lloyd said, "He who controls the votes will win the election...
Intellectuals sometimes take a certain ain't-we-awful pride in America's tradition of political paranoia (Know-Nothingism, anti-Catholic ravings, McCarthyism, for example). But on the whole, Americans' freedom has made them comparative innocents; dinner parties aside, Stalin may have murdered upwards of 10 million of his fellow citizens, though estimates vary greatly...