Stalin's Not-So-Willing Propagandist

Now that it has become as common for a serious reader to read literary biographies as actual novels, is only a matter of time until even moderately famous writers get the full biographical treatment. The last year saw new biographies of Antoine de St.-Exupery, Andre Breton, and William Morris, to name just a few. And truly major writers are guaranteed at least a handful of encyclopedia-length biographies--three new books on Thomas Mann appeared in the space of a few months last summer.

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.

Perhaps it is just because Ehrenburg was most successful as a journalist and public figure, not as a major creative writer, that Joshua Rubinstein's Tangled Loyalties: The Life and Times of Ilya Ehrenburg is so consistently absorbing. Most lierary biographies are forced to make an exciting story out of lives containing little external incident, and as a result they either present a catalogue of mundane details or try to unearth some salacious, gossipy stories about their subject.

But Ehrenburg's life actually was as interesting as his writing; over six decades he came in contact with virtually every major political and cultural figure in Russia. Joshua Rubinstein is a historian, affiliated with Harvard's Russian Research Center, and this biography treats Ehrenburg as a historical figure, paying only moderate attention to his literary work. The result is a book that brings Ehrenburg vividly to life, even for those who have never read his novels, as well as skillfully illuminating the dark times in which he lived.

As the 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.

His fruitful collaboration with the regime is especially peculiar because Ehrenburg was an early and vocal anti-Bolshevik. Born to a middle-class Jewish family in Kiev in 1891, he joined the Party in his teens but later quit in disgust at its intolerance and inability to understand art. Instead he lived as a Bohemian in Paris, making friends with Diego Rivera and Picasso. Even the Revolution didn't win him over to Communism; he returned to Russia in 1918, only to leave again three years later and write his first novel, The Extraordinary Adventures of Julio Jurenito and His Disciples, a Candide-like satire on revolutionists of all stripes.

But by the late 1920s, Ehrenburg was warming to the Communist regime, and in the mid-1930s he became the Izvestia correspondent in France, sealing his compromise with Stalinism. From then on his life became an excruciating balancing act, trying simultaneously to appease the Kremlin and make some small gains for what he believed in--artistic freedom and the rights of Jews, foremost among them.

As Ehrenburg's biographer, it is perhaps to be expected that Rubinstein becomes his advocate, trying to acquit him of the moral taint of collaboration. Rubinstein's thesis is a reasonable and, for the most part, well-supported one: 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."

This means that, while he didn't dare speak out on behalf of persecuted writers like Babel, Mandelstam or Anna Akhmatova during the Stalin years, Ehrenburg worked assiduously to resurrect their reputations in the more lenient Khrushchev period. As Rubinstein documents, Ehrenburg used his position as the Soviet writer best known to the Western intelligentsia in order to blackmail the censors: he would repeatedly announce the publication of a controversial book or article, then protest that its failure to appear due to censorship would reflect badly on the Soviet regime in the West.

It is also true that Ehrenburg protested the regime's abuses as far as he could without losing his privileged position. He refused to sign the most egregiously pro-Stalin public statements of his fellow writers, worked hard to document the Nazi massacre of Jews despite official Soviet disapproval, and was one of the first public figures to speak out against Stalin after his death, in his novel The Thaw.

Still, Rubinstein often seems too quick to give his subject the benefit of the doubt. In the book's final pages, he mentions the Prague Spring uprising which took place 1968, one year after Ehrenburg's death, and comments offhandedly that it was "a cause Ehrenburg surely would have supported." Rubinstein seems to have forgotten his own account of how, during the similar 1956 revolt in Hungary, Ehrenburg was dispatched to a foreign writers' conference to defend Khrushchev's brutal intervention against criticism, a job he performed without complaint. True, Ehrenburg was no fawning Stalinist; but to imply that he was some sort of conscientious objector trivializes the sacrifices made by real dissidents.

Nevertheless, Rubinstein's sympathy never completely blinds him to his subject's many ambiguities. The Ilya Ehrenburg who emerges from Tangled Loyalties is not a heroic man, but he is marvelously complex, as fascinating as the era he lived through. Tangled Loyalties must be of interest to anyone concerned about the troubled relationship between art and politics, both in the last century and in the century about to start.