Here is one excerpt from my biography of Ilya Ehrenburg. The section comes from Chapter 8, on the Spanish Civil War, when Ehrenburg decided to return to the Soviet Union for a brief visit in December 1937. He did not know that his childhood friend Nikolai Bukharin was about to be brought to trial and that Stalin would personally arrange for him to see Bukharin in the dock. The section requires only a few brief words of introduction.

1) Lyubov Mikhailovna Kozintseva was Ehrenburg's wife.

2) Irina Ehrenburg is his daughter and her husband was Boris Lapin.

3) Ovady Savich and his wife Alya were among Ehrenburg's closest friends. Savich was also a journalist and worked alongside Ehrenburg in Spain, covering the civil war for the Soviet press.

4) Mikhail Koltsov was an important Soviet journalist and Stalin's personal emissary to the Spanish republic.

5) Vsevolod Meyerhold was an innovative theatre director.

6) In April 1924, Stalin gave a series of lectures in which he staked his claim as Lenin's legitimate heir. Surprisingly, he also praised a story of Ehrenburg's, although that particular story had been censored from a volume that Ehrenburg had recently published in Moscow.

7) Ehrenburg had an appointment to see Stalin in December 1934, but the meeting was cancelled because of the assassination of Sergei Kirov. Ehrenburg and the dictator never met face-to-face.

The Great Purge

In spite of all he knew, Ehrenburg was not prepared for the fear that engulfed the Soviet capital. One friend immediately asked how he could have allowed himself to come. Didn't he know what was going on?" His naivete startled his daughter as well. Ehrenburg and Lyubov Mikhailovna stayed with Irina and Boris Lapin on Lavrushinsky Lane in an imposing, grey stone, ten-story building constructed in the 1930s as a residence for literary figures. Boris Pasternak was one of many writers who lived there.

It was not a secure haven. That first evening Ehrenburg noticed a curious handwritten sign in the elevator. "It is prohibited to put books down the toilet. Anyone breaking this order will be traced and punished." (It seemed dangerous to own books by newly exposed "enemies of the people.") Ehrenburg later learned that residents of the building wanted the noisy elevator to be closed at night; it kept them awake as they listened, wondering anxiously where it would stop and where the next arrest would come.

Ehrenburg's account of the Great Purge has been superseded by others more vivid and detailed, but People, Years, Life was published less than a decade after Stalin's death and was the first to describe the atmosphere of confusion and terror that overwhelmed Moscow's intellectual community.

After we entered the apartment, Irina leaned toward me and quietly asked, "Don't you know anything?"

We stayed up half the night as she and Lapin told us what was happening: an avalanche of names and after each one a single word, "taken."

"Mikitenko? But he was just in Spain and spoke at the Congress." "So what," Irina replied. "There are people who gave speeches or had an article in Pravda only the day before."

I was upset and kept asking after each name, "But why him?" Lapin tried to think up reasons: Pilnyak had been to Japan, Tretyakov met often with foreign writers, Pavel Vasilyev drank and talked too much, Bruno Jasenski was Polish and all the Polish communists had been taken away. . . Irina answered each time, "How should I know? No one knows." With a rueful smile, Lapin advised, "Don't ask anyone. And if someone starts talking, just keep quiet."

When Ehrenburg arrived on Christmas Eve, Literaturnaya Gazeta announced he would be returning to Spain in two weeks. But he soon learned this would not be possible. "Everything takes time now," he was told. "The big shots are very busy. I would have to wait a month or two." Ehrenburg in fact had to stay more than five months.

Friends explained their fear. Mikhail Koltsov had wrned Ehrenburg not to return to Moscow and was shocked to see him in Russia. "He took me into the large bathroom adjoining the office and there let himself go. 'Here's the latest anecdote for you. Two Muscovites meet. One says, 'Have you heard the news? They've taken Teruel.' The other asks, 'Oh, and what about his wife.'" Vsevolod Meyerhold lost his theater in January; it was closed for being an "alien" element in Soviet cultural life. People Ehrenburg knew kept a suitcase with two changes of underwear on hand at all times. He hardly tried to write, but famous for his articles from Spain, he gave as many as fifty talks during his five months in the country.

Ehrenburg was especially eager to see Isaac Babel. He "found 'the wise rabbi' sorrowful, but his courage, his sense of humor, his story-teller's gift never left him." Babel described a factory where prohibited books were pulped to make paper and homes for orphans whose parents were still alive. "Today a man talks frankly only with his wife, at night with the blanket pulled over his head," was how Babel described the terror.

