David Ortenberg
The writer, editor, and journalist David Ortenberg was born in 1904 in Chudnov (near Zhitomir, Ukraine), in a very poor Jewish family. His father Josef Ortenberg was a broker. The family lived among some wealthy Czech settlers, and the children were acutely aware of their social inferiority. David attended primary school in the town, along with Czech and Ukrainian pupils. As he recalled, "there was no talk of national differences at school; we lived, studied, and played together. Each of us would try to pronounce some words, and even whole sentences, in the other's language: the Czechs would try to speak Russian, and we would try to speak Czech. However, no one ever attempted to speak Yiddish."1. David's parents denied themselves everything to feed their children, but the family would always have two white challah loaves for the Sabbath. David remembered his mother lighting candles and praying for her children to get an education. The Ortenbergs put a high premium on learning.
After his father's death in the Spanish flu pandemic during the Russian Civil War (1918-1920), the sixteen-year-old David tried to make some money to support his mother Revekka and sister Dora, but he soon decided to continue his studies at the provincial school in Kharkov (Ukraine). There, he gained his first experience in journalism, writing for the small local papers. Despite his youth, the teenaged David took part in some campaigns of the Civil War. In 1922, he joined the Communist Party.
After finishing school, he was sent to the district town of Izyum (near Kharkov), where he served as principal of the first mobile school of political literacy in Ukraine. He also edited the newspaper Zarya ("Sunrise"). In the 1930s, he worked in Dneprodzerzhinsk (Kamenskoye, Ukraine) as editor of the city newspaper, Dzerzhinets. There, he became acquainted with Leonid Brezhnev, the future General Secretary of the Communist Party of the USSR in 1964-1982. In those years, Ortenberg also worked as a special reporter for the Ukrainian edition of Pravda, the major Soviet daily. From 1938, he was deputy executive editor of the newspaper Krasnaya Zvezda ("Red Star"). That same year, he was called up to serve in the Red Army, and took part in the conflict with Japan at Khalkhin Gol (Mongolia) in 1939, where he met Georgy Zhukov (who would go on to become Deputy Supreme Commander of the Armed Forces of the USSR in World War II). He also fought in the Soviet-Finnish "Winter War" of 1939-1940, in the rank of brigade commissar.
In July 1941, following the outbreak of the Soviet-German War, Ortenberg was appointed editor-in-chief of the Krasnaya Zvezda ("Red Star") newspaper, under the pseudonym Vadimov. Ortenberg wrote: "I definitely knew how to depict events and people, based not only on the reports of the operations division, but on what I had seen with my own eyes"2. Stalin entrusted this important post to Ortenberg, allegedly at the recommendation of Zhukov, at a very tough time, after some of the top journalists of the newspaper had been repressed. The new editor was aware of the danger, yet his attitude to his job remained unchanged. Being at the helm of the most important Soviet wartime newspaper, Ortenberg did his best to turn it into an effective weapon in the fight against the Nazis. While he was not a highly educated person, he had a very good intuitive grasp of literature, and hired talented writers and poets.
Krasnaya Zvezda was the most "literary" newspaper in the wartime USSR, and some of the foremost Soviet writers – Vasily Grossman, Andrey Platonov, Ilya Ehrenburg, Konstantin Simonov, Alexey Tolstoy, Mikhail Sholokhov – were among its contributors. The high quality of their texts made Krasnaya Zvezda exceptionally popular and valuable. Ortenberg possessed great personal courage, which was manifested both in his relations with the Party leadership and in his constant visits to the front lines. While editors-in-chief were not requited to do so, Ortenberg insisted on seeing the war with his own eyes, and he personally visited Stalingrad, Novorossiysk (Malaya Zemlia), Volokolamsk, and Novgorod amid the most intense fighting. He would later describe all these trips in his memoirs.
Thus, Ortenberg managed to create a genuinely interesting and popular newspaper, which was also an effective instrument of Soviet propaganda. Some of the persistent myths of the "Great Patriotic War" were born on the pages of Krasnaya Zvezda. One of these is the famous story (later shown to be false) of Panfilov's Twenty-Eight Guardsmen, who were allegedly killed in action on November 16, 1941, after destroying 18 German tanks and halting the enemy advance. Ortenberg himself was one of the authors of this myth.
In 1943, Ortenberg was summoned to a meeting with the Party bosses. There, Alexander Shcherbakov, head of the Soviet Information Bureau, told him that there were too many Jews on the editorial board of his newspaper, and he suggested that Ortenberg "thin them out." The editor-in-chief was confused: there were many people of different nationalities working at his newspaper, and he had never previously pondered the problem of antisemitism, which was already spreading in Soviet society because of Stalin's policies. Ortenberg told Scherbakov: "This has already been done: Eighteen Jewish reporters from the newspaper have been killed in action." That same year, he was sacked from his post and sent to the front. After inquiring about the reason for his dismissal, he was told by Shcherbakov: "There is no reason." Ortenberg went so far as to write to Stalin, asking the same question, but there was no reply. Until the end of his life, Ortenberg could not come to grips with the fact that the reason was his nationality.
