Vasily Semyonovich Grossman

Vasily Grossman was born into a Jewish family in Berdichev, worked as a chemical engineer in the Donbass mines, and became a writer in the 1930s. When war broke out in 1941 he could have stayed in the rear on grounds of eyesight and health, but volunteered as a front correspondent for Krasnaya Zvezda (Red Star) and went on to spend more than a thousand days at the front. In September 1941 his mother Yekaterina was murdered in German-occupied Berdichev. He carried that death as a lifelong burden, and later poured it into the most famous chapter of Life and Fate, a mother's last letter to her son.

From August 1942 Grossman was in Stalingrad. He crossed the Volga into the heart of the street fighting, reported on the snipers Zaitsev and Chekhov and on the men of Gurtiev's division, and won the soldiers' trust because he shared their dangers in the trenches. His essay "The Direction of the Main Blow" was passed from hand to hand at the front and in the rear. A large share of the densest testimony about what the soldiers of Stalingrad endured came out of his notebooks.

Entering Poland with the Red Army in the summer of 1944, Grossman reached the site of the Treblinka extermination camp and interviewed dozens of survivors and local residents. "The Hell of Treblinka", published in Znamya that November, was among the first substantial accounts to reconstruct how an extermination camp worked, and it was distributed as documentation at the Nuremberg trials. This document, which showed the world the substance of fascism, belongs to the weightiest achievements of Soviet war literature.

In 1960 Grossman completed Life and Fate, a vast novel that held the whole century of war around the axis of Stalingrad, and submitted it to the journal Znamya. The editor Kozhevnikov passed the manuscript to the party organs, and on February 14, 1961 KGB officers came to his apartment and confiscated the manuscript, its copies, the drafts, even the typewriter ribbons. The writer was not arrested. The book was.

Grossman wrote to Khrushchev demanding freedom for his book, and in 1962 was received by Suslov, the secretary for ideology. According to Grossman's own record of the meeting, Suslov told him the book could not be published for two or three hundred years. But a copy kept by his friend Semyon Lipkin survived; years later, with the help of Voinovich and Sakharov, a microfilm was carried abroad, and the first edition appeared in Lausanne in 1980. In the Soviet Union it was published in 1988, under glasnost. Grossman himself saw none of this: he died of stomach cancer on September 14, 1964.

Life and Fate holds the heroism of Stalingrad and the weight of state coercion within a single Tolstoyan canvas, painting the people who defeated fascism and the bureaucracy that constrained them in the same frame. The confiscation of the manuscript is recorded as a marker of the limits of Thaw-era cultural policy, and the book's return became one of the emblematic scenes of glasnost, when Soviet society began to face its own history directly.