GROSSMAN, VASILY (1905–1964)

Writer.

Vasily Semyonovich Grossman was born on 12 December 1905 to cultured, assimilated Jewish parents in the town of Berdichev, in Ukraine. He graduated from Moscow State University in December 1929 as a chemical engineer but wanted to be a writer. A number of innovative but enthusiastically Soviet works gained him admission to the privileged Union of Soviet Writers in 1937. Grossman might have remained an ardent Soviet writer but for his experiences as a frontline correspondent during World War II. He spent more than a thousand days at the front, witnessing the street fighting at Stalingrad and accompanying the Red Army on its long drive from Ukraine to Berlin. He gained national fame for his lively, sensitive reporting and ended the war a decorated lieutenant colonel in the Red Army. After the war, his desire to tell the truth about the collaboration of some Soviet nationals in the murder of their Jewish neighbors during the German occupation put him at loggerheads with official government policy. Grossman had discovered that his mother was among the twenty thousand Jews murdered in Berdichev on 15 September 1941, and he would not give up trying to write that history. As a result, the Soviet authorities under both Joseph Stalin and Nikita Khrushchev labeled him an enemy of the state. His manuscripts were suppressed and buried in archives; his published works were removed from libraries. When he died of stomach cancer on 14 September 1964 (the eve of the twenty-third anniversary of the murder of the Jews of Berdichev), he was officially a nonperson.

Grossman married twice. His first marriage ended in divorce but gave him his only child, Yekaterina, born in January 1930. In 1935 he married Olga Mikhailovna Guber, the former wife of the writer Boris Guber, who was arrested and executed in 1937 for "anti-Soviet activities." When Olga Mikhailovna was herself arrested by the NKVD (the Soviet secret police) in 1938, Grossman courageously wrote a letter to Nikolai Yezhov, the head of the NKVD, explaining that she was no longer the wife of an "enemy of the people" (Boris Guber) but his own spouse. Grossman obtained her release and adopted her two sons so they would not be sent to special camps for the children of those who had been arrested.

After the war, Grossman fell in love with Yekaterina Zabolotskaya, wife of the poet Nikolai Zabolotsky, and they lived together for two years. Although both returned to their spouses, their love endured as deep friendship and trust until Grossman's death. Grossman secretly entrusted his final typescript of Forever Flowing to Zabolotskaya on his deathbed. She kept it safe for decades before giving it to John Garrard of the University of Arizona for transfer to the West, where it was deposited in the Andrei Sakharov Archive at Harvard University.

Grossman remained relatively unknown in the West until the posthumous publication of his major novel, Life and Fate, in Lausanne, Switzerland, in 1980, after friends smuggled a copy to the West. In 1962, after the KGB had seized the original manuscript of Life and Fate, Mikhail Suslov, the ideological boss of the Communist Party, told Grossman that the novel threatened harm to the Soviet people, the Soviet state, and "all those struggling to achieve communism beyond Soviet borders." The novel could be published inside the Soviet Union, he said, "in 250 years." What was so dangerous about a novel centered on the battle for Stalingrad written by the Red Army's premier war correspondent? This was the same Vasily Grossman whose pieces about the heroic Stalingrad garrison, such as "Stalingrad Hits Back" and "In the Line of the Main Drive," had been published in 1942 to universal acclaim in the Red Army's newspaper, Red Star. But Life and Fate struck at the heart of the Soviet assertion that Adolf Hitler's Germany was the diametrical opposite of Stalin's Soviet Union. Grossman showed two warring totalitarian regimes that were mirror images of each other. Grossman was the first Soviet writer or historian to perceive them this way but did not become the first to publish.

The Soviet Union's famous war memorial at Stalingrad (now Volgograd) quotes "In the Line of the Main Drive," Vasily Grossman's most celebrated war report, which appeared in Red Star, the Red Army newspaper, in 1942. In huge granite letters, a German soldier asks, "They are attacking us again; can they be mortal?" Inside the mauso leum, tooled in gold around the base of the giant dome, a Red Army soldier gives the answer: "Yes, we were mortal indeed, and few of us survived, but we all carried out our patriotic duty before holy Mother Russia." "In the Line of the Main Drive" was reprinted in Pravda during the war, but although Grossman finished the war as a decorated lieutenant colonel in the Red Army, he later became a critic of the regime and Soviet designers refused to speak his name at the memorial where he had witnessed and written about a soldier's courage under fire.

Grossman amplified this comparison in Forever Flowing, which after his death was also smuggled to the West for publication in Frankfurt, Germany, in 1970. In it, Grossman compared Hitler's hierarchy based on race to Vladimir Lenin's hierarchy based on class. Both grounded their appeals on the powerful nationalist extremism stirring in their populations, and both ideologies led to state chauvinism and state-sponsored anti-Semitism. In Life and Fate, Grossman spoke ostensibly about Nazi Germany, arguing that "in totalitarian countries, where society as such no longer exists, only State anti-Semitism can arise. This is a sign that the State is looking for the support of fools, reactionaries and failures, that it is seeking to capitalize on the ignorance of the superstitious and the anger of the hungry." The criticism applied to Soviet Russia, as well.

See alsoAnti-Semitism; Red Army; Samizdat; Soviet Union.

Vasily Grossman's "Trial of the Four Judases," in his novella Forever Flowing, is his strongest indictment of Soviet totalitarianism. Since the state's legal code punished not only the offender but also anyone who knew but did not report subversive behavior, the regime encouraged citizens to betray one another. Thus there were many Judases, for virtually no person—and Grossman included him self in this indictment—could survive and be totally innocent. In this page of the original typescript, Grossman added in his own handwriting "Iuda" (Judas), to emphasize that betrayal was at the heart of the Soviet state.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Primary Sources

Grossman, Vasily. The Years of War (1941–1945). Translated by Elizabeth Donnelly and Rose Prokofiev. Moscow, 1946. A collection of Grossman's articles and reports from Stalingrad to Berlin.

——. Life and Fate: A Novel. Translated by Robert Chandler. New York, 1986.

——. Forever Flowing. Evanston, Ill., 1997.

Ehrenburg, Ilya, and Vasily Grossman, eds. The Black Book: The Ruthless Murder of the Jews by German-Fascist Invaders throughout the Temporarily-Occupied Regions of the Soviet Union and in the Death Camps of Poland during the War of 1941–1945. Translated by John Glad and James Levine. New York, 1981.

Secondary Sources

Ellis, Frank. Vasiliy Grossman: The Genesis and Evolution of a Russian Heretic. Oxford, U.K., 1994.

Garrard, John. "The Original Manuscript of Forever Flowing: Grossman's Autopsy of the New Soviet Man." Slavic and East European Journal 38, no. 2 (1994): 271–289.

——. "Vasilii Grossman and the Holocaust on Soviet Soil." In Jews and Jewish Life in Russia and the Soviet Union, edited by Yaacov Ro'i, 212–225. Ilford, U.K., 1995.

Garrard, John, and Carol Garrard. The Bones of Berdichev: The Life and Fate of Vasily Grossman. New York, 1996.

John Garrard