Ilya Ehrenburg

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Ilya Grigoryevich Ehrenburg (Template:Lang-ru; January 27, 1891, Kiev,Ukraine, (then Russian Empire) –August 31, 1967, Moscow, Soviet Union) was a Soviet Jewish writer and journalist whose 1954 novel gave name to the Khrushchev Thaw.

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Life and work

Ilya Ehrenburg played many roles in his life, and was never fully understood by his contemporaries. A revolutionary as a teenager, a disenchanted poet in his youth, writing Catholic poems despite his Jewish background, a follower of Lenin on arrival in Paris who became an anti-Bolshevik, truthful and sensitive journalist, turning again in later years to writing crude Communist and war propaganda, while occasionally defending his views with boldness against Stalin or government mouthpieces, Ehrenburg was a public figure who at times made severe compromises to survive under the inescapable paradoxes of Soviet totalitarianism, and at others took foolhardy risks that he survived perhaps only by chance.

Ehrenburg is well known for his literary writing, especially his memoirs, which contain many portraits of interest to literary historians and biographers.

Together with Vasily Grossman, Ehrenburg coedited The Black Book that contains documentary accounts by Jewish survivors of the Holocaust in the Soviet Union and Poland.

On his passing in 1967, he was interred in Novodevichy Cemetery in Moscow.

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Controversies

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One of the major controversies surrounding Ehrenburg is that during World War II he exhorted Soviet troops to kill German military that they encountered in the war effort. Ehrenburg 'supposedly' authored a leaflet entitled "Kill," which was circulated among the soldiers on the Eastern Front:

"Now we understand the Germans are not human. Now the word 'German' has become the most terrible curse. Let us not speak. Let us not be indignant. Let us kill. If you do not kill a German, a German will kill you. He will carry away your family, and torture them in his damned Germany. If you have killed one German, kill another." [1]

Some historians attribute Ehrenburg's message as a motivating factor for the violence against German civilians that took place as Soviet troops advanced through Nazi occupied territory toward the end of the war.

Other historians challenge Ehrenburg's authorship of the infamous "Kill"-leaflet. Their arguments are based on the absence of known original Soviet copies of the leaflet from archives and an article by the alleged author in the Krasnaya Zvezda dated November 24, 1944 in which Ehrenburg explicitly denies his authorship of the "Kill" leaflet. [2] (German) A few historians even claim the "Kill" leaflet to be a fabrication of the Nazi Propagandaministerium, invented to strengthen the German resistance during the final months of the war.

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