Word: ehrenburg
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...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...
...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...
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...