How Vladimir Putin will respond to these setbacks is anyone’s guess. But Leon Aron contends that something can be learned about his regime by looking at a largely forgotten short Russian novel, which testifies to “mankind’s ineradicable yearning for the dignity in gaining moral autonomy from the totalitarian state.”

Titled The Thaw, the book appeared just a year and a half after Stalin’s death in 1953. On the surface, the narrative tells of the goings-on in a small Soviet town and the large industrial plant that sustains it. But readers at that time took it for what it was: a lightly penciled yet unmistakable outline of a thin but durable shoot of civil society breaking through the Stalinist permafrost.

Its author, Ilya Ehrenburg, co-edited, along with his fellow Soviet Jewish novelist Vasiliy Grossman, The Black Book of Soviet Jewry, one of the first systematic accounts of the Holocaust. The authorities deemed the book anti-Soviet, and it wasn’t published in Russian until 1980, and then only in Jerusalem. But for the most part, Ehrenburg adhered to the party line and, Aron writes, was “uncannily” good at anticipating its abrupt changes. Aron goes so far as to call Ehrenburg “Stalin’s favorite Jew.”

The admiration, however, was not necessarily mutual, as The Thaw makes as clear as any book published inside a totalitarian regime can:

Recovering from the memory hole the shameful and scary events that the party wished to bury, Ehrenburg writes about Anna Sherer, a Jewish doctor at the plant’s clinic. Having lost a husband in the war and her mother and sister to the Holocaust, Anna is brought to tears by Pravda’s “announcement” about an “uncovered group of doctors-wreckers, almost all Jews,” who had been alleged to poison the country’s leaders—the nightmarish Doctors’ Plot that was intended as a prologue to a nationwide pogrom and was cancelled only by Stalin’s death. “Sometimes people say such dreadful things,” she confides to a friend. “Don’t trust the doctors!” workers had groused loudly in the clinic’s reception. “Especially the likes of her!”

Addressing a recent meeting of the Palestine Liberation Organization’s Central Committee, Mahmoud Abbas criticized Hamas more sharply than he has previously (at least in public), calling them “sons of dogs.” The eighty-nine-year-old Palestinian Authority president urged the terrorist group to “stop the war of extermination in Gaza” and “hand over the American hostages.” The editors of the New York Sun comment:

Mr. Abbas has long been at odds with Hamas, which violently ousted his Fatah party from Gaza in 2007. The tone of today’s outburst, though, is new. Comparing rivals to canines, which Arabs consider dirty, is startling. Its motivation, though, was unrelated to the plight of the 59 remaining hostages, including 23 living ones. Instead, it was an attempt to use an opportune moment for reviving Abbas’s receding clout.

[W]hile Hamas’s popularity among Palestinians soared after its orgy of killing on October 7, 2023, it is now sinking. The terrorists are hoarding Gaza aid caches that Israel declines to replenish. As the war drags on, anti-Hamas protests rage across the Strip. Polls show that Hamas’s previously elevated support among West Bank Arabs is also down. Striking the iron while it’s hot, Abbas apparently longs to retake center stage. Can he?

Diminishing support for Hamas is yet to match the contempt Arabs feel toward Abbas himself. Hamas considers him irrelevant for what it calls “the resistance.”

[Meanwhile], Abbas is yet to condemn Hamas’s October 7 massacre. His recent announcement of ending alms for terror is a ruse.

Abbas, it’s worth noting, hasn’t saved all his epithets for Hamas. He also twice said of the Americans, “may their fathers be cursed.” Of course, after a long career of anti-Semitic incitement, Abbas can’t be expected to have a moral awakening. Nor is there much incentive for him to fake one. But, like the protests in Gaza, Abbas’s recent diatribe is a sign that Hamas is perceived as weak and that its stock is sinking.