Bookplanet: Vasily Grossman (Life and Fate)

Life and death in the Red Army – by Omer Bartov
Under review: Anthony Beevor and Lucy Vinogradova, translators and editors -- A WRITER AT WAR: Vasily Grossman with the Red Army, 1941–1945
Catherine Merridale -- IVAN’S WAR: The Red Army, 1939–1945

Since the fall of the Soviet Union fifteen years ago, the historiography of Russia and its vast empire has flourished. Young historians stormed into the archives, liberating thousands upon thousands of documents from their folders and trying to make some sense of that other side of the Iron Curtain. The curtain had crashed under its own weight, corroded by the rust and pollution of ageing industries and faded hopes. But while opinions about what had been going on behind it were vehement, knowledge was scarce. Now that it lay in ruins, knowledge rapidly expanded and opinions became far less certain.

Entire mountains of books could or should now be thrown into the dustbin of history. New research on the Gulag has shown not merely the murderous brutality of that system, its economic inefficiency and its utter and complete uselessness; it has also demonstrated how different the Gulag was from the Nazi system. The “concentrationary universe” was not cut from the same cloth, even if saying so served the ideological purposes of those who rightly condemned Stalinist criminality. Similarly, new studies of Soviet “population policies” have largely dispensed with the simplistic models of earlier scholarship. Whether the Soviet Union was an “affirmative action empire”, as one scholar has argued, or “a state of nations”, as another has suggested, clearly Lenin and Stalin’s moulding and destruction of ethnic groups was part of a complex, and often brutal, process of trying to create a Soviet nation from a conglomerate of peoples under their control.

In brief, the more we learn about the Soviet Union, the more we realize that the term totalitarianism simply does not fit the bill: it neither describes the USSR in a satisfactory manner, nor does it provide more than the most simplistic measuring rod for a comparison with that other spectre of the twentieth century, the Bolsheviks’ greatest enemy and the Russian people’s scourge – Nazi Germany. But thanks to this new research, as well as to the new sensibilities developed in the wake of Communism’s fall, we are now also beginning to know much more about the war in which these two empires clashed and one of them was wiped out. The West is finally coming to the realization that despite its heroics and posturing, without the horrific sacrifice of the Soviet Union, it would have been squirming under the Nazi boot for far longer.

But it is also gradually grasping the sheer tragedy of this moment in the heart of the previous century, of a victory that had to be won and was bound to be lost, of a sacrifice never acknowledged and never recompensed, and of gains made by the defeated and power grasped by those who won with the blood of their discredited allies. The knowledge we have accumulated in the past fifteen years of open borders and archives is not a cause for much celebration, for it sheds light on the darkest, most desperate, and bloodiest episode of our time. We turn our face away from it in horror and despair, yet we know that we are still living its consequences.

Not all understanding is derived from documents newly salvaged from the archives. Some of the sources for understanding the tragedy and glory of Russia’s war have been waiting to be “discovered” and employed for decades, yet in a sense they were always available. This is the case of the two magnificent books under review here. Vasily Grossman completed his novel Life and Fate in 1960, but Mikhail Suslov, chief of the Cultural Section of the Central Committee, decided that it would not be published for at least 200 years, and the KGB seized all copies it could lay its hands on.

Life and Fate is finally being recognized as one of the greatest masterpieces of the twentieth century. But it had to be smuggled to Switzerland and only gradually came to be known by an international readership. It was finally published in Russia after the fall of Communism. An extraordinary combination of a sprawling nineteenth-century Russian novel and a Soviet social-realist depiction of simple men’s discovery of their capacity for heroism and sacrifice, the book was based on Grossman’s own experience at the front as a correspondent for the Red Army’s official paper, Krasnaya Zvezda (Red Star). Thanks to Antony Beevor and Luba Vinogradova, the notebooks on which Grossman based much of his novel, written during his time at the front – where he spent most of the war years – are now available in an excellent English translation.

Grossman died in 1964, at the age of fifty-nine. He never saw his masterpiece in print and had over the years been transformed from a patriotic Soviet man into a deeply disillusioned one, though he never lost his love for the Soviet Union and the Russian people. But it is not only Grossman the man whose experience in the war has been rescued from oblivion by this publication: it is the experience of millions of Russian men and women, and innumerable other nationalities in the former Soviet Union, whose current resentment, contempt, fear or hate of the Russians does not in any way diminish the astonishing collective effort to drive out the Nazi invaders and put an end to their war of destruction.

