Joseph Stalin

"I followed Ehrenburg's career more closely than anyone. My agents recorded his conversations, even in Paris where I allowed him to live for many years. When Hitler was our enemy, I knew I could count on Ehrenburg's loyalty, even when I got rid of his friends Bukharin, Mandelstam, and Babel. Ehrenburg mastered the art of silence. But Rubenstein has taught me things I did not know. Even before Khrushchev denounced me in 1956, Ehrenburg wrote his silly little novel The Thaw. Soon the whole country adopted those words, the thaw, as if life under me had been dark, gloomy, cold, 25 years of winter. If I had known half the material that is in Tangled Loyalties, Ehrenburg would not have survived. He would have enjoyed the hospitality of my jailers."