Epitaph for a Killer

The career of Author Ilya Ehrenburg, 74, spans the history of modern Russia from Czardom through Lenin's Bolshevik Revolution, Stalin's years of terror, and the gentler years of the old killer's successors. Ehrenburg managed to survive it all by saying just enough of the right things and keeping a discreet tongue about the wrongs around him. Last week, in the final chapters of his rambling memoirs, People, Years, Life, Ehrenburg reminisced on the darker side of the Stalin era.

"I would just like to explain to the readers why I did not like Stalin," he wrote, because "a new generation is growing now that knew nothing of the stormy applause [for Stalin] and the nights when we listened for the noises on the stairs. I realized that Stalin, in his nature and favorite methods, resembled the politicians of the Italian Renaissance.

"Among those who perished were my close friends, and nobody would succeed in convincing me that they were traitors. Sergei Eisenstein [the famous Soviet movie director] told me of his meetings with Stalin, who spoke of the necessity to extol Ivan the Terrible and added that Peter the Great didn't cut off enough heads." Summing up his thoughts about Stalin, Ehrenburg says: "If he just read the list of all his victims, he would not have been able to do anything else."

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