The Life and Fate of Vasily Grossman, Banned Russian Novelist
By Timothy Sandefur
Vasily Grossman’s novel The People Immortal—which has just been republished in a new translation by scholars Robert and Elizabeth Chandler—is a work of Soviet war propaganda. It first appeared in 1942 while Joseph Stalin and Adolf Hitler were squandering millions of lives in Eastern Europe. It’s bland and formulaic, with a predictable plot about a military unit that strives to escape encirclement by Nazi forces during the German advance through Ukraine. Instead of having personalities and values, its characters mostly just recite lines about the USSR being “a land where the inequality between workers and those who employ them has been eliminated,” and its few interesting passages are drawn from actual incidents that Grossman witnessed while working as a war correspondent on the Eastern Front.1
The book would hardly be worth noticing today were it not that Grossman went on to become one of the Soviet Union’s most interesting dissident writers. His later novels, Life and Fate and Everything Flows—which were banned in the USSR during his lifetime—have become posthumous classics, and the Chandlers have spent years translating and publishing these and Grossman’s other books after painstakingly restoring passages that communist censors deleted—a priceless service to literature and history. It might be fairer to call their work “reconstruction” than “restoration,” because in some cases, they have had to reassemble what they believe to be the author’s original intention from multiple editions and manuscripts, each of which was subjected to a different round of communist censorship. In any event, their efforts give us an opportunity to reflect on the tragic and salient career of one of the greatest witnesses to the horrors of Soviet tyranny.
‘Two Truths’
Born in Berdichev, Ukraine, in 1905, Grossman originally trained as a chemical engineer, writing short stories on the side. But by the 1930s, he had decided to devote himself entirely to writing. Some of his early work was praised by influential authors, including Maxim Gorky and Boris Guber. But his personal life was less successful. In 1933, he separated from his wife and began an affair with Guber’s wife, Olga. Olga and Boris divorced soon after, and Olga married Grossman. About a year later, Boris was arrested on political charges and executed. The NKVD, which later became the KGB, arrested Olga, too, shortly thereafter.
Charged with the crime of not having denounced her ex-husband as an enemy of the people, Olga and her children were destined for concentration camps, but Vasily intervened. With considerable bravery, he took official custody of the children and wrote a direct appeal to the head of the secret police. “All that I possess,” he declared, “my education, my success as a writer, the high privilege of sharing my thoughts and feelings with Soviet readers—I owe to the Soviet government.”2 This brought an order to appear at the NKVD’s headquarters, where he was interrogated. His pleas ultimately were successful; Olga was let go.3
Scholars still debate how sincerely Grossman meant the obsequious words in his letter.
On one hand, his literary success was largely at the behest of Soviet bureaucrats, who were empowered to decide which writers could publish and which books people could buy. Yet such servile flattery was essentially a requirement for anyone hoping to survive in Stalin’s Russia. More revealing was the fact that Grossman never joined the Communist Party—which certainly would have helped his career. And even his early stories sometimes were criticized for being too candid about unpleasant facts of Soviet life. Gorky, for example, labeled Grossman’s first novel “naturalism”—a term that, as Robert Chandler explains, was a “code word for presenting too much unpalatable reality.”4 In a 1932 letter, Gorky explained to Grossman that there are “two truths”: the “truth of the past,” which was “disgusting and tormenting,” and “another truth,” which “has been born” with communist rule, and that alone was acceptable for public consumption.5
Over the next decades, Grossman would find himself increasingly frustrated at being forbidden to tell unpalatable truths in his journalism and his fiction. The reader can sense his resentment behind a recurring theme in his later novel Stalingrad. In that book, one character repeats Gorky’s claim that there are two realities. “No,” another character replies.
I can tell you as a surgeon there is one truth, not two. When I cut someone’s leg off, I don’t know two truths. If we start pretending there are two truths, we’re in trouble. And in war, too—above all, when things are as bad as they are today—there is only one truth. It’s a bitter truth, but it’s a truth that can save us.6
Soviet officials did not allow these lines to be published in the final novel.
