Ilya Ehrenburg was Joseph Stalin's master propagandist. He attracted notorierty by the lurid nature of his pronouncements, and by his incitement to the Red Troops to murder and plllage as they entered Hitler's Germany in 1945. We reproduce here critiques and comments on a recent biography.

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Joshua Rubenstein, Tangled Loyalties, The Life and Times of Ilya Ehrenburg (New York, 1998). Mr. Rubenstein's latest book, Tangled Loyalties, The Life and Times of Ilya Ehrenburg, a biography of the controversial Soviet writer and journalist, has just been published after thirteen years of research and writing, including two months examining newly available material in Russian archives and libraries. He also conducted personal interviews with more than one hundred people who knew Ilya Ehrenburg, locating them in Russia, England, France, Spain, Israel, and the United States. Mr. Rubenstein has also contributed articles and reviews on Russian and international affairs to many publications including Commentary, The New Republic, The Wall Street Journal, The Nation, The Columbia Journalism Review, The New York Times and The Boston Globe. Since 1975, Mr. Rubenstein has been the Northeast Regional Director of Amnesty International USA, overseeing Amnesty's work in New England, New York and New Jersey. His responsibilities have been wide-ranging. They include acting as an official Amnesty spokesman on radio, television and in the print media; maintaining extensive press contacts and initiating editorial board meetings on breaking human rights stories; organizing public forums and benefits; establishing Amnesty chapters in high schools, colleges and the community; directing a staff of five people and many volunteers in the Northeast Regional Office located in Boston; and participating in numerous human rights activities at the national and international level.

Joshua Rubenstein has been professionally involved with human rights and international affairs for more than twenty years as an activist, scholar and journalist with particular expertise in Soviet affairs. A long-time Fellow of Harvard's Davis Center for Russian Studies, he has made many research trips to Moscow and other Russian cities. He has lectured and written widely on the Soviet human rights movement, including a series of lectures in Russian at the Mendeleev Institute in Moscow in the fall of 1990 and in the spring of 1991. His first book, Soviet Dissidents, Their Struggle for Human Rights (Beacon Press, 1980; 1985), was based on research and interviews in Western Europe, the Soviet Union, Israel, and the United States. In a review in The New York Review of Books, it was praised by Leonard Schapiro, the dean of Soviet scholars in Great Britain, as "sympathetic, scholarly, and comprehensive," and "recommended to all who want to get a fair picture of the development and tribulations of the movement, and of the experiences of some of its most prominent protagonists." Mr. Rubenstein's latest book, Tangled Loyalties, The Life and Times of Ilya Ehrenburg, a biography of the controversial Soviet writer and journalist, has just been published after thirteen years of research and writing, including two months examining newly available material in Russian archives and libraries. He also conducted personal interviews with more than one hundred people who knew Ehrenburg, locating them in Russia, England, France, Spain, Israel, and the United States.