No one knew what to believe. "We thought (probably because we wanted to think that way) that Stalin did not knew about the senseless violence against Communists and the Soviet intelligentsia," Ehrenburg admitted in his memoirs. A long-time Communist such as Vsevolod Meyerhold told Ehrenburg that the repression was concealed from Stalin. Boris Pasternak too shared this common illusion. Ehrenburg came across him one night while they were both walking their dogs. "[Pasternak] waved his arms as he stood among the snowdrifts: 'If only someone would tell Stalin everything.'" Of course Stalin knew, but the terror was so profound and the sense of uncertainty so intense that few could bear the truth that Stalin had initiated the terror for his own purposes; there was no one to appeal to.

For Ehrenburg, the trial of Nikolai Bukharin was the preeminent event of his sojourn in Moscow. Aside from Bukharin there were twenty other defendants, including two prominent diplomats, Nikolai Krestinsky, a former ambassador to Germany, and Christian Rakovsky, who had represented the Soviet government in Paris and London. They were accused of participating in an enormous conspiracy whose right-wing members were directed inside the country by Nikolai Bukharin and whose left-wing members were led from abroad by Leon Trotsky. Bukharin was accused of ordering Kirov's assassination and even of attempting to kill Lenin in 1918 when an attack on the Bolshevik leader almost succeeded.

Ehrenburg never had any illusions about the case. He was given a pass into the courtroom at Stalin's behest. As Ehrenburg later recalled, "One important journalist, who soon perished on the direct orders of Stalin, told the editor of Izvestia . . . in the presence of a dozen colleagues, 'Arrange a pass for Ehrenburg to the trial. Let him see his little friend.'" The journalist was Mikhail Koltsov, who was quoting Stalin himself; only one as evil as Stalin would have wanted Ehrenburg to see Bukharin in the dock. Although Ehrenburg attended the trial's opening sessions on March 2, he did not write about what he saw until the 1960s, when he hoped to advance Bukharin's rehabilitation with a candid portrait in People, Years, Life.

[The accused] related monstrous things and their gestures and intonations were unusual. It was they, but I did not recognize them. I don't know how Yezhov secured such behavior. Not one Western author of pot-boiler detective novels would be able to publish such a fantasy. . . .

It was all an unbearably terrible dream for me and I was not able to say a word about it even to Lyuba and Irina. Today as well I don't understand it at all; Kafka's novel The Trial seems realistic to me, a thoroughly sober work of art.

Ehrenburg could barely speak when he returned to Lavrushinsky Lane. He told his family it was horrible and then lay down on the sofa, his face to the wall, and could not eat for several days.

Izvestia expected him to write about the court proceedings. "I virtually screamed 'no,' and after hearing my voice," Ehrenburg recalled, "no one suggested to me that I write about the trial." As Savich heard him say, "There are things that a decent person does not write about."

During those months in Moscow, Ehrenburg wrote only two articles about Spain and gave one published interview. The first article, entitled "To Life," appeared less than two weeks after Bukharin's execution and describes the bombing of Barcelona and Franco's reliance on German and Italian aid. None of this was remarkable. Near the end of the piece, however, Ehrenburg recalls the grotesque slogan of General Millan Astray, "Muera la inteligencia! Viva la muerte!", ("Death to the intellectuals! Long live death!") which often animated fascist rallies. Ehrenburg wrote hundreds of eloquent, angry pieces on the Spanish civil war, but it seems more than coincidental that the one article to cite General Astray's bloodcurdling cry came after Bukharin's trial, when Ehrenburg saw a close friend destroyed firsthand and had good reason to fear for his own life. Reading this article, one cannot but wonder if the "life" he intended to defend was not his own and if the title itself, coming during a walpurgisnacht of recrimination and death (during Bukharin's trial, crowds gathered at night around large bonfires near the Kremlin and screamed for the defendants' execution) was not a veiled or at least unconscious protest against the purges and the fate of so many of his friends. Fascists cried "Death to the intellectuals! Long live death" while Soviet prosecutors screamed for the blood of "enemies of the people." Ordinary Soviet citizens would never dare to compare Stalin with Franco, not even in the most remote region of their consciousness; but Ehrenburg was no ordinary Soviet citizen.

Following Bukharin's execution, which was publicly announced on March 15, Ehrenburg could no longer wait patiently to leave the country. He decided to appeal directly to Stalin, describing Spain as the place where his talents were needed most. Several weeks went by before Ehrenburg was summoned to Izvestia and told he would have to remain. "Comrade Stalin thinks that in the present international situation, it is better for you to stay in the Soviet Union." His wife would be permitted to bring their books and belongings from Paris. Ehrenburg had every reason to assume he was trapped. At that moment, he took an unheard-of initiative. Over the objections of his family, Ehrenburg appealed again to Stalin and repeated his request for permission to leave. "I realized, of course, that I was behaving foolishly. More than likely, after such a letter I would be arrested. Nevertheless, I sent it off . . . . In my nervous state, I was hardly able to eat." His gamble succeeded, as a call from Izvestia confirmed. On May Day, Ehrenburg was in Red Square covering the pageantry, and soon after he and Lyubov Mikhailovna left by train for Helsinki. Their sense of relief was profound. Once they reached Finland, "Lyuba and I sat in silence on a bench in a public garden," Ehrenburg wrote in his memoirs. "We could not even talk to one another."

