The Ruthless Truth of War

Shortly after the collapse of the Soviet Union I was invited to join a private train for its first – and, as it proved, only – excursion, from St Petersburg to Tashkent. Things in Russia had changed a lot, mostly for the worse. The streets of former Leningrad had been commandeered by homeless urchins and men in dark glasses with mobile phones. In a hotel bar, a drunken Red Army veteran pulled a pistol on me. Moscow seemed more dilapidated than ever, but L’Oréal perfume was on sale at the GUM store. As the train puffed south towards the Caspian Sea, blank and hungry faces stared from desolate village halts, and the carriage windows were locked for the passengers’ protection.

The ruins of Russia were not what I had come to see, however. My goal was Stalingrad on the Volga, scene of the most violent battle of the Second World War, the beginning of the end of Hitler’s imperial fantasy, and a turning-point in European history. I left the train and spent a day walking round the city looking for something that would convey the terrible struggle of the winter of 1942–3. Along the top of the steep western bank of the river a line of tank turrets on concrete pillars reminded the visitor how perilously thin the Red Army front line became. In the rebuilt megalopolis, renamed Volgograd, a few wartime ruins had been preserved. A rotunda displayed a panoramic painting of the Soviet counter-attack which in December 1942 encircled the 300,000 troops of General Paulus’s Sixth Army, and thousands of bedraggled and freezing German prisoners being ferried over to the eastern bank of the Volga and marched away, already dying, to the camps. I climbed Mamaev Kurgan, the hill overhanging the city where some of the fiercest fighting took place. It is crowned by a 150-foot statue of Mother Russia waving a ninety-foot sword over her head. Built in Brezhnev’s time, this is the biggest war memorial in the Soviet Union and one of the tallest monuments anywhere. On the wall of a mausoleum, in letters six feet high, were written these words: ‘They are attacking us again; can they be mortal?’ Inside, the answer was picked out in gold: ‘Yes, we were mortal, and few of us survived, but we carried out our patriotic duty before holy Mother Russia.’ Fine words, but there was no telling whose words they were. I found out only this year, when I read what is surely the best account of the Battle of Stalingrad, the greatest book to come out of the Second World War, and – some say – the greatest novel to come out of Russia in the twentieth century: Vasily Grossman’s Life and Fate. Grossman’s novel is often compared to Tolstoy’s War and Peace, which it resembles not only in its theme and epic length, but also in its episodic structure. Although built round the siege of Stalingrad it portrays, like Tolstoy’s novel, an entire society at a moment of great crisis. Events are described through the daily lives of a middle-aged physicist, Viktor Shtrum (who stands for the author), his wife Lyudmila and her extended family, the Shaposhnikovs. To summarize as briefly as possible: Lyudmila’s son has been wounded at the front. Her nephew is one of a group of soldiers cut off in a ruined house in Stalingrad. Her sister is married to the director of the city’s power station. Another sister, formerly married to a Red Army commissar or political officer, is in love with a heroic tank commander. Her brother is in the gulag; so is her ex-husband. Other scenes are set in the Lubyanka prison, in a German concentration camp, and in a gas chamber. Like Tolstoy, Grossman drew his characters from life. In the novel, Viktor’s Jewish mother is trapped behind German lines and writes him a last letter. The author’s own mother Yekaterina was caught behind the lines at Berdichev in the Ukraine, and was murdered in September 1941, in the first massacre of Jews in Hitler’s war. (Grossman never forgave himself for failing to bring her to Moscow before the invasion.) As in Tolstoy, real people appear in the story: Red Army generals whom Grossman admired, members of the German high command – even Adolf Eichmann. Comparisons with Tolstoy may be flattering, but they are also misleading. Hitler’s invasion was much more terrible than Napoleon’s. It aimed at nothing less than serfdom for the Slavs and extermination of the Jews, a ‘total war’ in which Soviet civilian casualties alone may have reached 18 million. But Grossman’s Russians, unlike Tsar Alexander’s, were fighting a war on two fronts: not only the armed forces of a foreign tyrant but also the erratic cruelty of their own tyrant. Some readers find Grossman’s writing style flat compared with Tolstoy’s. If so, I think the explanation lies in the fact that the author of Life and Fate was much closer to his material than was Tolstoy, who wrote decades after the events he describes. In the 1,000 days he spent at the front as a war reporter for the Red Army newspaper Krasnaya Zvezda Grossman saw things that Tolstoy never did. He understood that literary artfulness can sometimes make things incredible. What he called ‘the ruthless truth of war’ could only be conveyed in fragments. Grossman may not inhabit his characters as completely and satisfyingly as Tolstoy does, but when imaginative flights are required, or illuminating detail, he is well able to supply them. Like Tolstoy, Grossman’s