Order No. 270
When Hitler betrayed his former ally, Stalin, and attacked the Soviet Union in June 1941, Grossman joined the newspaper Krasnaya Zvezda as a war reporter, covering the fighting in Ukraine. He interviewed countless soldiers, officers, and civilians—including among the latter many who initially greeted the Nazis as liberators from Communist tyranny—and he witnessed not only the horrors of combat but also the ineptitude of the outgeneraled and poorly equipped Red Army. Soviet forces retreated hundreds of miles, falling back from the German border to the outskirts of Moscow, until Stalin, who attributed his soldiers’ failures to cowardice, finally issued the barbaric Order No. 270. Among other things, it proclaimed that “the families of Red Army men who allow themselves to be taken prisoner” would be “deprived of all state benefits”—meaning, sent to the gulag—and that officers “who hide in a slit trench during a battle” would be “shot on the spot.”7
That stopped the retreat but also helped make the ensuing Battle of Stalingrad the bloodiest battle in the history of the human race, costing the Germans about 870,000 casualties and the Soviets more than 1.1 million. Of the latter number, more than 13,000 were soldiers executed for cowardice or desertion under Order No. 270—a fraction of the 300,000 Soviet fighting men believed to have been killed by their own commanders during the war (roughly equivalent to the entire number of Americans who died in World War II).8
The People Immortal, which appeared as a serial in the Soviet military newspaper Red Star before being published in book form, was Grossman’s first war novel. Based largely on his firsthand observations, its action revolves around the Nazi advance through Ukraine, and it was quite popular; soldiers were said to have reread it until their newspapers disintegrated. Yet it suffered from censorship that ranged from the silly (the soldier characters were not allowed to curse, for example) to the ironic. Stalin’s censors were especially nervous about Grossman’s references to the Red Army’s retreat, and they would not let him describe the attackers in tones that might seem admiring. Thus, he had to excise a line that said that, due to a commander’s indecisiveness, “his men had forgotten all discipline.” In another passage, which described a group of soldiers as “unshaven, their tunics were in tatters, and some were not carrying weapons,” he was forced to omit reference to their not carrying weapons.9 In another chapter, he wrote that the Germans “had arrived—with their magnificent, compact radio transmitters, with equipment fabricated from nickel, glass, tungsten and molybdenum, with vehicles on synthetic rubber tyres and powered by multi-cylinder engines,” but the censors made him delete the phrases “magnificent, compact,” and “powered by multi-cylinder engines” because they put too much emphasis on German technological superiority.10
One consequence of Stalin’s threat to murder subordinates whose performance he deemed inadequate was that Soviet commanders, although often brave and sometimes heroic, were terrified to take initiative—and Grossman mentioned this often in The People Immortal. For example, in one paragraph when a character suggests a way to breach the German lines, an officer replies, “You’re talking nonsense. Such an action would be contrary to all regulations. I’ve never once seen mention of anything of the kind.”11 This, too, was deleted before publication.
Perhaps the most revealing act of censorship came in a passage that referred to “humanity’s eternal longing for a land that does not know slavery, for a life built on the laws of reason and justice, for a land of equals.”12 Stalin’s deputies let Grossman keep “land of equals” but insisted on deleting the denunciation of slavery and the invocation of reason and justice.
Censorship of the Holocaust
Yet the censorship that appears to have bothered Grossman most was the prohibition on discussing the Holocaust. The Soviets took the position that the Nazis were equally a threat to all races, so highlighting the suffering of the Jews was politically unacceptable. In The People Immortal, Grossman tried to get away with subtle mentions of the subject. In one passage, for instance, a character muses on the clouds of dust raised from the road by tanks, fleeing tractors, and “the little shoes of girls leaving Bobruisk, Mozyr, Zhlobin, Shepetovka, and Berdichev.”13 These five villages were Jewish population centers specifically targeted for destruction by the Nazis. Naming them was Grossman’s way of hinting at the genocide he could not openly discuss.
