Word: khrushchev
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...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...
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...
...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...
Author of The Crisis Years: Kennedy and Khrushchev...
Working at the highest levels of the Soviet government before his appointment as ambassador, Dobrynin had exposure to many of the Kremlin's murkier minds, like Khrushchev and Brezhev. His clear discussion of their decisions and their ways of handling power yields an insight that could only have come from experience...