Writers and Soviet Leaders

"This book by Boris Frezinsky describes the relationships between the communist intellectuals and the ruling élite. It’s a fascinating subject and a great book, and there are great photos in it too: Gorky, Lenin, Mayakovsky, Trotsky and so on. It’s mostly documents. He writes introductions to every section – for example, the relationship between Ilya Ehrenburg and Nikolai Bukharin who was Ehrenburg’s friend and patron. And then he publishes letters and so on. So it’s a rare thing. It’s interesting to see characters that people think they know and then find out what they were really like: who turned out to be a coward and who possessed great will and courage in the face of this very dangerous time, the 1930s. In particular, I was struck by Ilya Ehrenburg, who was the great ideologist of communism and the Soviet state whom the Soviets used so effectively during the war as a cultural link between Russia and the West. Bukharin was a very powerful man, one of the original Bolshevik revolutionaries. Ehrenburg had been his schoolmate and loved to send him all sorts of complaints, about how Pravda was shortening his articles, how he hadn’t been paid enough money. At first you think he’s not a nice person, that he’s a bit of a shit. That’s your initial impression. But then when Bukharin gets into terrible trouble, Ehrenburg refuses to speak against him at his trial and takes a great risk to do this. And for the rest of his life he tries to do whatever he can for Bukharin’s widow. He even tried to write a chapter on Bukharin in his memoirs. Of course, he wasn’t allowed to, but he still manages here and there to insert a paragraph about this person who was his great friend. That’s a very good question. He worked mainly in the literature and art archive, the RGALI archive. Then he worked in the archive of the history of Moscow. But it’s mainly the RGALI that he looks at because, of course, a lot of stuff on his subject would be in the KGB archives at the Lubyanka—but there’s no way of getting in there."