The People Immortal was nominated for the Soviets’ highest literary prize, and Grossman’s nonfiction writings on the war were also published in highly acclaimed editions. Toward the war’s end, he seemed to be doing well enough that he could focus on what he hoped would be his masterpiece: an epic novel of World War II in the tradition of Tolstoy’s War and Peace. But he would find it impossible to complete the project, due in part to the proscription on discussing the Holocaust.
Stalingrad
The manuscript swelled to vast proportions; Grossman eventually divided it into two novels: the thousand-page Stalingrad and its sequel, Life and Fate, which is almost as long. Stalingrad was subjected to an exhausting ordeal of censorship, as bureaucrats added and deleted hundreds of passages, their demands again ranging from the petty to the extreme. Grossman was ordered, for instance, to remove a sentence that described the wife of a weeping soldier helping him wipe his nose; censors would only let her wipe his eyes. More daringly, Grossman phrased many condemnations of Hitler in words that readers would recognize as equally applicable to Stalin. In one chapter, for example, he broke off his narrative to proclaim:
It is time for intelligent people to renounce, once and for all, the thoughtless and sentimental habit of admiring a criminal if the scope of his criminality is vast enough . . . of pardoning a murderer because he has killed not one individual but millions. Such criminals must be destroyed like rabid wolves. . . . History’s only true heroes, the only true leaders of mankind, are those who help to establish freedom, who see freedom as the greatest strength of an individual, nation or state.14
Not surprising, these words never reached readers’ eyes during his lifetime.
Mutilated as Stalingrad was by the censors, the communist press nonetheless hailed it as a major accomplishment when it was published in July 1952—only to undergo a sort of whiplash early the next year, when the Agitprop section of the Communist Party Central Committee inaugurated a denunciation campaign against Grossman, partly motivated, as the Chandlers explain, by the fact that Grossman was Jewish. Stalin had adopted anti-Semitism as a terroristic device for controlling the Soviet people, and his paranoid crusade against Russian Jews climaxed with the infamous “doctor’s plot” in 1951—according to which Jewish physicians were supposedly conspiring to murder Soviet government officials. That, and Grossman’s politically incorrect tendency to write about unpleasant aspects of Stalin’s rule, contributed to the anti-Grossman campaign. The publisher was forced to publicly apologize for printing the book, and things got so bad that Grossman appeared destined for the gulag—only to be reprieved when Stalin died on March 5, 1953, just weeks after the denunciations of Stalingrad had begun. “In this death,” Grossman later wrote, “lay an element of sudden and truly spontaneous freedom. . . . Villages that had been groaning beneath the iron weight of Stalin’s hand breathed a sigh of relief.”15 Yet that sigh of relief turned out to be premature. When the new dictator, Nikita Khrushchev, denounced Stalin’s legacy in 1956—even going so far as to rename the city of Stalingrad Volgograd—a new cycle of censorship began: Grossman was now forced to excise passages from the next edition of the novel that were considered too _pro-_Stalin.
Consequently, before the Chandlers could publish the first English translation of Stalingrad in 2019, they had to reconstruct it from ten different versions of the manuscript that exist in Russian libraries, each with a different set of revisions, deletions, and additions. These last are the worst because, although the Chandlers could restore suppressed passages, they felt it improper to remove many of the long, propagandistic digressions that Grossman was forced to add—dreary discursions on the nobility of Russian peasants and the like, all of which dilute the novel and distract from its central drama.
Nevertheless, what remains is an impressive shadow of what might have become one of the 20th century’s great novels. Grossman could write with insight and beauty when allowed to. Consider Stalingrad’s most moving chapter, in which scientist Viktor Shtrum—away from home on a business trip—finally remembers to open a letter that was hurriedly handed to him during his travels, and which he has forgotten about until now:
No one could hear his footsteps now. The house was empty.