subject was humans as individuals, not humanity in the mass. The soldiers who were sent on suicidal charges against Panzer tanks were not just troops, but people. The Jews lined up on the edge of pits and shot in their thousands, or later driven to the gas chambers in their hundreds of thousands, were not just Jews. They were fathers and mothers, brothers, sisters, farmers, poets, tradesmen, teachers. Half the population of Berdichev, the author’s birthplace, was Jewish. Grossman’s family was Jewish only in name. They were rich – a ‘carriages and diamonds family’ – and imbued with Russian and Western European culture, non-religious and pro-Bolshevik. Young ‘Vasya’ gave little thought to his ethnic identity; that came later, when first Hitler, and then Stalin, forced him to do so. Trained as a chemist (like Primo Levi, the bard of Auschwitz), he soon turned to writing and made his name in 1934 with a novel about his birthplace, In the Town of Berdichev, which was praised by Mikhail Bulgakov and Maxim Gorky. In 1941 he volunteered for duty. He was 35, with owlish spectacles, and overweight. He had never fired a gun. But he showed extraordinary physical courage, running the gauntlet of bombs, mortars and shellfire to talk to the men – and women – at the front, from the humblest water-carrier to the commander in his bunker. He had a knack of getting people to open up: a famously taciturn Siberian general talked to him for six hours in the heat of battle. His characterization of women, whether at home or at war, is especially moving. After Grossman’s war there was no peace. Victory over Germany did not end the Stalinist terror, as the author had presumed it would. On the contrary, Stalin’s manic suspicions returned, with a nasty anti-Semitic twist. Already disillusioned by the wartime treatment of the Red Army, the writer was shocked at the Communist Party’s post-war complicity in suppressing the genocidal purpose of the Nazi invasion. Massacred Jews were to be described only as ‘peaceful Soviet citizens’. ‘Do not divide the dead,’ decreed Stalin. The collaboration of Soviet citizens in the genocide, especially Ukrainians, was a forbidden topic. Completing his masterpiece in 1960, Grossman sent the manuscript to the magazine Znamya, confident that seven years after Stalin’s death it would be published. But Life and Fate proved too hot to handle. Not only did it reveal Stalin’s misconduct of the war, it explicitly equated Hitler’s Fascist regime with Stalin’s Communist one, as mirror images of each other. The Kremlin’s censors considered it to be more damaging than Pasternak’s Dr Zhivago, or even Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag Archipelago: it could not be published, they said, for at least 200 years. The KGB came to the author’s flat and took away every manuscript they could lay their hands on, even carbon papers and typewriter ribbons, then drove round Moscow collecting the remaining copies. In despair, Grossman wrote a letter of protest to Khrushchev (who had been a commissar at Stalingrad and appears in the novel as Getmanov). He was invited to the Kremlin to meet Mikhail Suslov, the ideology boss, who accused him of indulging in a cult of personality and asked: ‘Why should we add your book to the atomic bombs that our enemies are preparing to launch against us?’ ‘They strangled me in a doorway,’ was Grossman’s verdict. By now Grossman was suffering from stomach cancer, and on 14 September 1964, the eve of the anniversary of the massacre in which his mother was murdered, he died. But two close friends had persuaded Grossman to hide copies of the manuscript with them. Ten years after the author’s death, one of them, Semyon Lipkin, decided to try and smuggle his copy abroad. With the help of the famous physicist Andrei Sakharov – who had access to microfilm cameras – and the writer Vladimir Voinovich, the manuscript reached Switzerland, where it was eventually published by a small press in Lausanne in 1980. The world hardly noticed. It took an English translation and another two decades before this overlooked masterpiece of Russian fiction was recognized. Life and Fate is a great book and can be read for itself. But to appreciate how autobiographical and historical it is, I would recommend two other books. One is Grossman’s own war diary for 1941–5 which records what he saw at the front during the retreat, the battles for Moscow and Stalingrad, and the advance via his home town, and Poland, to Berlin. The English edition includes his article on the Treblinka death camp, which was quoted at the Nuremberg trials. The other book is the well-written, comprehensive biography by an American (non-Jewish) academic couple which charts the author’s progress from idealist intellectual to disillusioned enemy of the state. Grossman’s uninhibited reflections can be found in his last novel, Forever Flowing, never completed, about a man who returns from the gulag to meet those who denounced him. It contains a famous description of the Ukrainian famine and the first accusation by a Russian writer of Lenin’s ultimate responsibility for the Terror. One day, perhaps, the name of Vasily Grossman will take its rightful place on the wall of the Mamaev Kurgan mausoleum. But Life and Fate will always be his monument.

Extract from Slightly Foxed Issue 16 © Christian Tyler 2007