Tangled loyalties

Journalist, novelist, poet - Ilya Ehrenburg (1891-1967) was one of the most important Russian cultural figures of the twentieth century. A political exile from czarist Russia, he spent years in Paris as a bohemian poet and later became Izvestia correspondent in Western Europe. He was one of the few distinguished Soviet writers to survive Stalin. Ehrenburg's 1954 novel, The Thaw lent its name to the critical period following Stalin's death. His memoirs People, Years, Life outraged the Kremlin in the sixties for describing a conspiracy of silence that had prevailed under the dictator. In this…