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5. Popular World History and Chronicle C. After 1860

Vasily Grossman, A Writer at War: a Soviet Journalist with the Red Army, 1941-1945,ed. and trans. by Antony Beevor and Luba Vinogradova. Vintage Books/Random House, 2005. (380 pages) Paperback, ISBN 978-0-307-27533-2.

The Other Side of the Nightmare 

Reviewer: Joe Petrulionis

It is now fashionable to detect substantial improvement in Politburo attitudes during the Nikita Khrushchev years. Unquestionably, his widely-trumpeted “deStalinization program” included a new tolerance for carefully selected literature that might be considered critical of earlier Soviet behavior. Works including Solzhenitsyn’s mildly complaining One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich were published in Moscow with the unabashed assistance of Premier Khrushchev himself.  But unbridled power rarely permits open critique of its own actions. And the system which supported Khrushchev’s near autocracy must be protected from the derogatory gaze of the “liberal press.”  A case in point was the 1961 arrest and suppression of Vasily Grossman, perhaps the Soviet Union’s greatest novelist. Grossman, a Ukrainian Jew originally named Iosif, had achieved his incredible fame in the increasingly anti-Semitic Soviet Union through sheer force of his descriptive writing talents, and through a courageous insistence on presenting truth, even during his role as a war reporter while a uniformed soldier of the Soviet Army. To most Russians of the   1950’s, Vasily Grossman remained a loyal hero of the victory against Hitler. To the Khrushchev regime, Grossman’s greatest novel, Life and Fate, would be a threat if published. Then as now, national heroes might be sacrificed in the struggle to maintain executive power.

We can only speculate on what Khrushchev found so threatening in Life and Fate, a fictionalized account of the defense of Stalingrad. When Grossman submitted the manuscript to the censors in 1961, the accurate portrayals of post-war purges of so called “Trotskyists-fascists” and the “cosmopolitans,” would still have been embarrassing to Khrushchev. But Grossman’s convincing depiction of the heroic Russian peasantry achieving its protracted victory against the “Third Reich,” despite an incompetent Soviet high command, called into question the wartime viability of the, so called, “dictatorship of the proletariat.” This could not be tolerated.

In 1961, KGB agents stormed Grossman’s apartment and the living quarters of his typists. All copies of Life and Fate found were confiscated, as were Grossman’s notes, carbon paper, and typewriter ribbons.  All of his prior publications became taboo, and were withdrawn from circulation by order of the Cultural Section of the Central Committee. An unemployed pariah on the outs with the Soviet Writer’s Union, this hero of the Battle of Stalingrad died of stomach cancer in 1964. Grossman could not have foreseen that an unaccounted copy of the manuscript in the possession of a friend would be smuggled out of Russia in 1980. Published in Switzerland, the work became an overnight bestseller. It was finally published in the Soviet Union in 1989.

Life and Fate is a novel. Polished prose and seamless narration combine to enhance the coherence of the fictionalized account of the events Grossman witnessed firsthand. Yet Anthony Beevor and Luba Vinogradova’s collection, A Writer at War: A Soviet Journalist with the Red Army, 1941-1945 recaptures the reservoir of experience that fed that novel.  Writer at War provides a competently guided tour to Grossman’s own notebooks and journalistic sketches from his three years on the western front.

Grossman’s initial fame as a writer emerged from these news reports, not from his posthumously published novels. This well edited collection offers readers a sensitive portrayal of humans, somehow coping with the absolute war happening around them. Some of the earliest unclassified reports of the holocaust found their way into the Russian press through the careful medium of Grossman’s pen. Among the first Russians to open the destroyed Treblinka death camp, Grossman tells the first published story of the heroic uprising that destroyed the camp. The collection’s editors situate each report and notebook within an up-to-date historical backdrop that sometimes corrects, but always makes Grossman’s original more coherent, while preserving the intrinsic drama and feel of an eyewitness account. This important memoir should be read by the hoards of WWII buffs who often forget the nightmare that occurred in the eastern theater of the European war. But literary historians and students of cultural resilience will find fascinating this well crafted chronicle.

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