The war on the Eastern Front remains largely \u201cundiscovered country\u201d for the Western reader despite the fact that the Red Army was responsible for nearly 75 percent of German military losses, including soldiers killed in battle, wounded, taken prisoner and otherwise unaccounted for. The best guide to this terrain is Vasily Grossman, who spent over 1,000 days at the front as a combat correspondent for Krasnaya Zvezda, the Soviet Army newspaper. A decorated lieutenant colonel by the end of the war, he fell afoul of the Soviet authorities and died in 1964 a non-person, his works swept from library shelves and bookshops.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Grossman\u2019s determination to tell the truth about how the war was actually experienced by both Red Army soldiers and civilians put him on a collision course with the Soviet propaganda machine. Josef Stalin\u2019s pitiless wastage of soldiers was buried under grandiose memorials extolling how first he and subsequently the Communist Party had triumphantly led the united Soviet peoples to victory. The specifically Jewish nature of the civilian massacres was silenced with the scripted line, \u201cDo not divide the dead. All Soviet nationalities suffered equally.\u201d Grossman would accept neither Big Lie.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
With fellow correspondent Ilya Ehrenburg, he compiled and co-edited \u201cThe Black Book,\u201d the first documentary record of the Holocaust on Soviet soil. It was never published inside the Soviet Union. Even his magnificent novel \u201cLife and Fate,\u201d which centered on the battle of Stalingrad but embraced the entire country, was seized in manuscript by the KGB. Grossman himself was summoned to the Kremlin to hear from Party ideologue Mikhail Suslov that his novel was far more dangerous to the Soviet state than Boris Pasternak\u2019s \u201cDoctor Zhivago.\u201d It was in \u201cLife and Fate\u201d that Grossman arrived at the startling conclusion that the two warring socialist states, Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia, were in fact mirror images of each other. Grossman\u2019s comparison \u2014 called an \u201catomic bomb\u201d by Suslov \u2014 led him to a profound reassessment and rejection of the Soviet experiment, and of Vladimir Lenin himself, a generation before his compatriots approached similar judgments.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Grossman began his journey of discovery in his war diaries, written in \u201creal time\u201d from 1941 to 1945. They were first published by his daughter Yekaterina Korotkova-Grossman in the collection \u201cGody Voiny\u201d in 1989, when perestroika and glasnost had loosened the Party\u2019s stranglehold. Now, the bulk of them have been translated by Antony Beevor and Luba Vinogradova for an important new book, \u201cA Writer at War: Vasily Grossman With the Red Army, 1941-1945.\u201d Here, with useful commentary, is a description of war as endured by the Red Army soldier, the \u201cIvan\u201d so disastrously underestimated by the German high command and so callously expended by his own. Badly led, and sometimes not even led at all, his rugged courage changed the course of history.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Among the most politically sensitive of the themes Grossman confronted were desertion and collaboration in the Holocaust. He accompanied an army in full strategic retreat for six terrible months in 1941, from the invasion of June 22 to the magnificent stand in front of Moscow in December. The human tragedy was colossal. The entry \u201cInterrogation of a Traitor\u201d is a searing example of the kinds of choices individuals made. Grossman witnessed the summary court martial and execution of a young Ukrainian deserter, whose former commander, \u201cshouting and crying at the same time,\u201d sentenced him to death as a comrade told the traitor: \u201cYou\u2019ve disgraced your son! He won\u2019t be able to live with this shame!\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cA Writer at War\u201d also juxtaposes \u201cThe Killing of Jews in Berdichev,\u201d Grossman\u2019s postwar article about his hometown, translations of the two letters Grossman wrote to his mother on the anniversary of her death in 1950 and 1961, and his fictional treatment in \u201cLife and Fate\u201d of life inside the Berdichev ghetto prior to the massacre. After the Red Army retook Berdichev\u2019s shattered ruins, Grossman discovered that his mother and a female cousin had been among the approximately 20,000 Jews rounded up early on the morning of Sept. 15, 1941. They had been taken to the military airport, where German Einsatzgruppen had shot them and dumped their bodies into pits. (To this day, the victims\u2019 bones lie under mounds still visible near the airport\u2019s fence.)<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Much of the material in \u201cA Writer at War,\u201d whether background notes or translations, was first covered in \u201cThe Bones of Berdichev: The Life and Fate of Vasily Grossman,\u201d which I published with Carol Garrard in 1996. But Vinogradova and Beevor\u2019s adaptation gives the reader a condensed and easily accessible version as well as more extensive selections of Grossman\u2019s war diaries.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
While \u201cA Writer at War\u201d is a welcome tribute to a neglected author, it contains several puzzling lacunae and imprecisions. For instance, it is of significance that Grossman died not sometime in \u201cthe summer of 1964,\u201d but on Sept. 14 \u2014 the eve of the anniversary of his mother\u2019s death in the Berdichev massacre 23 years earlier. Far more important is the fact that the authors\u2019 discussion of the Soviet Union\u2019s effort to suppress Grossman\u2019s \u201cruthless truth of war\u201d lacks any mention of the most calculated and brazen attempt: the giant World War II monument Leonid Brezhnev erected on Mamayev Kurgan, the scene of the fiercest firefights in the Battle of Stalingrad.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Nowhere is the Party\u2019s cynical campaign to co-opt the victory seen in starker relief than here, where Grossman interviewed the Siberians of the 308th Rifle Division for his most famous Krasnaya Zvezda piece, \u201cAxis of the Main Attack.\u201d Words from this piece are carved in granite nearly two meters high along the wall leading to the mausoleum.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
A German soldier questions: \u201cThey are attacking us again, can they be mortal?\u201d Inside the mausoleum, a Red Army soldier answers in letters tooled in gold around the base of the dome: \u201cYes, we were mortal indeed, and few of us survived, but we all carried out our patriotic duty before holy Mother Russia.\u201d Yet neither inside nor outside of the mausoleum is the source of these words or their author acknowledged. Ironically, by failing to draw attention to the Stalingrad memorial, Beevor and Vinogradova miss an opportunity to right the very wrong their book sets out to redress: the Soviet campaign to erase Grossman from the memory of his countrymen.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
John Garrard is professor of Russian studies at the University of Arizona and, together with Carol Garrard, a co-author of \u201cThe Bones of Berdichev: The Life and Fate of Vasily Grossman\u201d and the forthcoming \u201cFrom Party to Patriarch: Russian Orthodoxy Resurgent.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
(Courtesy: The St. Petersburg Times)By John Garrard The war on the Eastern Front remains largely \u201cundiscovered country\u201d for the Western reader despite the fact that […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[8],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/berdichev.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/986"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/berdichev.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/berdichev.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/berdichev.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/berdichev.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=986"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/berdichev.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/986\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":987,"href":"http:\/\/berdichev.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/986\/revisions\/987"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/berdichev.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=986"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/berdichev.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=986"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/berdichev.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=986"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}