Mikhail Koltsov

Mikhail Efimovich Koltsov (Russian: Михаил Ефимович Кольцов) (June 12 [O.S. May 31] 1898, – February 2, 1940), born Mikhail Efimovich Fridlyand (Friedland) (Михаил Ефимович Фридлянд), was a Soviet journalist.

Born at Kiev, Koltsov was the son of a Jewish shoemaker and the brother of Boris Efimov. Koltsov participated in the Russian Revolution of 1917, became a member of the Bolshevik party in 1918, and took part in the civil war. A convinced communist, he soon became a key figure of the Soviet intellectual elite and arguably the most famous journalist in the USSR, chiefly due to his well-written satirical essays and articles, where he criticised bureaucracy and other negative phenomena in the Soviet Union. Koltsov founded popular journals such as Krokodil, Chudak and Ogonyok and was a member of the editorial board of Pravda. As a Pravda correspondent, he travelled to Spain to cover the Spanish Civil War, while at the same time he was working for the NKVD. He also acted as military advisor to Loyalist forces on occasion. Koltsov is widely regarded as having been Joseph Stalin's chief reporter in the Spanish war, with speculation suggesting he had a direct line from his hotel to the Kremlin.

The British communist journalist, Claud Cockburn, who met Koltsov in Spain, described him as "a stocky little Jew with a huge head and one of the most expressive faces of any man I ever met...He unquestionably and positively enjoyed the sense of danger and sometime - by his political indiscretions, for instance, or still more wildly indiscreet love affairs - deliberately created dangers which need not have existed." George Orwell in Homage to Catalonia (1938) accused Cockburn of cooperating with Koltsov to produce false stories that favored Soviet objectives in Spain. Ernest Hemingway, in his novel For Whom the Bell Tolls, based on the war in Spain, represented Koltsov as the character Karkov. Koltsov described his experiences in The Spanish Diary, which was published in 1938.

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