The Soviet writer between wartime reportage and The Thaw
The title The Thaw became a name for post-Stalin hopes and limits far beyond the novel itself.
A novelist, poet, and journalist widely read as a wartime correspondent, he gave the name The Thaw to a 1954 novel; its title became the name for the de-Stalinization era as he worked at the edge of cultural liberalization.
Career Timeline
- 1941–1945Wartime correspondent for Red Army newspapers
- 1954Publishes the novel The Thaw
- 1960–1966Publishes memoir People, Years, Life
Related historical events
- 1936–1939The Spanish Civil WarIzvestia correspondentReported from Spain from August 1936 and toured the northern front with a mobile cinema, screening Soviet films for the troops
- 1937–1938The Great PurgeCarrier of memoryA writer who survived the purge years and later transmitted their memory in his memoirs.
- 1941–1945The Great Patriotic WarWartime publicistThe emblematic writer of the war years, his articles in Krasnaya Zvezda steeled the will to resist at the front and in the rear.
Wartime Propagandist: 1,500 Articles and 'Kill the German'
From 1941 to 1945, Ehrenburg wrote roughly 1,500 articles and pamphlets as a correspondent for Krasnaya Zvezda. His pieces were not only printed in frontline newspapers but distributed at readings and on leaflets; among partisans, an informal order reportedly instructed that newspapers be used for rolling cigarettes except for articles by Ilya Ehrenburg. His July 24, 1942 article 'Kill! (Убей!)' became the definitive articulation of the 'Kill the German' slogan, and Soviet newspapers soon ran columns titled 'Have You Killed a German Today?' The propaganda was so effective that Hitler personally declared him Germany's 'worst enemy' in January 1945 and ordered him captured and hanged. Nazi propaganda dubbed him 'Stalin's House Jew (Hausjude Stalins).' Yet when the Red Army crossed into Germany, the official line shifted toward liberating the German people, and after his April 11, 1945 article 'Enough! (Хватит!)' appeared in Krasnaya Zvezda, the head of the Central Committee's Propaganda Directorate, G.F. Aleksandrov, published a rebuttal in Pravda titled 'Comrade Ehrenburg Simplifies.' The episode became an emblematic crack in Soviet propaganda at the war's end.