Seventy years ago, a short novel by a Soviet Jewish writer became a political sensation. Titled The Thaw, the book appeared just a year and a half after Stalin’s death in 1953. On the surface, the narrative tells of the goings-on in a small Soviet town and the large industrial plant that sustains it. But readers at that time took it for what it was: a lightly penciled yet unmistakable outline of a thin but durable shoot of civil society breaking through the Stalinist permafrost.
Ilya Grigoryevich Ehrenburg was born to an upper-middle-class family in Kiev in 1891. Although he never joined the Communist Party, he served the Kremlin faithfully, writing, whether from Paris or Moscow, on topics that he judged, almost always correctly, to be in demand by the Kremlin. Uncannily adumbrating sharp turns in the “Party line,” he came to the attention of Stalin, who was eager for intellectual and literary credibility.
Ehrenburg was also a top Soviet international propagandist, the main handler of the most prominent Western fellow travelers—the novelist André Malraux, the poet Pablo Neruda, artists Pablo Picasso and Diego Rivera, and the actor and singer Paul Robeson—and perhaps the most prominent and seemingly indefatigable agitator for the Cold War Moscow-sponsored worldwide “Peace Supporters Movement.” Three Stalin Prizes, encouraging telegrams, and a phone call from the literary critic in chief himself in the Kremlin were among the rewards of Stalin’s favorite Jew.
Even so, Ehrenburg was no typical literary apparatchik. He lived in Paris for more than a decade as a political émigré from czarist Russia after the 1905 revolution and befriended Modigliani, Picasso, Rivera, and Soutine at the Left Bank cafés. In 1922, he wrote the brilliantly irreverent The Extraordinary Adventures of Julio Jurenito, which skewered both Soviet totalitarian socialism and the post–World War I capitalist West and foretold the Holocaust. During World War II, he was perhaps the most popular of Soviet wartime correspondents and essayists. (Hitler ordered his troops to capture and hang Ehrenburg.)
In 1960, almost three and a half decades after the beginning of Stalin’s reign and seven years after his death, Ehrenburg opened the eyes of the literati in the Soviet Union with an astonishing memoir called People, Years, Life. Among its many pleasures, the book resurrected the reputations and names of literary geniuses—Anna Akhmatova, Isaac Babel, Osip Mandelstam—who had been defiled, banned, buried, forgotten.
But first there was The Thaw. To assuage the cen-sors, Ehrenburg tucked its fabric onto the template of socialist realism with scores of safety pins. Thus it features the “struggle between the good and the better”; it reflects the Stalinist obsession with fulfilling the industrial quotas (the all-powerful “plan”) to advance the march toward Communism, and its main characters are utterly chaste in their romantic longing.
In The Thaw, whether Ehrenburg is writing about the perspective inside the city committee of a provincial town or the highest reaches of the government in Moscow, the Party’s hand is invariably benign, wise, and firm in righting the wrongs, rewarding the good, and punishing the bad. There are paeans to the Soviet “hero-people” who “perform astounding feats.” Passionately engaged with the Soviet Union’s foreign policy, its characters enthusiastically regurgitate Pravda’s latest reports, the U.S.–French relations being especially irresistible. Walking home from an Italian movie, two would-be lovers discuss the political future of an unemployed Roman: Would he join the Communists or “remain in the dark”?
A Pravda account of the latest Party plenum, which called for a dramatic increase in livestock, is mentioned half a dozen times: Read and reread, it “lifted people’s moods, brought cheer to their souls,” and became a subject of a lecture attended by the townsfolk.
Speaking of lectures, the heroine, Lena Zhuravleva, falls for the hero, Dmitry Koroteev—a talented and hardworking engineer, a constellation of Soviet Man’s virtues—in part because of his masterful summation of the end of the Korean War. It was, Dmitry says, the “collapse of the American strategy,” a “lesson to all aggressors” and an inspiration to the “supporters of peace” all over the world. Lena is a model Soviet teacher, day and night thinking about her students, attending a seminar on Marxism-Leninism before rushing to participate in the town’s amateur performance group.
Hewing to the precepts of socialist realism made the flimsy story even less engaging, and Ehrenburg was aware of its flaws. That is why, toward the end of his life—he died in 1967—he described himself ruefully as a “middling, so-so writer.” But no matter. For as he replied to his austere critics, “The hero of The Thaw was the thaw.” The book was an earthquake. It provided the term thereafter applied to a short but crucial era of Soviet history—the period that saw the emptying of the Gulag, diminishing political controls, and lessening repression. Indeed, the word “thaw” continues to be used when describing moments of liberalization in authoritarian and totalitarian states to this day.
Save perhaps for Nikolai Chernyshevsky’s What Is to be Done?—the mid-19th-century bible of radical intelligentsia from the suicide bombers of People’s Will to Lenin and the Bolsheviks—it is hard to think of a work of Russian fiction in which the gap between literary merit and political impact is quite as great.
The Thaw took on no less than what Dmitry Bykov, a leading Russian critic and historian of literature, called the “laying down of taboos,” which he described as the “key feature of Stalinism.” The key moment in the book comes when Dmitry Koroteev declares, “I don’t want to lie!”—anticipating Aleksander Solzhenitsyn’s call to resist totalitarianism by refusing “to live the lie.” First among the published Soviet writers, Ehrenburg lit the fuse of the truth bomb that would explode 35 years later in Gorbachev’s glasnost and bury the Soviet Union.
