Vasily Grossman

Why He Merits Our Attention

This is my first of four posts about the great Ukrainian writer Vasily Grossman (1905-1964). 

Let’s do our best to imagine having lived the life of writer Vasily Grossman. 

Imagine that in 1905 you are born in Ukraine, the son of parents who were born in Ukraine.

Imagine that you are a budding writer in 1932 and 1933, when the Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin deliberately starves to death four million of your fellow Ukrainians.

Imagine that you are there for the Purge – the Red Terror, of 1937 and 1938 – when Stalin has hundreds of thousands of Soviets executed.

Imagine yourself as a journalist, spending 1,000 days with the Soviet Army.

Imagine being present for the worst siege in the history of human warfare – the Germans’ siege of Stalingrad.

Imagine yourself as a journalist at one of the largest land battles in human history – the Battle of Kursk – when the Soviets at last defeat the Germans.

Imagine being there with the Soviet Army in 1943 as it retakes Ukraine, and arriving in Kiev in November as the city is liberated from the Nazis.  You find out that on September 29 and 30, 1941, some 34,000 Jews were massacred in the “Babi Yar” ravine near Kiev, and at least another 66,000 Jews since.  Dozens of the dead were your relatives.

Imagine traveling west of Kiev to your hometown of 60,000 people — Berdichev.  You learn more about how every Jew in Berdichev was shot to death – 10,000 Jews on September 5, 1941, and 20,000 more from September 14 to 16.  And as you look out at the mounded-over pits you know that in one of them lies the body of your mother.

What will later be called the Holocaust began in your hometown and then expanded across your home country.  In 1942, the Nazis had declared Ukraine free of Jews.  All one million of them. 

You encounter mass graves across Ukraine and you write the world’s first journalistic accounts of the Holocaust.

As you move on with the Soviet Army to Poland, you’re aware that the Nazis have murdered half of the five million Jews living in the Soviet Union.

On July 23, 1944, you reach the Majdanek extermination camps near Lublin.  For the first time, you see a gas chamber.  You see tens of thousands of pairs of children’s shoes.

You move onto Treblinka, east of Warsaw, where 800,000 have died.  It is already destroyed by the Nazis.  Razed.  It’s just fields of powdered bone and ash.

You begin to interview eyewitnesses.  You provide the first accounts of the death camps.  You declare to the world that “this is the biggest crime in history”.  

In April 1945 you walk into Berlin.  You see Joseph Goebbels’s half-burned corpse.  You enter Adolph Hitler’s private office.  You look at a globe, books, papers, letters, and document seals – “The Fuhrer has confirmed”, “The Fuhrer has agreed” – scattered across the floor amid bits of smashed plaster and stucco.

You return to Moscow.  By the late 1940s, your books have sold eight million copies in the U.S.S.R.  But your novel Stalingrad is shelved by Soviet officials because Stalin doesn’t want the War remembered – at all.  A heavily censored version appears in 1952, and Soviet readers find it’s truthful and speaks to their hearts.

However, you are attacked by people close to Stalin, and you survive only because you go into hiding until the tyrant dies.

Millions of prisoners are released and walk out of the gulags.  You interview many of them. 

In February 1961, you’ve been working for a decade on your novel Life and Fate when KGB agents arrive at your apartment and announce, “We are here to arrest the novel.”  They get ten copies and a draft, leaving only one copy.  The book would harm the Soviet people, you are told, and Communists throughout the world. 

You are crushed.  You say at a hearing, “I ask for my book’s freedom.”

“Perhaps,” a Soviet official responds, “not for about 250 years.”

You are now a “non-person”.  Soviet authorities allow no public mention of your name.

So consigned, you find yourself totally free mentally, psychologically, and as a writer.  You write your final novel, Everything Flows.  You attack the foundations of the Soviet regime and its mass repression.  You work on your novel right up until your death in 1964.

Six years after your death, Everything Flows is smuggled out on microfilm and published in West Germany.  In 1980, a smuggled copy of Life and Fate is published.  But not until 1988 and 1989 do your two novels appear in the Soviet Union.  As they devour Life and Fate – and it becomes recognized as one of the great novels of the 20^th Century – Russians see no reason to stick with the Leninism you attacked ferociously, and the Soviet regime soon falls.

Now you see why Vasily Grossman merits our attention.