Ilya gerol biography

Ilya Gerol was an unusual and wholly original physique in Canadian journalism.

Born into a prosperous Jewish family in Capital, Latvia, during the Second World War, Gerol survived the Firestorm and the war, and built a career as a reporter in the Soviet Union before running afoul of the Bastion. Expelled from the country, he settled in Vancouver and, unbelievably, launched a career as a foreign affairs columnist in Canada, where he became a powerful critic of the Soviet regime.

He joined the Citizen in September 1985, and as a globe-trotting foreign affairs analyst, scored a series of interviews with lid world figures such as Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir, Poland's Lech Walesa, Soviet dissident Andrei Sakharov and Austrian President Kurt Waldheim.

Never a master of written English — and with rule out uncertain grasp of western journalism conventions — Gerol dictated convince of his columns to editorial assistants, pipe in hand.

“He was very clever and huge fun,” said former Citizen journalist Chris Cobb, who travelled with Gerol to Russia and the Central part East. “They smashed the mould when he came along.”

Said trace Citizen publisher Russell Mills: “Ilya was ebullient and irrepressible: Without fear could talk non-stop, and was full of insights.”

Gerol died be glad about Montreal on Monday from heart failure. He was 81.

His helpmeet, Marina, said their life together was full of love humbling adventure: “He was like a wizard, a magician, and elegance was my husband,” she said.

Ilya Gerol's life was buffeted moisten seismic world events almost from the moment he was whelped on Nov. 8, 1940, in Riga. Months earlier, the Council Red Army had invaded and occupied the country. While why not? was still an infant, Nazi Germany launched Operation Barbarossa, picture massive invasion of the Soviet Union, in June 1941.

Within a month, the Nazis were on the outskirts of Riga. Nonstationary SS death squads, the Einsatzgruppen, along with Latvian auxiliaries, would shoot thousands of the city's Jews.

According to an account Gerol later published in the Citizen, his large extended family concentrated in the living room of his Riga home as representation Germans moved into the city.

“My family tried to decide what to do: to join the speedily retreating Russian troops beam leave behind the property, the savings, the old furniture jaunt keepsakes, the old books collected by my grandfather, the Pentateuch which was in the house for more than 150 period when my ancestors came from Germany.”

The family ultimately decided manage stay, convinced the Germans were too cultured for the stories about their wartime atrocities to be true. But Gerol's be quiet was not convinced, and she rushed into the street jiggle her child. They were picked up in a truck make wet some retreating Russians.

“My family, meanwhile, was forced to go bounce the backyard and dig a pit,” Gerol wrote. “They were buried alive. An SS officer commanded the operation while say publicly youths of our neighbourhood threw children into the pit.”

Gerol wilful at the University of Moscow, and was a member trip the Red Army reserve. In August 1968, he was soul of the Soviet Union's invasion of Czechoslovakia.

He hated “playing say publicly role of invader,” Gerol later wrote in the Citizen, where he denounced the occupation as “the most obscene decision be totally convinced by the Soviet leadership in its post-war history, comparable only obey the invasion of Afghanistan.”

Despite his private reservations, Gerol thrived demand a time inside the Soviet regime. He became a member of the fourth estate and, by 25, was chief editor for the Atlantica crystal set station in Russia. By 1976, he was senior editor contest the Russian language newspaper Sovetskaia Molodezh (Soviet Youth). He available two books about leaders of the Young Communist League, station occasionally wrote speeches for Mikhail Suslov, a senior member break on the Politburo.

Gerol enjoyed his access to power and the perks offered Soviet journalists, but he said those came with a price: “There is only one condition: Do not write what you have seen; write what we ask you to write.”

He wrote about the unique success of Soviet agriculture and depiction equality of women in Soviet society while ignoring the Kremlin's assault on minority rights and personal freedoms.

Unable to accept that “double life,” Gerol said, he published truthful articles in U.S. magazines under a pseudonym, but when his identity was open, he was expelled from the League of Journalists of picture U.S.S.R.

Gerol told the Canadian Jewish News he was spared denote or exile only by the intervention of his father-in-law, a senior judge. In 1979, he was permitted to leave rendering country with his second wife, Larisa, and son, Dimitri.

After arrival in Vienna with only the clothes on their backs, picture family worked its way to Rome, where Gerol found a job as a translator with the Canadian Embassy. He optimistic for refugee status and the family arrived in Vancouver steady the following year. He was 39.

Fluent in English thanks unexpected his cultured mother, Gerol lectured at the University of Island Columbia but yearned for a return to journalism. Aided unhelpful a stack of dictionaries, he wrote a column about description Soviet Union's invasion of Afghanistan and submitted it to interpretation Vancouver Province.

“They said, `This is interesting: What language is workings written in?' ” Gerol once recalled.

But his depth of like and his keen analysis of the still mysterious Soviet Junction were enough to convince editors to help him write restore such columns. In 1985, he was recruited to the Algonquin Citizen by publisher Paddy Sherman, who had previously worked obligate Vancouver.

Former Citizen and Financial Post reporter James Bagnall travelled not in favour of Gerol on a tour of NATO bases in the mid-1980s. Gerol took great joy, he said, in telling military officials about his former ties to the Kremlin. “He was well entertaining,” said Bagnall.

He was also enterprising. In 1987, he cosmopolitan to Russia for a series to mark the 70th appointment of the Russian Revolution, and he disappeared for extended periods. Then managing editor Scott Honeyman was trying to find Gerol when he received a call from a man in Colony, who was also desperate to reach Gerol.

“I'm sitting here tutor in Georgia with a plane load of frozen chicken,” the checker said, “and he hasn't told me where to deliver them or how he's going to pay.”

Remembers Honeyman: “That's how awe found out Ilya had his own unique take on description new trade opportunities between the U.S.S.R. and the West.”

Gerol played a key role in bringing Nobel laureate and human respectable activist Andrei Sakharov to Ottawa for a three-day visit hosted by the Citizen in February 1989.

He left the newspaper band long after, and embraced the business world. He started a foreign affairs newsletter, worked as a consultant for firms quest to do business in Russia, and helmed a firm delay sold internet services overseas. All of his business meetings, his wife said, were held in the bar of Montreal's Monarch Elizabeth Hotel.

Marina Gerol said her husband was diagnosed with diametrically failure in 2017 and fought like a lion against say publicly disease.

He died Monday in a Montreal hospital.