In 1945, reporting for the Soviet military newspaper Red Star from the ruins of Berlin, Vasily Grossman proclaimed, “Writers will write novels; playwrights will compose plays. They will describe the strength and courage of Soviet man, the trials he overcame on his path to victory.” This was, perhaps, another way of saying that he and fellow journalists embedded with the Red Army would continue in other forms the work upon which they had been engaged since the Battle of Stalingrad: the production of Soviet propaganda.
There is an admirable history of Soviet writers risking everything to subvert Stalin’s tyranny, and Grossman would go on to be part of it. But at this moment he was no doubt sincerely caught up in the monumental achievement and terrible sacrifice of defeating the Nazis. In time, he authored a series of novels that moved ever further from the party line, culminating in the magnificent Life And Fate. By this point, the once ardent champion of Soviet man saw the Great Patriotic War as a struggle between totalitarian states that crushed beneath them tens of millions of lives – all of them, to Grossman, lyudi: unique human beings. When, in 1960, he sent the manuscript to a possible publisher, the KGB promptly raided his apartment and confiscated everything that could possibly have contributed to its composition, down to his typewriter ribbons.
Having outlived Stalin – notable good fortune for a prominent Soviet Jew – Grossman may have anticipated Nikita Khrushchev’s denunciation of the Old Man would lead to a thaw in the USSR’s icebound policy towards creative expression. He was mistaken. There is no evidence he ever came as close to the executioner’s pistol as Boris Pasternak, author of Dr Zhivago, the “cloud-dweller” whom Stalin quixotically marked out for personal protection from, well, Stalin. Yet the post-Stalin regime sought to bury both writers’ masterpieces. They failed with Pasternak’s and succeeded with Grossman’s. Life And Fate remained suppressed for two decades after Grossman’s death from cancer in 1964. That was, at least, a reduction on the two centuries initially promised by the party.
The narrative of Grossman’s career is not as simple as it might at first appear: a true believer becoming a dissident. It is questionable whether he was ever fully either thing. As a Ukrainian, by the time war broke out he was surely already familiar with the Holodomor – the state-inflicted famine that devastated his homeland in the 1930s, and which he depicted unsparingly in his final novel, Everything Flows, likewise unpublished in his lifetime. From The Front Line, a collection of his Red Star articles written during or shortly after the war, shows how often, and how artfully, he skirted or subverted the doctrinaire demands of his assignment. The first thing to say is that although it is propaganda, and one frequently feels upon it the dead hand of party authority, this does not rob it of its value as journalism, as reportage, as history or as literature. On the contrary, it can astonish as all of them. Grossman was an extraordinary writer. If you want to know not only what happened during the war in the east, but how it was experienced by those caught up in it, he is peerless – at once clear and vivid, with a masterful sense of when to be prosaic and when poetic, when naturalistic and when rhetorical, all underpinned by a genuine moral rigour intermittently betrayed by the interventions of his editors in Moscow.
On this last point he is well served by his present editors. Robert Chandler (Grossman’s longstanding English translator, alongside Chandler’s wife Elizabeth) and Julia Volohova have carefully sifted the available texts and sources, including Grossman’s own notebooks, to present something as close to the author’s intentions as can be reasonably surmised. Their own notes and annotations are readable and illuminating. From Grossman, we receive an unrivalled picture of the war; from them, a valuable picture of Grossman.
It’s sharp and searing and surgical as a red-hot scalpel, wielded as reportage, polemic and, in hindsight, oblique advocacy for the coming Jewish homeland
At the heart of the volume lies The Hell of Treblinka. As the editors note in their useful appendix, this was not the first published account of the camp. That was written by a Polish-Jewish escapee, Jankiel Wiernik, upon whose memoir Grossman closely relied. The Hell of Treblinka exerts such disturbing power that to quote this or that line from it seems a disservice to the victims; it should be read in its entirety, at one sitting, and the reader would be well advised to have no plans for some little time afterwards. It would be trite to say it does justice to the dead – that nothing ever can or will is the key to Grossman’s insight – but it does allow one to take in the horror not only of what was done to the murdered, but of how the murderers did it. If this seems a fine distinction, Grossman fixes upon its significance: the cruel delusion, dawning apprehension and deathly terror of one person, a thousand persons, nearly a million persons, made no more than a rote task for their laughing executioners, repeated en masse several times daily.
“Do Not Divide The Dead” ran an official slogan, underlining the Soviet policy to erase the identities of the Nazis’ victims, today eagerly continued by many who consider themselves progressives. Grossman declined to be complicit in this erasure. His mother died in one of the first massacres of Ukrainian Jews – part of the “Shoah by Bullets” – in September 1941. The closest he comes to direct mention of this is in a long article, Ukraine Without Jews, which went unpublished at the time. It over-rationalises the Nazis’ Jew-hatred – maybe as a sop to Grossman’s superiors, for whom everything had to be explicable in terms of class struggle and historical materialism. Otherwise it is as sharp and searing and surgical as a red-hot scalpel, wielded as reportage, polemic and, in hindsight, oblique advocacy for the coming Jewish homeland against whose existence the Soviets would poison the global left. “Hatred of the Jews became a furnace […] Jews do not possess a state of their own and are scattered about the world […] Antisemitism has always been the banner of reactionaries; it has always been their favoured weapon […] With no law and no army to defend him, the Jew is an ideal target.” And, with the ring of the writer’s hammer striking the nail exactly on its head: “Tell me what you blame the Jews for – and I’ll tell you what you’re guilty of.”
This was as true of his Soviet masters as of every other cohort to project its own flaws, crimes and neuroses onto the world’s eternal scapegoats. It was received about as well as you would expect. Grossman pleaded for Jews to be recognised simply as people, lyudi, with the same collective qualities and faults as all humanity. He was right, but he did not foresee how this truth would become a boon to those who would make us both a mirror and mask for their own shortcomings. For this unconscionable failure to be the only perfect people – this obdurate, presumptuous insistence upon being, like everyone else, merely human – we are never to be forgiven.
From The Front Line, by Vasily Grossman, is published by MacLehose Press
To get more from Life, click here to sign up for our free Life newsletter.