For the rest of the war, Ortenberg served as chief of the political sections of various armies. In 1946-1950, he was chief of the Political Department of the Moscow Air Defense District. He was awarded two Orders of the Red Banner and three Orders of the Patriotic War. He was discharged from the army in the rank of Major General in 1950.
In 1948, Ortenberg graduated from the Lenin Higher Party School and began to write prose about the war: Time Has No Power, It Will Live On Forever, Frontline Trips, 1943, etc. He also collected and edited the war stories written by Krasnaya Zvezda reporters, publishing them in the collections Fiery frontiers (1965), In the Name of the Motherland (1968), and others.
Ortenberg died in Moscow in 1998. He enjoyed the reputation of a person who had served in his vocation and made a great contribution to the Soviet victory and to the memory of the war.
Related Resources
Memoirs of David Ortenberg
I recalled my conversation with Shcherbakov several months prior to my departure from Krasnaya Zvezda. Alexander Sergeyevich summoned me and said (verbatim):
- "There are many Jews in your editorial office… They need some pruning…"
I was shocked to hear such words from the Central Committee secretary, and was struck quite speechless. Finally, I replied:
- "I've already…"
- "Already what?"
- "I've already pruned them… The special correspondents Lapin, Khatsrevich, Rosenfeld, Shuer, Vilkomir, Slutsky, Ish, Bernstein. They have all been killed in action. They were all Jews. But there is still one other Jew I can prune – myself…"
I said this and left, without even saying goodbye.
Today, I am convinced that Shcherbakov did not start this conversation on his own initiative. Undoubtedly, the order had come from Stalin. His attitude to the Jews had been well-known for a long time. The full extent of Stalin's antisemitism – which became so malevolent and monstrous in its manifestations after the war, when he launched the notorious "anti-cosmopolitan" campaign – has now become known throughout the world.
I would like to tell a story that illustrates Stalin's role as the "prime mover" behind Soviet antisemitism. We were dimly aware of it at the time, but now it has become clear.
In late 1936, the deputy editor of Pravda made a phone call to me in Dnepropetrovsk, where I was working as a Pravda correspondent, and suddenly asked me:
- "What is your wife's name?"
- "Lena," I replied, wondering as to the purpose of the question.
- "That doesn't sound right," he said, " and what about your son?"
- "His name is Vadim."
- "Very well. You have an article scheduled for tomorrow's issue of Pravda. It will be signed Vadimov, after your son's name."
I was so stunned that I even failed to inquire: "What's the matter? Why do I need to use a pseudonym?" But, upon further reflection, I decided (rather foolishly) that a great honor had been bestowed upon me. The greatest writers and journalists, so I believed, would occasionally submit their materials under pseudonyms; hence, the Pravda staff must have been so impressed with my article that they decided to publish it under an alias. This was followed by other articles and reports. I would invariably sign them with my full name, yet they always appeared under the pseudonym in the paper. Eventually, I noticed that the names of other Pravda correspondents began to change, as well. All the "-bergs" and "-mans" vanished, to be replaced with pseudonyms ending in "-ov". It was the same story in Izvestia and Komsomolskaya Pravda.
Shortly thereafter, a conference of Pravda correspondents took place. We asked each other: "What's the matter? Why have you changed your names?" They all gave the same reply: "It wasn't we who changed them; they had them changed for us!" And then they told us sotto voce, without actually mentioning the General Secretary by name, that this had been done at his behest. However, they did not explain the purpose of this massive "rebranding". Then again, it was not hard to guess…
What was my own attitude to this? I can say in full honesty that I attached no importance to the "fifth point" [the indication of nationality in Soviet passports]. I had been raised in the Russian culture practically from the "cradle", and Russian is the only language I speak. My wife was Ukrainian, and we had the good fortune to celebrate our "Golden Jubilee" [50th wedding anniversary] before her death.
The story of my pseudonym had a sequel during the war. On the third day after its outbreak, I was summoned by L. Z. Mekhlis, chief of the Main Political Directorate, who proceeded to inform me of my appointment as editor-in-chief of Krasnaya Zvezda. He told me to get to work. After a brief pause, he added: "Your contributions will be signed Vadimov." As I have already mentioned, I had no desire to stay in Moscow. So, I kept tailing Mekhlis as he paced through his office, begging him to have me sent to the front. Eventually, Lev Zakharovich became angry, and he told me harshly:
- "Your candidacy has been approved by Stalin. Zhukov was there with him, and he, too, approved it. I will not bring this matter up with Stalin. Write to him yourself."
Naturally, I could not get up the nerve to do it. Neither did I have the courage to ask Mekhlis: "Why Vadimov, of all names?" The answer was obvious. After all, our renaming in Pravda back in the 1930s had been carried out at his directive; he had merely been implementing Stalin's will. The present situation was no different. However, Mekhlis gave no explanation at the time; he merely pointed upward: "Stalin said so." Many years after the war, I finally posed this question to Mekhlis. The answer he gave was mind-boggling: "Stalin said back then that we should not be taunting… Hitler."
I quit Krasnaya Zvezda and parted with Vadimov.
From: David Ortenberg,1943. Moscow, 1991. p. 399-401.
