Stalingrad

by Vasily Grossman

  In Stalingrad, Marusya—a candidate member of the Communist Party—comes out with precisely the same thoughts while arguing with her younger sister, Zhenya, who is an artist: “Instead of strange daubs no one can understand, you should paint posters. But I know what you’ll say next. You’ll start going on about truth to life . . . How many times do I have to tell you that there are two truths? There’s the truth of the reality forced on us by the accursed past. And there’s the truth of the reality that will defeat that past. It’s this second truth, the truth of the future, that I want to live by.” At this point, a surgeon and friend of the family intervenes.

  “No, Marusya,” said Sofya Osipovna. “You’re wrong. I can tell you as a surgeon that there is one truth, not two. When I cut someone’s leg off, I don’t know two truths. If we start pretending there are two truths, we’re in trouble. And in war too—above all, when things are as bad as they are today—there is only one truth. It’s a bitter truth, but it’s a truth that can save us. If the Germans enter Stalingrad, you’ll learn that if you chase after two truths, you won’t catch either. It’ll be the end of you.”

  Despite his earlier criticisms, Gorky evidently played a central role in orchestrating Grossman’s remarkably successful literary debut in 1934. Like Lev Shtrum, he is a mentor to whom Grossman felt deeply indebted.15 Unlike Lev Shtrum, however, Gorky is a very ambiguous figure. In the aftermath of the Revolution his publishing projects rescued many writers from starvation, yet from 1928 until his death in 1936 he was complicit with the most brutal aspects of Stalinism. It is possible that Grossman’s awareness of his debt to Gorky made him all the more determined to continue to write truthfully himself—not, like Gorky, to be seduced by the privileges that accompany power and success. David Ortenberg, the editor of Red Star, the main Soviet army newspaper, remembers arguing with Grossman about whether or not it was really necessary for the hero of one of his works to die. Grossman replied, “We have to follow the ruthless truth of war.”16

  6

  The Soviet regime needed a Soviet Tolstoy. After 1945, however, Stalin also needed a new, preferably internal, enemy to help justify his dictatorship. The choice of enemy was simple enough; antisemitism had always been widespread in Russia and Ukraine. Grossman—both a Jew and a candidate for the role of the new Tolstoy—was positioned on a dangerous fault line.17

  The question of whom to choose as the Soviet Tolstoy was, in any case, fraught. There had always been rivalry between the Writers’ Union and the Agitprop Section of the Central Committee. In this instance the Agitprop Section was backing the now-forgotten novelist Mikhail Bubyonnov, while Alexander Fadeyev (the chairman of the Writers’ Union) and Alexander Tvardovsky (the chief editor of the journal Novy Mir) were backing Grossman. For all their political acumen, Fadeyev and Tvardovsky evidently underestimated how fiercely the anti-Jewish campaign would intensify. They began publishing For a Just Cause during the very month—July 1952—when most of the leading members of the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee were undergoing secret trial, before their execution in August.

  Initial reviews of For a Just Cause were enthusiastic and on 13 October 1952 the Prose Section of the Writers’ Union nominated the novel for a Stalin Prize.18 On 13 January 1953, however, an article appeared in Pravda titled “Vicious Spies and Killers Passing Themselves off as Doctors and Professors.” A group of the country’s most eminent doctors—nearly all of them Jewish—had allegedly been plotting to poison Stalin and other members of the political and military leadership. These accusations were intended to serve as a prelude to a vast purge of Soviet Jews.

  A month later, on 13 February, Bubyonnov published a denunciatory review of For a Just Cause. A campaign against Grossman swiftly gathered momentum. Major newspapers printed articles with such titles as “A Novel That Distorts the Image of Soviet People,” “On a False Path,” and “In a Distorting Mirror.” In response, Tvardovsky and the Novy Mir editorial board as a whole duly acknowledged that publication of the novel had been a grave mistake.

  Soon after this Grossman committed an act of betrayal that troubled him for the rest of his life: he agreed to sign a letter calling for the execution of the “Killer Doctors.” He may have thought—perhaps not unreasonably—that the doctors were certain to be executed anyway and that the letter was worth signing because it affirmed that the Jewish people as a whole were innocent. Whatever his reasons, Grossman at once regretted what he had done. A passage in Life and Fate based on this incident ends with Viktor Shtrum (who has just signed a similar letter) praying to his dead mother to help him never to show such weakness again.