One would have wanted to know more about these notebooks. We are told that Beevor “came across” them while writing his impressive book Stalingrad, but we are not given any information on where they were kept and how they were found. Nor does the book contain only Grossman’s diary entries, since these are combined with some of his articles, especially for Krasnaya Zvezda, some of his letters, and some other extraordinary writings, not least of which is his devastating account of the Nazi extermination camp in Treblinka, an essay that was subsequently quoted at the Nuremberg International Tribunal in 1945. What makes these notebooks so valuable, however, is their evident sincerity, Grossman’s critical yet empathetic gaze, and the manner in which his admiration of Soviet patriotism and his growing anger at the incompetence of so many commanders and the readiness of the regime to squander the lives of its sons combine to provide a searing portrait of the immense quantities of blood that were so readily given and so nonchalantly wasted to win a victory that had to be won.

Grossman’s prose moves from the mundane to the exalted, anticipating the greatness of Life and Fate but also staying very close to the immediacy of the events he is experiencing. Any war correspondent writing today about the horrors we are still being subjected to by ideologues, mean-spirited leaders and fanatics of various shades and faiths, should take the time to read him. There is a profound humanity in his prose, an ability for empathy and a capacity for rage that one rarely meets in papers which consider themselves much nobler than the Red Star. “At war,” Grossman writes, “a Russian man puts on a white shirt. He may live in sin, but he dies like a saint.” He then expands on this comment. “We Russians don’t know how to live like saints, we only know how to die like saints. The front [represents] the holiness of Russian death, the rear is the sin of Russian life.”

After the terrible battles of 1941, Grossman prepares for the horrors of Stalingrad without yet knowing what awaits him. At the front, he writes, “lies the answer to all questions and to all fates”. The answers he finds there, and the fate that he too will have to confront as Stalin tightens his hold on the nation as soon as the
battle has been won, will need years to digest, rework and commit to paper. And when he finally reaches his birthplace, the Ukrainian town of Berdichev, in early 1944, and learns how the Germans murdered his mother, along with most of the other 30,000 Jewish inhabitants of the town, he soon realizes not only that the fate of an entire people had been sealed under the guise of a murderous war, but that the Soviet authorities will never let him write about it. His article on Berdichev was censored, lest the Jews appear as unique victims and the Ukrainians as willing collaborators. And The Black Book, the attempt by Ilya Ehrenburg and Grossman to document the Holocaust in the Soviet Union, was finally barred from publication in 1947. This was Stalin’s answer to the fate of the Jews as he turned his attention to persecuting those who had done so much, for better and for worse, to create the reality and myth of the Soviet people.

That myth is shattered for Grossman also as he confronts the atrocities perpetrated by the Red Army as it enters Germany: the mass rapes, looting, murder of civilians and wanton destruction of property. “Horrifying things are happening to German women”, he writes. Even “Soviet girls liberated from the camps are suffering a lot now”, he notes, for the fury of the soldiers no longer makes any distinctions. And yet, in groping for an answer to the brutalization of the men he loves, Grossman does discover a truth that has long been forgotten. As German soldiers marched into Russia, they mocked what they called the “Soviet Paradise” of filth and poverty and considered the “Untermenschen” they encountered as hardly worthy of life. As the Red Army marched into Germany, writes Grossman,

our soldiers really started to ask themselves, why did the Germans attack us so suddenly? Why did the Germans need this terrible and unfair war? Millions of our men have now seen the rich farms in East Prussia, the highly organized agriculture, the concrete sheds for livestock, spacious rooms, carpets, wardrobes full of clothes . . . the well-built roads . . . and the German autobahns . . . the two storey suburban houses with electricity, gas, bathrooms and beautifully tended gardens . . . the villas of the rich bourgeoisie in Berlin, the unbelievable luxury of castles, estates and mansions. And thousands of soldiers repeat these angry questions when they look around them in Germany: “But why did they come to us? What did they want?”.

