Vasily Grossman won fame in the Soviet Union as a war reporter during the 1941-5 war, but has become known only relatively recently in the west as the author of Life and Fate, a massively ambitious novel about his wartime experiences. Told through the eyes of the Shaposhnikov family and their friends, that novel told awkward truths fearlessly. Some were truths about the Jewish experience of Soviet life (Grossman was Jewish); some about the everyday reality of living under a dictatorship. The book painted a harrowing picture both of Hitler’s totalitarianism and of Stalin’s, showing their similarities in a way that Soviet authorities could not tolerate. The manuscript of Life and Fate was confiscated and destroyed in 1961. Grossman died three years later, aged 58, without seeing his greatest achievement published.
Luckily, a copy of Life and Fate was smuggled out in the 1970s and published abroad by a Swiss publishing house in Russian and then in English, translated by Robert Chandler, in 1985. It has become a latter-day bestseller. In 2011, an adaptation was aired on Radio 4 with Kenneth Branagh as the hero Viktor Shtrum. Last year, St Petersburg’s Maly Theatre brought a Russian-language stage version to London for a brief run at Theatre Royal. The critic Francis Spufford has rightly praised the book as “a moral monument, a witness-report in fiction from the heart of 20th-century darkness, an astonishing act of truth-telling.”
Stalingrad is the prequel to Life and Fate—the first of a pair of interconnected stories. Another 900-page epic, also translated by Chandler, it contains many of the same characters at an earlier stage in life. The gripping narrative runs from peacetime life in Stalingrad through a lengthy Soviet retreat in the early part of the war to the onset of the battle for the city, which is where Life and Fate picks up. But unlike that later work, this novel was actually published in the Soviet Union during Grossman’s lifetime. It came out in 1952 under a different title, the more Soviet-sounding For a Just Cause. According to Alexandra Popoff, author of the recently published biography Vasily Grossman and the Soviet Century, this change was imposed on the author by his editors, reflecting Foreign Minister Molotov’s words at the start of the war: “our cause is just.” This version restores Grossman’s original title.
In his introduction, Chandler calls Stalingrad “one of the great novels of the last century.” For many years, For a Just Cause had been the stuff of footnotes—a book merely listed and then passed over. It would be easy to think that its rebranding was no more than canny marketing on the back of Life and Fate’s success. Or is it another masterpiece?
While the narrative is just as compelling, the structure is in some ways tighter and clearer. Yet although -Stalingrad has the same breathtaking sweep as Life and Fate, also consciously modelling itself on Tolstoy’s War and Peace by moving between historical panoramas and individual stories, it at first appears less bold in its thinking. While it features cameos from Mussolini and Hitler, Stalin doesn’t make a personal appearance and his letter ordering the defence of Stalingrad is received with reverent obedience. Only one character, the young officer Darensky with an aristocratic background, has suffered arrest in the Terror of the 1930s—and he’s been released.
Mixed with the extraordinary storytelling, too, is extraneous material demonstrating the heroism of the proletariat in the struggle against fascism. This material may be part of the reason that Stalingrad has been dismissed as “socialist realism,” a now despised cultural form promoted under Stalin’s rule in which art had to be concrete, positive, public, proletariat-focused and party-minded—bad characters drawn fully bad and good characters fully good.
Chandler gives two other reasons Stalingrad has been overshadowed by its sequel. One is our blinkered approach to reading Soviet-era books: “we are still in thrall to Cold War thinking; people have been unable to conceive that a novel first published during Stalin’s last years, when his dictatorship was at its most rigid, might deserve our attention. Eminent figures have been dismissive of Stalingrad and it has been easy to assume that there must be good reason for this. I, too, made this lazy assumption for many years.”
The other reason, adds the translator, is that there has never been a definitive Russian version of this novel. The censors, editors and political committees got to it first, forcing multiple rewrites on the author in pursuit of a politically acceptable novel. Among their demands was the removal of large chunks of story, including that of the Jewish scientist hero, Viktor Shtrum. Although he was forced to compromise on many passages, on this Grossman stubbornly stood his ground. The fictional Shtrum was not only central to the novel, he also shared a name with the real-life Lev Shtrum, a founder of Soviet nuclear physics, who had taught in Kiev when Grossman studied there. The real Shtrum was accused of Trotskyism and executed in 1936; his papers were removed from libraries and he was deleted from history. The fictional Shtrum was Grossman’s defiant memorialising of the “disappeared” scientist.