  Grossman’s act of betrayal did nothing to ease his position. The campaign against him intensified. Mikhail Sholokhov, the most eminent Soviet writer of the time, had previously expressed admiration for Stalingrad.19 Now, however, he allowed Bubyonnov to quote him at an important meeting as saying, “Grossman’s novel is spittle in the face of the Russian people.”20 Fadeyev published an article full of what Grossman described as “mercilessly severe political accusations.” Voenizdat, the military publishing house that had been planning to publish For a Just Cause in book form, asked Grossman to return his advance—in view of what Grossman caustically referred to as “the book’s now unexpectedly discovered anti-Soviet essence.”21 Fortunately for Grossman, Stalin died on 5 March 1953. But for this, he too—like many other writers with links to the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee—might well have been executed.

  Denunciations of Grossman and his novel continued for another few weeks, but then the campaign petered out. In mid-June Voenizdat, with Fadeyev’s encouragement, repeated their original offer to publish For a Just Cause. Grossman had clearly known very well, from the beginning, how difficult it would be to publish the novel and he recorded all relevant official conversations, letters and meetings in a fifteen-page document titled “Diary of the Journey of the Novel For a Just Cause Through Publishing Houses.” The final, laconic entry in this diary reads “26 October 1954. The book is on sale on the Arbat, in the shop ‘The Military Book.’”

  7

  Almost every step of Grossman’s career—even after his death—has been marked by long delays and protracted battles. Editors, scholars, and literary critics seem to have responded to the painful and intractable nature of much of Grossman’s subject matter with an equal intractability of their own. A Russian edition of Everything Flows was first published in Frankfurt in 1970; a first English translation was published in 1972. Both attracted little attention—though Everything Flows is one of Grossman’s finest works, remarkable, above all, for its searing account of the Terror Famine in Ukraine in 1933 and its bold reinterpretation of several centuries of Russian history.

  Life and Fate is now well-known, but it too was slow to reach the reader. Even after the satirist Vladimir Voinovich had smuggled microfilms of the text to the West, it took almost five years to find a publisher for the first Russian-language edition—mainly, it seems, because of antisemitism among Russian émigrés. Grossman’s friends and admirers were bewildered and shocked. In 1961, after what he always referred to as the “arrest” of Life and Fate, Grossman said it was as if he had been “strangled in a dark corner.” Dismayed at being unable to find a publisher in the late 1970s, Voinovich said it was as if Grossman were being strangled a second time.

  In 1980, however, the Russian text of Life and Fate was finally published, by L’Age d’Homme in Lausanne. At a conference in 2003 in Turin, Vladimir Dimitrijevic, the editor who accepted the novel, said he had sensed at once that Grossman was portraying “a world in three dimensions” and that he was one of those rare writers whose aim was “not to prove something but to make people live something.” He could equally well have said this of Stalingrad.

  The microfilms of Life and Fate were made from a copy of the typescript that Grossman had entrusted to the poet Semyon Lipkin, and which Lipkin had kept in his dacha near Moscow. There is a curious parallel between the slow, faltering journey made by the text o
f Life and Fate, from a dacha near Moscow to a Swiss publishing house, and the journey made in Stalingrad by Anna Semyonovna’s letter, from the Berdichev ghetto to a dacha near Moscow. In each case there were delays and misunderstandings, and a strange lack of interest—at least initially—when the document first reached its destination. Even after the first publication of translations of Life and Fate in the mid-1980s, Grossman’s international reputation grew only slowly.

  Grossman is now seen as one of the greatest novelists of the last century—and Anna Semyonovna’s letter is probably the best-known chapter in his entire oeuvre. Nevertheless, there is still much about Grossman and his work that we do not know. Few of his works are available—even in Russian—in definitive texts. His first novel, Glyukauf, is generally considered dull and has never been republished. It is entirely possible, however, that Grossman’s original manuscript is more interesting than the published text. We know that the novel was heavily censored and that this appalled Grossman, yet no one—as far as I know—has seriously studied the manuscript.

  Even more surprisingly, there is still no definitive Russian text of Life and Fate. In 2013, to much fanfare, the Russian security services released the typescripts confiscated by the KGB in 1961. These type-scripts, too, have hardly been studied.

  I hope one day to revise my translation of Life and Fate in the light of a definitive Russian text. For now, though, it is a joy to be able to bring out a version of Stalingrad that is more complete than any existing edition, in Russian or in any other language. This version is by no means definitive, but it includes a great deal of important material, from the earliest and boldest of Grossman’s typescripts, which has never before been published.

  —ROBERT CHANDLER

  1. Jochen Hellbeck, Stalingrad: The City that Defeated the Third Reich, translated by Christopher Tauchen and Dominic Bonfiglio (New York: Public Affairs, 2015), 433–34.

  2. Alexandra Popoff, Vasily Grossman and the Soviet Century (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2019), see chapter 8.

  3. Vasily Grossman, A Writer at War: Vasily Grossman with the Red Army, 1941– 1945, edited and translated by Antony Beevor and Luba Vinogradova (London: Harvill Press, 2005), xiii.

