Ilya Ehrenburg was an intriguing man who wove a fascinating path through the Soviet system. He first registered on Western intelligence radar screens in the Spanish Civil War working as a journalist for Izvestia but was widely suspected of being an NKVD agent. From there he moved to France and witnessed the fall of France to the Wehrmacht in 1940. This experience he captured in a novel which won The Stalin Prize in 1942. By this time, the USSR itself was at war with Germany and Ehrenburg became a famous war correspondent. In the process he covered the emerging horrors of the Holocaust and became dedicated to exposing Jewish genocide campaigns in the Soviet Union. Through all of this he escaped the purges that decimated Soviet literary ranks and ended his life a wealthy man if the impressions of the Paris Review on visiting his Moscow home in the early 1960s are to be believed.
Perhaps his most famous book was "The Thaw" a controversial novel which focused on the personal lives of Soviet factory workers and bosses in contrast to the epic heroic sagas expected under the political diktat of the day. "The Thaw" is a quick, but fascinating read, highlighting the human qualities of a large cast of characters most of them sympathetic to any reader now. This book gave its name to one of the periods of relatively liberal policies persued for a time by Stalin's successor, Nikita Khruschev. Copies are hard to find nowadays, but this little gem of historic and literary interest is worth looking out for.
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