3.   A Website visitor comments on the book Tangled Loyalties by Joshua Rubenstein, a biography of Stalin's own notorious "Dr Goebbels," the war-propagandist Illya Ehrenburg: Ehrenburg willed his estate to the State of Israel where he is considered a "hero" (NB: the Dr Baruch Goldstein from Brooklyn who shot fifty-eight Arabs to death while they were at prayer in a mosque is now also commemorated by a memorial in Israel). Ehrenburg was "tainted" by having once been a close favorite of Stalin and because Ehrenburg was the Editor-in-Chief of "Pravda" after the war. Now Ehrenburg must be "rehabilitated" by showing that: His being an "apologist" for the antisemitic dictator,Stalin, and his being a hard-line anti-Western Communist ideologue during the Cold War in the 1950's was entirely contrived for the sake of his own survival under the murderous anti-Semite Joseph Stalin, and Those "stories" about his having called for the mass-rape and murder of German civilians during the final phase of the Second World War were (a) entirely false and contrived by Nazi propaganda; (b) mostly exaggerated; (c) really done by Stalin and not Ehrenburg; and (d) entirely justified, since it served those German Nazi bitches right anyway. I bought a copy of Ehrenburg's official memoirs for one dollar in a bookstore only one mile from my house here in New York. They were for the years 1945-54 and entitled: Ehrenburg: The Post-War Years. It turned out that my friend in Manhattan, an old Irish guy ( I myself am part Irish) had copies of Ehrenburg's memoirs for the years 1928-41 and for 1941-45. So between us we have really "got all the goods" on this noted Jewish humanitarian Illya (or "Elijah") Ehrenburg. In the library of the Manhattan Veterans' Administration Hospital on 23rd Street there is a Jewish Who's Who as well as a Literary Who's Who and this has some very interesting articles on Ehrenburg. He was the scion of the biggest capitalist banking family in Imperial Russia. He became a Communist Revolutionary in 1905 during the first attempt at the Revolution, was influential in "Modernist" art circles, and, of course, the noted (ahem) "journalist" of the WWII era. He was a life-long crypto-Zionist and willed his entire estate to the State of Israel. That Literary Who's Who contains an interesting quote from a Russian Orthodox priest who, referring to the "humanitarian work" that Ehrenburg was doing in running a children's theater, exclaimed: " That Ehrenburg is a devil ! He is driving them to Jewry !" In Alexander Solshenitsyn's epic poem on the mass-rape of the German women, his Nobel-Prize-winning Prussian Nights, when he writes about the Red Army's propaganda division - special Section No. 7:, the Division for the Demoralization of the Enemy's womenfolk (sic), Ehrenburg is referred to as "the chief ham of the lot!" To learn more about this remarkable modern Jewish hero, read A Charmed And Checkered Life at the Jewish Website http://www.nd.edu.

4. "Joshua Rubenstein has written a brilliant analysis and biography of Ilya Ehrenburg, the famous Russian iconoclast and critic. It is a pity that Ehrenburg is not alive to appreciate the quality of this work and the merit which is thus cast on his reputation." -- Harrison Salisbury "More than a needed biography of Ehrenburg . . . Tangled Loyalties is a contribution of much significance to our understanding of the history of Russia in Stalin's time and of her relations with the West." -- Robert C. Tucker, Professor of Russian Politics, Princeton University "A superb biography." -- Publisher's Weekly, December 11, 1995 "The story of a particular man and time, but also a finely drawn portrait of a writer and his conscience under siege in a place where the ill-chosen word could lead to exile or death." -- Kirkus reviews, December 15, 1995. "A fascinating portrait." -- Library Journal, February 15, 1996. Click here for a picture of the bile that Publisher's Weekly, Kirkus Reviews and Library Journal poured over David Irving's much-praised biography of Dr Goebbels. "Well-written, meticulously researched . . . In the awful compromises he had to make in order to survive, Ehrenburg is very much a man of Europe's 20th century. Did the good he did outweigh the lies he had to tell? This thoughtful and engaging account of his life should remind us how seldom most Americans have had to confront such choices." -Jane Taubman, Professor of Russian at Amherst College, in The Boston Globe, March 24, 1996. ". . . succeeds in presenting Ehrenburg's life against a panorama of historic events. It also helps us discern the baffling ironies of Ehrenburg's career. The book's chief value, however, lies in Mr. Rubenstein's deliberate refraining from unequivocal judgment. He clearly means to convey his subject in all his complexity rather than offering wholesale absolution or damnation." -Stanislaw Baranczak, Professor of Polish language and literature at Harvard, in The Wall Street Journal, April 2, 1996.   "A masterpiece of painstaking scholarship." -- Washington Jewish Week, April 11, 1996. "He paints a convincing portrait of this exceedingly complex individual, approving but by no means wholly flattering, balancing his courageous and at times heroic qualities with instances of his equally shifty and sometimes downright scoundrelly characteristics." -- The Chicago Tribune, April 14, 1996. "Tangled Loyalties is a first-class biography." -- Adam Ulam, Professor of History and Political Science, Harvard.