It is hard to understand how a writer like [Ehrenburg], who in his Russian-Parisian days had been one of the most brilliant satirists of the 'twenties, could ever have turned out the sad propaganda work represented by so many of his later novels. (p. 83)

From the nature of Ehrenburg's stormy career, it can be no simple [task to judge this writer]…. It is not too much to say that his latest writings and utterances all suggest an unsurprising desire for expiation and rehabilitation. Perhaps no writer has survived so many friends dead by execution or suicide as Ehrenburg. How should one judge his efforts at rehabilitation? There is not the slightest reason to doubt the genuineness of his newly proclaimed Jewish sentiments, but in this very fact lies pathos. In informed Jewish circles, Ehrenburg's role during Stalin's pogrom has been the subject of bitter attack, but from the outside one need perhaps say only this. If among the survivors or the relatives of those murdered, Ehrenburg is, to say the least, highly unpopular, the reasons are clear. But to critics who sit safely in the West he might well reply: "How can you possibly imagine what life was like under Stalin's totalitarian terror, when the only law for the individual was to survive—and if you cannot imagine, how can you judge?" (p. 89)

Through his past history and the fortune of his survival, Ehrenburg is indeed in a unique position as a Soviet critic. For reasons still not fully explained he can speak out more freely than others. The choice is his, therefore, whether to be a truly independent critic, to let his real feelings emerge as when he wrote Roitschwantz, or merely to be "a nonconformist conformist." After all, who else is there of the old guard who could help clarify the minds of young Soviet readers? From his first glimpse of Soviet society in 1921 and from his outsider's view during the next twenty years, Ehrenburg was able to see precisely what happened to freedom and what happened to the arts under the political system which Lenin set up. He could see how the chain of events—the purges of the 'thirties, the extermination of the Russian intelligentsia, the fifth-rate Soviet art of to-day—were not accidents due to Stalin's character but the direct product of a totalitarian form of society from which he, Ehrenburg, kept away for as long as possible.

When we come to Ehrenburg's attitude towards current issues, we meet the same ambiguity.

Even to begin to tell this story could be of inestimable value to young Soviet readers, yet this is precisely what Ehrenburg in [the first three volumes of] his autobiography has so far not done—not plainly, as Pasternak has spoken out. True, he hints plentifully about his early literary doubts about Communism, but these hints are muffled. He speaks of the sad deaths of literary friends of his generation, but avoids the question of why in a Communist society dedicated to the uplift of mankind such artists should have been imprisoned, executed, or driven to suicide….

If Ehrenburg wants his plea for better understanding between Soviet and Western writers to carry weight,… equivocation is hardly enough. No one, to be sure, expects Ehrenburg to be "another Pasternak," but the question is whether he will speak out with the sincerity that befits the author of Julio Jurenito and Roitschwantz. And this means one thing: young Soviet writers like Yevtushenko surely deserve to know not only what happened to their predecessors, but why. In the earlier parts of his autobiography, Ehrenburg has chronicled the tragedies of his life as a writer under Communism, but without adequately presenting them in their real context. One hopes that in subsequent volumes he will not thus turn away from the true meaning of his own "stormy life." (p. 90)