Tangled Loyalties: The Life and Times of Ilya Ehrenburg

Rubenstein's superb biography of Soviet journalist, poet and novelist Ilya Ehrenburg (1891-1967) probes the moral complexity of a major cultural figure. Ehrenburg joined the Bolshevik underground at age 15. Imprisoned two years later, he fled Czarist Russia for Paris, where he met Lenin, whom he ridiculed in a satirical journal. The disillusioned ex-radical denounced the Bolshevik revolution in his poetry and became a cafe crony of Picasso, Modigliani and Chagall. But as an Izvestia correspondent in Paris during the 1930s, Ehrenburg became a key component of Stalin's propaganda machine. Yet Rubenstein, an Amnesty International director and a fellow at Harvard's Russian Research Center, maintains that Ehrenburg's courageous, even outspoken stances against Soviet repression far outweigh the compromises and silences of a career played out under dictatorship. He argues that Ehrenburg's subversive novel, The Thaw (1954), helped launch de-Stalinization, and he pressed for the rehabilitation of Isaac Babel, Osip Mandelstam and Marina Tsvetaeva. An assimilated Jew, Ehrenburg, in a personal letter of protest to Stalin, fearlessly opposed the dictator's planned round-up and deportation of the Soviet Union's Jewish citizens to Siberia and Birobidzhan in 1953. Photos. (Feb.)