Adept from childhood in the intricacies of the language of allusions and hints writers used to evade all-too-literal government censors, the Russian reader had no difficulty in spotting the subversion in the seemingly offhand remarks of Ehrenburg’s characters.
The workers at the plant in the center of the narrative live in “decrepit hovels”: “dark and dank,” “rotting” under “leaky roofs.” The town stores are empty, as is the plant commissary, and the workers must ride a bus for three hours to look for food in the closest city.
State-run art comes in for repeated needling. Soviet readers and theater audiences “ache for” good books and fine plays. We see a talented artist who is unable to exhibit his landscapes literally starving, while a journeyman painter rakes it in with socialist realist visual claptrap with names like A Banquet in a Collective Farm and Meeting in a Factory Workshop.
“No one pays for ‘ideas,’” the painter explains. “They may wring your neck for ideas. Ideology is what’s needed. Have it in your book or painting you’ll be fine. Ideas are only for madmen.” In the Soviet Union, he adds, Raphael would have no hope for membership in the Artists’ Union, which commissioned work and gave out prizes.
Recovering from the memory hole the shameful and scary events that the Party wished to bury, Ehrenburg writes about Anna Sherer, a Jewish doctor at the plant’s clinic. Having lost a husband in the war and her mother and sister to the Holocaust, Anna is brought to tears by Pravda’s “announcement” about an “uncovered group of doctors-wreckers” who had been alleged to poison the country’s leaders—the nightmarish Doctors’ Plot that was intended as a prologue to a nationwide pogrom and was cancelled only by Stalin’s death. “Sometimes people say such dreadful things,” she confides to a friend. “Don’t trust the doctors!” workers had groused loudly in the clinic’s reception. “Especially the likes of her!” (“Can’t trust [her] too much,” the plant’s director advises his wife.)
_____________
Yet perhaps even more than the exhilaration of finally seeing in print at least a glimpse of the filth, injustice, and privation around them, the readers of the book may have made it a sensation not because of the horror it evoked but due to Ehrenburg’s hopefulness: He had perceived a change in the air and was quick to convey it to the reader.
Ubiquitous hypocrisy—what Koroteev calls “saying one thing but living differently”—might no longer be essential for survival as it had been under Stalin. Suddenly, opinions could differ and be voiced. Lena walks out on her boorish underhanded husband, the plant director no less—and neither is hauled before a Party komitet. While “doctors-wreckers” are being tortured and the gallows readied for public hangings on Red Square, a plant engineer comes to Sherer’s office, shakes her hand, and deplores the ugliness of the general opinion expressed about her clinic.
The time had come and gone, Koroteev happily notes, when one could denounce one’s colleague and have him sent to the Gulag. The putative “traitor” we see in the book, another plant engineer, is no longer “under the net,” even as some vindictive townsfolk are looking forward to the “traitor’s” trial and what they assumed would be his inevitable conviction.
Contemplating precisely such an outcome is the plant’s intriguing director, Ivan Zhuravlev. A stereotypical manager of Stalin’s five-year plans, Zhuravlev is obsessed with pleasing “Moscow” and the “Ministry” by filling and overfilling plant quotas while exploiting and browbeating the workers. An embodiment of what Ehrenburg tags as a hard-liner, Zhuravlev rails against liberalizing reforms: “Take a few bricks out and the entire house will come down.” Ehrenburg contrives in his plot to have Zhuravlev fired—and this after his principled wife Lena had already left him without punishment.
Two years after The Thaw, in October 1956, Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev attacked Stalin in what came to be known as the “secret speech”—an epochal moment that broke the international Communist movement when the gap between the fantasy of Communist progressivism and the reality of Stalinist totalitarianism was revealed and could no longer be unseen. Zhuravlev’s departure from the book reads like a prophecy of that moment: “No one remembered [Zhuravlev]. The factory whistle blew, the lathes hummed but where was Zhuravlev? What’s with him? Not a single soul cared to know.”
Still imprisoned by censorship and fear, Ehrenburg’s characters relish a sliver of liberty to think and to talk. They infect the reader with what Bykov diagnosed as the “delight at the sight of a revealed freedom.” The elation also permeated the brass fanfare of Dmitri Shostakovich’s Festive Overture. Written and performed the same year as The Thaw’s publication, ostensibly to celebrate the 37th anniversary of the Revolution, the music was immediately understood by Muscovites (my grandmother among them) for what it really was: a celebration of the death of the composer’s tormentor in the Kremlin.
As the book ends, it is February—a classic Russian winter, but it’s already slightly warmer. Thoughts of spring are everywhere. “It is not about the weather,” Ehrenburg spells out. “It is all much deeper.”
At the “dark and bloody crossroads” where literature and politics meet, in Lionel Trilling’s words, Ehrenburg erected an enduring fingerpost. As we watch Russia’s seemingly inexorable slide into fascism and neo-Stalinism under Vladimir Putin, The Thaw remains an imperfect yet durable testament to cowed mankind’s ineradicable yearning for the dignity in gaining moral autonomy from the totalitarian state. It is a reminder of and an homage to what Ehrenburg called, in a poem at the end of his life, the “trampled-on yet thinking reed” of humanity.
Who knows: As he hides his handwritten notes in the farthest recesses of his desk, perhaps another useful Kremlin scribe, cosseted by the ruler as Ehrenburg was, may be dreaming of being the first to herald a post-Putin “thaw.”
Photo: Tretyakov Gallery / Wikimedia
We want to hear your thoughts about this article. Click here to send a letter to the editor.