The English translation is an epic in itself. It comes with a historical introduction and an afterword explaining Chandler’s chosen blend of different versions of the text, along with elaborate notes. It requires a lot of cross-referencing; but it’s worth the effort. The story of the publication process sheds new light on how the typescript became almost as much of a battleground as the streets of Stalingrad. It gives a clear insight into the nature of Soviet political pressure, and of Grossman’s bravery. “For Grossman... telling the truth about the war was not a small thing: he considered it his duty as a writer. He was forced to compromise, to produce 10 versions of the novel, to insert passages emphasising Stalin’s and the Party’s organising role in the war; he had to obscure the Jewish theme,” comments Popoff. “But he succeeded in having some truth about the war published—at a time when none was being told.”
For an author to speak truth to power has always been risky in Russia. Tsars took an oppressive interest in writers from Pushkin onwards. Censors cut risqué chapters from Dostoyevsky’s novels. This scrutiny has often been explained as a mark of a writer’s spiritual importance in Russia—a back-handed compliment to their power to influence, which has been viewed with trepidation by a controlling state. But under Soviet rule the relationship became more straightforwardly murderous. Once the authorities prescribed socialist realism as the only acceptable writing style, you no longer had to express politically subversive views to get into trouble. Even to express yourself in an individual style was suspect. Poets were especially endangered. “Only in Russia is poetry respected. It gets people killed. Where else is poetry so common a motive for murder?” wrote the poet Osip Mandelstam, before dying a prisoner in the Gulag in 1938.
That Grossman was a brave man no one doubted. When war broke out in 1941, he was turned down for military service—he was overweight, wore spectacles and suffered from asthma. But he persuaded the editor of Red Star, the army gazette, to send him there as a war correspondent. As a reporter, he covered the long Soviet retreat before advancing German forces, the battle of Stalingrad and then the Soviet advance all the way to Berlin. Though he didn’t suffer the same privations as the civilian population, he showed great bravery. As Popoff writes, he “overcame his phobias and picked dangerous assignments to gather material at the front lines.” His curiosity about the thousands of people he interviewed gave him insights that most Soviet citizens did not have. Driving through Ukrainian villages in 1942, he witnessed locals reluctant to leave as the Germans advanced—remembering Stalin’s forced collectivisation and famine, they hoped German rule might be better (their hopes would be dashed). During the retreat, he witnessed Soviet intelligence work that Popoff describes as a “comedy of errors,” including one inexperienced intelligence officer ignoring a captured Austrian motorcyclist’s statement that there were 500 enemy tanks “right near you.” And he saw the courage with which everyday people faced death.
He was among the first to uncover Nazi barbarity towards the Jews. He visited Berdichev, where his own mother had been killed under Nazi occupation in one of the first mass bloodlettings on Soviet soil. He visited the killing ground of Babi Yar, a ravine outside Kiev. Later, he reported from eastern Poland, where he found no Jews left. In July 1944, he entered the Polish killing centre Majdanek with the Soviet Army; in September, Treblinka. His article, “The Hell of Treblinka”—which Popoff calls a mix of investigative journalism, a historical and philosophical essay, and a requiem to the victims—was published in November 1944 and used as evidence in the Nuremberg trials.
Part of the Soviet war experience was that, for all its horrors, there was also a quiet relief in at last being allowed to mourn openly. There was a lot of pent-up grief in the national psyche that had been building up since the Terror of the 1930s. Grossman’s articles articulated this twin outpouring of grief. His honesty and compassion were praised. His wartime writings were reprinted by three central publishing houses in 1943 and won a circulation of more than a million readers. His experiences, as he described them in the article “Good is Stronger than Evil” in 1944, led him to believe that the war, and the evils of Nazism, had failed to destroy the humanity in people. He emerged from the war alive, well known and relatively confident that truth-telling could now prevail.
This was not true, as he quickly discovered. From 1943 to 1946, he worked for the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee on The Black Book, a collection of eyewitness accounts of the Shoah on Soviet and Polish soil. Parallel American and Soviet editions of the book were planned. Among the harrowing material was Grossman’s own investigations into his mother’s death in the mass shootings at Berdichev—a story that, fictionalised as the death of Viktor Shtrum’s mother, haunts both Stalingrad and Life and Fate.
But in 1947 the Soviet publication of The Black Book was aborted. Stalin might need a new internal enemy to unite the country against, and the Jews had been Russia’s traditional whipping-boy. The book was banned. All copies were destroyed, the printing plates broken up. In 1948, Stalin launched a new anti-semitic campaign. During the “secret pogrom,” members of the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee were arrested, secretly tried and shot. Across the country Jews were driven out of positions of authority and preparations were made to deport the “rootless cosmopolitans” en masse.
