Vasily Grossman And The Soviet Century, Popoff - B

                                  Vasily Grossman was a magnificent war correspondent during The Great Patriotic War. In 1944, he wrote the 'Hell of Treblinka', one of the first reports of the Holocaust. It was so well done that it was used as evidence at Nuremberg. He was a Jew whose mother had been killed by the Nazis.  In the 1950's, he wrote his masterpiece, 'Life and Fate'. His great novel, set during the war, compared Nazism and Stalinism in their totalitarian brutality. He was told by the KGB it couldn't be published for 250 years. His final novel, on the Ukraine famine, was so well written that two famous historians, Robert Conquest and Anne Applebaum, relied on it in their histories of the era. 

                                He was born in 1905 in the predominantly Jewish city of Berdichev in Ukraine. His mother took him to Kiev in 1914 to provide better educational opportunities. War was followed by revolution and civil war. Millions died or fled the country. Throughout the chaos, he attended school, but was mostly self taught. He moved to Moscow to study chemistry in 1923. He turned to literature and politics, publishing an article in Pravda in 1928. He graduated from college in 1929 and was assigned as a mine inspector in the Donbass region of Ukraine. He contracted TB and was allowed to return to Moscow. With the help of Maxim Gorky, he published his first novel, 'Gluckhauf'.

                                Grossman worked in a pencil factory and wrote in the evenings, publishing short stories in literary magazines. He quit the factory and soon his writing career thrived. A second novel, 'Stepan Kolchugin', followed. His name showed up on certain NKVD lists, but he was not important enough to merit attention during the purges. He became a Red Star war correspondent in the summer of 1941. "His wartime notebooks contained much invaluable material that he would later use in his novels. However, everything he saw that summer - chaos at the front, the Red Army's rout, officers incompetence, and devastating losses - would later be concealed becoming Soviet taboos". He wrote extensively as he traveled all over the front and managed to obtain 2 months off in the spring of 1942. He wrote 'The People Immortal' about the 1941 invasion. It was an immediate success. He was assigned to Stalingrad in August, 1942. He was there through the end of the year, spent time in the city itself, and even a few days with one of the USSR's most famous snipers.  Some of his words are engraved in a memorial on the Volga.  His 'Stalingrad Sketches' was made into a film.  The following summer, he reported on the Battle of Kursk. As the Soviets advanced, he witnessed the consequences of the Holocaust in person and wrote 'Ukraine without Jews', but it was censored in Moscow.  His 'Hell of Treblinka' "transcended its epoch and a single genre, being at once a work of investigative journalism, a historical and philosophical essay, and a requiem to the victims." He marched into Berlin with the Red Army the following spring.  He was immensely popular, one of the best known writers of the war.

                                  He had never completely toed the line and fell out of favor after the war. As the anti-Semitism of Stalin grew and became virulent after the creation of Israel, his circumstances became perilous. All those who had worked on the Jewish Anti-fascist Committee were under suspicion and many were sent to the Gulag. His novel 'For The Right Cause', which is the first half of 'Life and Fate' came out to acclaim in 1952. Stalin's death in 1953 ended a totalitarian era of unprecedented murder and dishonesty. Stalin's crimes would not be fully known in the USSR until 1989. Millions were released from the Gulag.  It was at this time that Grossman began to fine tune his comparisons of Nazism and Stalinism. "In 'Life and Fate' freedom is the main theme. The war is fought against enslavement by both the Nazis and Bolsheviks, who destroyed freedom in their own land." In 1961, the state confiscated his novel and told him that it was too dangerous a threat to the state. He received a cancer diagnosis in 1962 and began to write 'Everything Flows', his novel on the Ukrainian famine. He died in 1964.

                                 A French edition of 'Life and Fate' appeared in 1983, an English version one a year later, and a Russian publication was released in 1988. The book became a bestseller in 2011 after a BBC Radio production starring Kenneth Branagh aired. A 2018 stage adaptation in London brought the novel publicity and, it has been referred to a the 20th century's'War and Peace'. As Russia returns to Stalinism, Grossman has faded into the background again.

                                I read 'Life and Fate' over thirty years ago and remember it as a grand. sweeping, wonderful book that displayed the war from the Soviet side better than anything I had come across. It was and is a great book, on par with those of Tolstoy, Pasternak, and Solzhenitsyn.