It is impossible to establish why Soviet officials changed their minds and let him go. Ehrenburg offered no explanation in his memoirs other than to say that he "lived at a time when the fate of a man did not resemble a game of chess but a lottery." Yet Ehrenburg's behavior at this perilous moment was unique, and his survival, in 1938 and later, was more than a fortuitous turn of fate. Ever since 1924, when Stalin took notice of Ehrenburg in a famous lecture, Ehrenburg's life depended on the will of one man. Other figures less well-known or otherwise more vulnerable could be arrested and liquidated on the orders of scores, hundreds, or even thousands of party leaders or policemen. Tens of millions of people were picked up in the 1930s. Stalin could not have agreed to each arrest. "If he had read the lists of all his victims," Ehrenburg wrote, "he would not have been able to do anything else." Once categories of victims were identified - - kulaks, religious believers, nationalists of various stripes, Zionists, Trotskyites, Bukharinites - - then it was up to local officials to fulfill their quota of arrests. No one, hoowever, would want responsibility for liquidating a man who had gained Stalin's personal favor. Having made note of Ehrenburg once, Stalin might ask for him at anytime. While Ehrenburg could be threatened, it would require a nod from Stalin to touch him.

Ehrenburg must have sensed this, giving him confidence to call attention to himself in the terrifying weeks following Bukharin's trial. It was a desperate strategy - - even a reckless one, as his wife and daughter insisted - - but the system was so unpredictable that Ehrenburg decided to throw caution to the wind. Perhaps his first letter was never shown to Stalin; or perhaps Stalin asked to see Ehrenburg's dossier and then satisfied, dispatched Ehrenburg back to Europe. In any case Ehrenburg did not wait on Lavrushinsky Lane for a noisy elevator to stop in the middle of the night. He refused to be a spectator to his own tragedy. Ehrenburg by then no doubt understood how fortunate he had been in December 1934 not to have met Stalin personally; seeing the dictator face to face would have increased the likelihood of his arrest in the future. Unlike Mikhail Koltsov Ehrenburg learned to keep his distance from the Kremlin.

Only recently has the extent of Ehrenburg's vulnerability been uncovered. Many years after Bukharin's execution Ehrenburg learned from Bukharin's secretary and from his widow Anna Mikhailovna Larina - - who spent nearly two decades in labor camps and exile - - that he almost became a defendant in Bukharin's trial. Kark Radek claimed under interrogation that Ehrenburg accompanied Bukharin to his dacha where, "over an omelette," Bukharin and Radek plotted a coup d'etat. Although Radek was condemned in February 1937, he was not executed immediately, and there is reason to believe that Bukharin's interrogators arranged for Radek to confront Bukharin personally with false testimony. By March 1938, however, Ehrenburg no longer figured in the case.

Similar events happened a year later. This time the principal victims were Vsevolod Meyerhold and Isaac Babel. Meyerhold was arrested on June 20, 1939 the age of sixty-five. Severely beaten by his interrogators, he "confessed" to being a Japanese spy, a conspirator alongside Rykov, Bukharin, and Radek, and a member of a Trotskyite cell, having been "recruited by Ilya Ehrenburg." Only in 1955, when Meyerhold's case was reviewed and he was rehabilitated, did Ehrenburg learn of these accusations.

Isaac Babel was also arrested in 1939, about a month before Meyerhold. Under severe interrogation that included three days and nights without sleep - - the notorious "conveyor belt" - - Babel too was forced to accuse Ehrenburg of recruiting him into a Trotskyite cell in which Andre Malraux had also served as an "espionage agent." Babel was executed on January 27, 1940; Meyerhold and Mikhail Koltsov were shot five days later. All three were "tried" before Stalin's infamous "troika" courts, three-man tribunals that condemned "enemies of the people" in proceedings that might last a few minutes. Perhaps the NKVD (the new name for the secret police) had more in mind and considered staging a "show trial" involving the country's leading cultural figures. In any case, Babel, Meyerhold, and Koltsov were secretly tried and executed; their families were not officially informed of their deaths for many years. Ehrenburg was fortunate enough to be in Paris when these friends were arrested and shot. He knew of their disappearance, but did not know how close he came to sharing their fate.