Then came the sound of rain. In the windless air the large drops fell generously and abundantly. The setting sun was still shining; as they passed through its slant rays, the drops flared, then faded. It was a very small rain cloud, and it was passing right over the dacha; its smoky leading edge was already floating away towards the forest. The sound of the drops had not yet tired the ear. Rather than a dull monotone, it was a polyphony in which every drop was a conscientious and impassioned musician, fated to play only a single note in its whole life. . . .
The moist air was warm and clean; every strawberry leaf, every leaf on every tree, was adorned with a drop of water—and each of these drops was a little egg, ready to release a tiny fish, a glint of sunlight, and Viktor felt that somewhere in the depth of his own breast shone an equally perfect raindrop, an equally brilliant little fish, and he walked about the garden, marveling at the great good that had come his way: life on this earth as a human being. . . . Then he remembered [the letter]. . . . Viktor sat down and glanced through the long letter. It was his mother’s record of her last days—from the beginning of the war until the eve of her inevitable death behind the barbed wire of the Jewish ghetto. It was her farewell to her son.16
The reader is not told the letter’s contents, however, and only in the sequel—Life and Fate, deemed unpublishable by Soviet censors—do we learn the details of her suffering at the hands of the Nazis. As a journalist, Grossman had visited some of the concentration camps and had even published the very first eyewitness account of them (his articles were used as evidence at the Nuremburg war crimes trials). Worse, his own mother was, indeed, murdered by the Nazis in Berdichev, an incident that never ceased to haunt him. Yet he was forbidden to focus on the subject in his books.
Life and Fate
Consequently—and perhaps ironically—Life and Fate became his greatest novel, precisely because the KGB confiscated the manuscript from Grossman’s apartment in 1960 and banned it outright, thereby sparing it the official mutilation that Stalingrad had experienced. Life and Fate tells the story of the Shtrum family during and after World War II—a war that takes the lives not only of Viktor’s mother but also of his stepson—all while the totalitarian state squashes every element of their privacy and dignity.
One of the novel’s most effective incidents concerns Yevgenia, Viktor’s sister-in-law, who struggles to get government permission to live in her apartment building. After being sent from one office to another—she can’t get a permit without a job, but she can’t get a job without a permit—she at last appeals to a government official named Limonov, who is attracted to her, although the married Yevgenia finds him repulsive and has repeatedly refused his advances. He listens to her story sympathetically and promises to do what he can to help her get a residence permit—before once again asking her on a date. She angrily refuses. But the next day, the permit arrives, and shortly afterward, Limonov shows up at her door. “I suppose you really owe me,” he says—and she invites him in.17
Life and Fate’s most haunting episode, however, comes when the Communist Party begins denouncing Viktor for refusing to compromise his scientific principles. He is spared at the very last minute when Stalin himself telephones Viktor at his laboratory and praises his work. The call lasts only a few minutes, but it is enough: Viktor’s fortunes immediately reverse, and his colleagues regard him as a virtual celebrity. Then, a few weeks later, a Party official appears at the lab and asks him to sign a letter that the Party is sending to Western newspapers, denying that there is any oppression in the USSR. Viktor knows that if he refuses, his newfound acclaim will vanish at once. “It’s quite unthinkable to show this letter to Comrade Stalin without your signature,” says the Party man. “He might ask, ‘But why hasn’t Shtrum signed?’”18
Like much else in Grossman’s novels, that incident was based on his real-life experiences. In early 1953, during the campaign against Stalingrad, and in the midst of the “doctor’s plot,” he had been asked to sign an open letter calling for the execution of Jewish physicians falsely accused of treason. Knowing that they were innocent, he nevertheless agreed, perhaps hoping that the Party would cease denouncing the novel, or perhaps, as the Chandlers speculate, because the letter also insisted that Jews, in general, should not be persecuted. Whatever his reasons, his remorse over adding his name to the doctors’ death warrant clouded the remaining decade of his life and formed the heart of the character of Viktor Shtrum. In one passage in Life and Fate, Viktor sits alone in his apartment, reflecting on the way totalitarianism is warping his perspective:
an invisible force was crushing him. He could feel its weight, its hypnotic power; it was forcing him to think as it wanted, to write as it dictated. This force was inside him; it could dissolve his will and cause his heart to stop beating; it came between him and his family. . . . Only people who have never felt such a force themselves can be surprised that others submit to it. Those who have felt it, on the other hand, feel astonished that a man can rebel against it even for a moment.19
Grossman seems to have hoped that Khrushchev’s repudiation of Stalin would mean that he would be allowed to criticize certain elements of communism in Life and Fate. It was not an unreasonable hope; Soviet leaders were then going through what historians call “The Thaw,” a brief period during which censorship was slightly relaxed. Boris Pasternak was allowed to publish Dr. Zhivago in 1957, notwithstanding its criticisms of Stalin; shortly thereafter, Khrushchev gave his personal permission for the premier Soviet literary magazine, Novy Mir, to print Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s novella One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich. (The barely literate dictator somehow concluded that Solzhenitsyn’s bleak indictment of life in the gulag “expresses the Party spirit.”)20
But a different fate awaited Grossman’s novel. In February 1961, after he delivered the story to a literary magazine, the KGB appeared at Grossman’s door and confiscated the manuscript. Oddly, this appears to be the only instance in which the secret police impounded a book but did not arrest its author—but the seizure of Life and Fate was tantamount to a death sentence anyway. Grossman fell into a depression that hastened his death only two years later at the age of fifty-eight. At one point, he even tried writing to Khrushchev directly, begging for permission to print the novel: “There is no logic, no truth in the present condition, in my physical freedom while the book, to which I have given my life, is in prison,” he wrote. “I ask for my book’s freedom.”21 But it was to no avail. A Kremlin deputy dispatched to meet with Grossman months after his letter explained that the novel was
hostile not only to the Soviet people and the state, but also to everyone who struggles for Communism. . . . We do not understand freedom the way they understand it in the capitalist world, as the right to do whatever you want without considering society’s interests. Only imperialists and millionaires need such freedom.22
The book remained locked in the government’s files. A microfilm copy of the manuscript was smuggled to the West, where it was published nearly fifteen years after the author’s death. It did not appear in Russia until 1988. In 2006, Robert Chandler published his own translation, followed three years later by his edition of Grossman’s final and most outspoken work, Everything Flows.
That book tells the story of an inmate who returns home after years in the gulag, only to be haunted by nightmares of the oppression and murder he has witnessed. Written in a strange mix of narrative, dialogue, and eerie nightmare sequences, the book gradually morphs into an outright denunciation of “the Russian slave soul”—which, in its “obedient industriousness” and “lack of any human dignity,” manifested a blend of “Christian meekness and Byzantine ascetic purity”—before closing with a paean to freedom: “No matter how limitless the power of the State,” Grossman wrote, “only one true force remains; only one true force continues to evolve and live; and this force is liberty. To a man, to live means to be free.”23
Grossman completed this manuscript—with a ballpoint pen on notebook paper—while hospitalized with what would prove his terminal illness. He was well aware that it could never be published in Russia. Yet he seems to have hoped that it would reach readers someday—which was just what the authorities, too, feared. Hours after his death, the KGB searched his apartment and sealed the door, forbidding even his widow from entering for two months. They even censored his obituary.24
The life and fate of Vasily Grossman is a tragedy worthy of his own novelistic skills. More than fifty years after his passing, we can only imagine what he might have achieved had communist tyranny not stifled him. The rebelliousness that peeks through the censorship in The People Immortal became, over time, an increasing fixation on the value of the individual and an acute analysis of the cultural and political foundations of Russia’s oppression. He put the ultimate lesson of his life’s work succinctly at the end of Everything Flows: “The history of humanity,” he wrote, “is the history of human freedom.”25 The Chandlers’ diligence in repairing and publicizing his work for the English-speaking world is a priceless contribution to both the history of literature and the liberty that he died praising.