By then, the undaunted Grossman had found a new avenue for his truth-telling: fiction. He wanted to chronicle the Russian war experience, bringing together reflections on philosophy, history and politics with vignettes of personal experience, as Tolstoy had done in War and Peace, the story of Russia’s response to Napoleon’s invasion. War and Peace had been popular among Russians during the 1941-5 war. Grossman’s mother had read it to children in Berdichev before the Nazi killings. It was broadcast on Soviet radio. It was what Grossman himself was reading while covering the siege of Stalingrad, and it is repeatedly referenced in Stalingrad. Grossman explicitly wanted to be a Red Tolstoy.
Helped by Chandler’s notes, preface and textual restorations, Stalingrad is revealed as full of haunting silences. One example is the massacre at Babi Yar, where 100,000 people, mostly Jews, were shot with local collaboration. Krymov, a military character who is often a mouthpiece for Grossman’s views on courage, is dropped outside Kiev on his way to military headquarters. He continues on foot “past a long, deep ravine with clay sides and then stood still for a moment, taking involuntary delight in the peace and charm of the early -morning... The light and the half-light, the silence and the bird calls, the sun’s warmth and the still-cool air created a sense of something extraordinary: any moment now, perhaps, some kind-hearted old men from a fairy tale would appear, quietly climbing the slope.” His sense of peace is an illusion. Unbeknown to the original readers, the Babi Yar ravine he describes is a mass grave.
The book’s most important unread document is the last letter Viktor Shtrum’s mother, Anna Semyonova, sends him before her death. The letter travels from the Berdichev ghetto to Viktor’s dacha, passed hand-to-hand seven times by different characters. At one point it’s handed in at Shtrum’s mother-in-law’s apartment. A young family friend takes it, remarks, “heavens, what filthy paper” and wraps it up in “a sheet of the thick pink paper people use to make decorations for Christmas trees.” When Viktor finds the letter at his dacha, he initially takes the pink wrapping to mean it’s a bar of chocolate. The next morning, after finally reading it, Viktor looks at himself in the mirror, expecting to see “a haggard face with trembling lips.” He is surprised to find he looks much the same as the day before. From then on, he carries the letter with him wherever he goes. When he re-reads it, which he obsessively does, “he felt the same shock as at the dacha, as if he were reading it for the first time.” Readers don’t see the letter in Stalingrad (though the text appears in Life and Fate) but the suffering it symbolises, like so many other untold stories, is deeply felt.
Finally published to acclaim in Novy Mir in 1952, Stalingrad was nominated for the Stalin Prize. But, within months, it became a political football again. That winter, Stalin declared Jews to be nationalists and agents of American imperialism. In January 1953, Pravda reported on a “plot” to poison Stalin by “doctor-saboteurs,” mostly Jewish. It was a clear warning that Jews should expect the worst. Grossman’s editors fearfully denounced the book they’d helped mould. Expecting arrest, Grossman fled to a friend’s dacha.
But, once there, he discovered that Stalin had died. Anti-semitic hysteria continued for a month, amid the mourning, before the mood calmed and the Kremlin publicly disavowed the “Doctors’ Plot.” Stalin’s henchmen began to dismantle the machinery of terror they themselves had operated. It was the beginning of the end of the era of purges—what Grossman called “a wolfish time.” The book survived, in its diminished form; the author, too.
The tortuous publication process might have stopped a lesser man from writing. But it impelled Grossman to go further, to write about the wrongs of Soviet life as well as of the Nazi system—to embark on Life and Fate. He’d written back in 1946 that Soviet writers should follow Tolstoy by advocating “basic and sacred human rights, the right of each individual to live on earth, to think, and to be free.” Perhaps, while writing Life and Fate, he thought that he was now looking back at the Stalin era as a historical period, as Tolstoy had been at Napoleon’s invasion from the end of the 19th century, and could freely take his own advice.
That he was wrong, and that writing Life and Fate only resulted in his voice being silenced for the rest of his life, didn’t alter the need to fulfil the writer’s duty of telling “the terrible truth.” It’s a pleasure, albeit a bleak one, to see more of his brave work at last being rediscovered and published today, and his truth told.
Vasily Grossman and the Soviet Century by Alexandra Popoff is published by Yale, £25
Stalingrad by Vasily Grossman, translated by Robert Chandler is published by Harvill Secker, £25