These questions are still being asked decades later by the 200 men and women interviewed in Ivan’s War: The Red Army, 1941–1945, and in the numerous letters and diaries Catherine Merridale has used to write this breathtaking, sweeping, yet well-balanced and finely tuned study of the Great Patriotic War from the perspective of the Soviet “grunt”.

At times it seems that the voices of the soldiers talking to us from the pages of the book overwhelm the argument proposed by the author. For Merridale ultimately insists that these millions of soldiers internalized a self-perception of glorious sacrifice and meaningful victimhood precisely because they had been treated so cynically by the state that sent them to die and abandoned those who barely survived. And, indeed, there is no doubt whatsoever that Merridale is right as far as the cynicism and callousness of the Soviet authorities
are concerned. But the men speak differently. Perhaps indeed they were duped, although, as Merridale concedes, there was no alternative. But their belief, their memories, their perception of what they did and why they did it, are their truth, and we may not have the right to deprive them of this small but valuable treasure.

Merridale is a sensitive listener and a moving, at times eloquent, writer. She therefore does not overstress her argument and has evident admiration for these men, those who speak from the pages of diaries and letters scribbled shortly before they were killed, and those who recall the events from the distance of old age and, usually, decades of poverty, illness and abandonment. But where Merridale surpasses not only other historians writing on the Red Army but military historians as a class, is in her extraordinary insights into the least visible yet often the most important aspects of the soldiers’ lives: their relations with the women they left behind and the women they encounter at the front; love, jealousy, hatred and violence; sex and impotence; anxiety, fear, despair and trauma; the impossibility of ever coming home as one had left it and the longing for the world that was destroyed for ever; courage, cowardice, avarice and crime.

Merridale seeks to know what the soldiers believed they were fighting for, what held them back and what drove them forward. In a war on such an unimaginable scale, where 27 million Soviet citizens died (of whom some 8.6 million were soldiers) and about 25 million were left homeless, it is clearly impossible to generalize. Following the terrible early defeats, men were moved by a desire for revenge, which remained with them throughout the war, gradually becoming a more effective tool as the army received better training, equipment and command. It was desire for revenge, not mere sexual drive, that was at the root of the murders and rapes that accompanied the invasion of Germany, argues Merridale, just as much as it was the same fury described by Grossman on seeing how, even in defeat, Germany was so much richer than Russia was even at its hour of total military superiority. By this point, Merridale writes, the Red Army had become “the instrument of collective redemption, the arm of vengeance and of liberation”.


It was also the instrument of a regime that had deported some 1.6 million of its own citizens by the end of the war, many of them Tatars from the Crimea and Chechens from the Caucasus. It was an army in which anti-Semitism flourished, even though Jews served in it with great dedication and expressions of anti-Semitism were forbidden. It was an army in which some 800,000 women served in a variety of roles, including combat, yet one which abused and exploited its own women, and raped and murdered hundreds of thousands of women, especially but not exclusively, in Germany. It was also an army in which men from innumerable ethnic groups served together, and yet one which increasingly made use of former political and criminal inmates of the Gulags, employed penal battalions on an impressive scale, and had to contend with nations coming back again under its control from the Baltic through Poland to Ukraine, whose hatred of the Soviet Union almost matched, and at times surpassed, that of Nazi Germany.

This too is probably why the memory of the war is so difficult to comprehend. Only a writer with Merridale’s fine sensibilities and keen understanding can begin to uncover the multiple layers involved. Anatoly Shevelev is one of those old soldiers who managed in his own peculiar manner to make sense of life and death in the war, its aftermath, and the shape of a post-Soviet Russia which he might have preferred not to have witnessed. As his wife, who had become a Christian was dying, Shevelev went to church. In his prayer, he said:

“Dear God, forgive me that I have been an atheist all my life. Not because I chose to be but because from my childhood on no one took me to church. I was brought up in an atheist world. I admire the Russian Orthodox Church, and these days I’ve started to value it, because if it had not been for the church, there would have been no Muscovy, and that was the foundation of our state. And in my own defence, please remember that I, along with millions of other atheists, saved the motherland. By doing so, indirectly, we saved your Orthodox Church. I’ve come to pray for the recovery of my wife, please, God. And forgive me. Because for my entire life I have been a member of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union.”

Isaac Babel could not have written it better.