To the Editor:

I would like to take exception to Gary Saul Morson’s dismissal of Ilya Ehrenburg’s participation in The Black Book project, an anthology of first-hand accounts of the Holocaust on Soviet territory. In his review of my book, Tangled Loyalties: The Life and Times of Ilya Ehrenburg [Books in Review, September 1996], Mr. Morson asserts that Ehrenburg’s “job was to guide the volume into print,” as if he were only lending his prestige to the project and was not genuinely engaged in creating it. Contrary to Mr. Morson’s unfounded and misleading claim, the historical record is crystal-clear: while the Nazis still controlled a great deal of Soviet territory, Ehrenburg assembled and directed the research of more than two dozen Jewish and non-Jewish writers, conducted scores of interviews on his own, edited a great deal of material, and contended with Soviet bureaucrats before relinquishing editorial duties to Vasily Grossman. Ehrenburg used the cover of the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee to organize this project That he was able to accomplish as much as he did independently of official Soviet control was unprecedented in Soviet history up to that time.

Mr. Morson also missed a major flaw in the book by John and Carol Garrard, The Bones of Berdichev: The Life and Fate of Vasily Grossman, which he also reviewed. In their attempt to create a monument to Grossman, the Garrards commit a crucial lapse of scholarly judgment. In February 1953, in the weeks following the denunciation in Pravda of a group of Jewish doctors for the alleged poisoning of Soviet leaders, Grossman was urged to sign an ugly collective letter addressed to Stalin himself. The regime was forcing Jewish cultural figures to agree in the letter that the doctors were guilty and that Soviet Jews should be deported to Siberia and Birobidzhan to save them from the “wrath of the people.”

Terrified, Grossman signed the letter. (I interviewed the poet Margarita Aliger, who had sat next to Grossman when they both signed the letter.) Grossman was under tremendous pressure, and I do not bring this up to condemn him in any way. He then returned home to drink himself into a stupor.

Although the Doctors’ Plot ended with Stalin’s death before the deportations could take place, Grossman regretted signing the letter for the rest of his life. (In fact, the episode drove him, in part, to write his famous novel, Life and Fate, as a form of penance.) The Garrards refer to this episode only in a footnote, by comparing the letter Grossman actually signed with a letter to the editor of the New York Times denying human-rights abuses in the Soviet Union that Grossman’s fictional counterpart, Viktor Shtrum, signs in Life and Fate. It is deliberately misleading on their part to make this comparison, aside from the fact that Grossman’s failure of nerve needs to be fully discussed in any serious account of his life.

Ehrenburg was one of the few who refused to sign this letter to Stalin. He actually refused on three separate occasions and was the only person to write a letter of his own to Stalin arguing against the planned deportations. Alexander Yakovlev (Gorbachev’s former adviser) has seen this letter in official Russian archives and confirmed that Stalin’s markings are on it. Yakovlev has yet to divulge what, if anything concrete, Stalin noted. But the fact that Ehrenburg risked his life in this way and could well have spared two million fellow Jews from an act of genocide is not to be lightly dismissed. The episode highlights a chapter in Tangled Loyalties.

Joshua Rubenstein
Cambridge, Massachusetts

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Gary Saul Morson writes:

Joshua Rubenstein’s quarrel seems to be more with the Garrards than with me. Even the passage in my review to which he objects represents my paraphrase of the Garrards’ account, not my own view of the subject. Apart from the two books under review, I have no information worth mentioning on the creation of The Black Book.

The tone of Mr. Rubenstein’s letter resembles that of his book: in both, he seems to conceive his role as one of defense attorney for Ilya Ehrenburg. Although biographers frequently are led to identify with their subjects, and to apologize for them as much as possible, such a practice diminishes the value of their work. It may seem naive to say so, but a scholar’s highest loyalty should be not to his subject but to the truth. In this respect, not just Ehrenburg’s, but also Mr. Rubenstein’s, loyalties are “tangled.”

At almost every point in his biography, Mr. Rubenstein strains to present Ehrenburg’s behavior in the best possible light. Concerning Ehrenburg’s fierce pro-Soviet propaganda in the 1930’s, Mr. Rubenstein appeals to our anti-fascist sentiments to justify all those with misgivings about Stalin who nevertheless served him: “the consolidation of fascist regimes . . . compelled them . . . to remain silent about events in the Soviet Union” (emphasis added). But at the time, nothing the fascist regimes had then done remotely compared with Stalin’s crimes, such as the enforced mass starvation of some seven million peasants. We are implicitly asked to justify Ehrenburg in terms of what the Nazis later did, which he could not have known in advance.

“Compelled” is also an odd word to use considering the fact that in the Soviet Union people were every day truly “compelled” in a nonmetaphoric way—in labor camps or by threats of being sent to them, as people were by the millions (or tens of millions). “Compelled,” which suggests no choice, is the word of an apologist, and Mr. Rubenstein uses it elsewhere. Ehrenburg, he says, “was devoted to the anti-fascist cause and was also a Soviet journalist, two commitments that compelled him to compromise both the truth and his own conscience. . . . Ehrenburg, like everyone caught in the Stalinist net, understood the price of defying Soviet policies and adjusted his behavior to remain alive” (emphasis added). Like everyone? No, there were exceptions. Compelled by his status as a Soviet journalist? But not every journalist took on such sensitive and politically loaded duties as Ehrenburg did, and very few profited from them the way he did. At the height of Stalin’s purges and later, when mere contact with foreigners was often enough to earn one a trip to the gulag, Ehrenburg lived splendidly and was able to travel frequently abroad. In 1960, for example, he managed to cross the border thirteen times.

Once a reader recognizes that a biographer is partisan, he cannot help wondering what has been left out; after all, defense attorneys do not usually present information damaging to their clients unless it is unavoidable. Our faith in such a biography necessarily weakens. Consider the following facts that Mr. Rubenstein provides: in the revolutionary and civil-war days, Ehrenburg was a fiercely anti-Bolshevik journalist. Having written for conservative papers abroad, he called the Bolsheviks rapists, both literally and figuratively, said that their regime was alien to the spirit of Russia, insulted Lenin personally, and sought support from the Whites, despite their well-known anti-Semitism. As Mr. Rubenstein notes:

It is hard to find a similar example of such outright hatred of the Bolsheviks by any other important Soviet personality, let alone by someone who later flourished as Ehrenburg did.

Yet later, living abroad, Ehrenberg was given the sensitive assignment of reporting on the Spanish Civil War. And then he went on to become the country’s leading foreign propagandist. How was this possible? How was he able repeatedly to solicit Stalin’s direct protection when attacked? Anyone familiar with Soviet history will ask whether he was a secret agent as well as a propagandist. For that matter, why did Stalin not suspect him of being a double agent?

Yet I do not wish to reverse Mr. Rubenstein’s questionable apologies with an equally questionable blanket condemnation. As I stated in my review, it is very hard to know whether to condemn people who compromised with a totalitarian regime that threatened their (and their families’) lives. A host of questions present themselves: Did the person compromise more than he had to? Did he profit by his activities? What alternatives were available and which did others choose? And one always wants to ask oneself, would I have behaved any better?

How to judge those who collaborated with great evil, but under great pressure, is an immensely complex moral problem, one which every East European country faces today. In the case of a figure like Ilya Ehrenburg we need real discussion, a biography that weighs with sensitivity the difficult questions involved. What we get instead in Tangled Loyalties is the best case a defense attorney knows how to make. And that is itself troubling, from both a scholarly and a moral perspective.

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