  4. E. V. Korotkova-Grossman, Vospominaniya (Moscow: Novyi Khronogra, 2014), 4.

  5. Vasily Grossman, “Trud pisatelya,” Literaturnaya Gazeta (23 June 1945). Anna Berzer quotes most of this short article in Proshchanie, published together with Semyon Lipkin, Zhizn' i sud'ba Vasiliya Grossmana (Moscow: Kniga, 1990), 121.

  6. See Yitzhak Arad, The Holocaust in the Soviet Union (Lincoln/Jerusalem: University of Nebraska Press/Yad Vashem, 2009), 543. A complete Russian text of The Black Book was published in Jerusalem in 1980.

  7. Rachel Polonsky, Molotov’s Magic Lantern: Travels in Russian History (London: Faber & Faber, 2010), 146.

  8. Gary Paul Nabhan, available at https://tinyurl.com/y7rcpzao, accessed 13 October 2018.

  9. Life and Fate, Part II, chapter 53.

  10. There are photographs showing Lev Shtrum with Lev Landau. Shtrum’s daughter, Yelena Lvovna, a physicist herself, worked in the Leningrad institute run by Abram Ioffe.

  11. Yury Bit-Yunan and David Fel'dman, Vasilii Grossman v zerkale literaturnykh intrig (Moscow: Forum, 2016), 45.

  12. John and Carol Garrard, The Life and Fate of Vasily Grossman (Barnsley: Pen & Sword, 2012), 332.

  13. I, for my part, am deeply grateful to Tatiana Dettmer for sharing her recent research with me. A Russian version of her “The Physicist Lev Shtrum. Unknown Hero of a Famous Novel” has now been published by Radio Liberty and is available at: https://www.svoboda.org/a/29512819.html.

  14. Bit-Yunan and Fel'dman quote Gorky’s letter at length in Vasilii Grossman v zerkale literaturnykh intrig, 176–78.

  15. Bit-Yunan and Fel'dman, Vasilii Grossman v zerkale literaturnykh intrig, 186–202.

  16. See Grossman, A Writer at War, 114; “The Ruthless Truth of War” is used as the title of the chapter in which this discussion is cited.

  17. For this important understanding, which they develop at length in their three-volume biography of Grossman, I am indebted to Bit-Yunan and Fel'dman.

  18. Lipkin, Zhizn' i sud'ba Vasiliya Grossmana, 151.

  19. Bit-Yunan and Fel'dman, Vasily Grossman, 334

  20. “Dnevnik prokhozhdeniya rukopisi” (RGALI, 1710, opis' 2, ed.khr. 1).

  21. Ibid.

  STALINGRAD

  This translation is dedicated to Robert Chandler’s father, Colonel Roger Elphinstone Chandler (1921–1968)

  PART ONE

  1

  ON 29 APRIL 1942 Benito Mussolini’s train pulled into Salzburg station, now hung with both Italian and German flags.

  After the official welcome in the station building, Mussolini and his entourage were driven to Schloss Klessheim, former summer residence of the archbishops of Salzburg.

  There, in huge chilly halls newly refurnished with loot from France, Hitler and Mussolini were to hold another of their meetings—along with Ribbentrop; Marshal Keitel; General Jodl; Galeazzo Ciano; Marshal Cavallero; Dino Alfieri, the Italian ambassador in Berlin; and other senior German and Italian officers, diplomats and politicians.

  The two dictators, the self-styled masters of Europe, had met each time Hitler was preparing some new human catastrophe. Their tête-à-tête meetings, on the border between the Austrian and Italian Alps, heralded major political developments and the movements of vast motorized armies. The brief newspaper bulletins about these meetings filled every heart with foreboding.

  Fascism had enjoyed seven years of triumph, in Africa as well as in Europe, and both dictators would probably have found it difficult to list the many major and minor victories thanks to which they now ruled over vast expanses of territory and hundreds of millions of people. Without bloodshed, Hitler had reoccupied the Rhineland and then annexed Austria and the Sudetenland. In 1939 he had invaded Poland and routed the armies of Marshal Rydz-Śmigły. In 1940 he had defeated France, avenging Germany’s defeat in the First World War; he had also occupied Luxembourg, Belgium and the Netherlands, and crushed Denmark and Norway. He had expelled Britain from the European mainland, driving her troops out of both Norway and France. In the first months of 1941, Hitler had defeated both Greece and Yugoslavia. Measured against these extraordinary successes, Mussolini’s brigandry in Albania and Abyssinia looked petty and provincial.

  The fascist empires had further extended their power in Africa, seizing Algeria, Tunisia and ports on the Atlantic Ocean. To the east, they threatened Cairo and Alexandria.

  Japan, Hungary, Romania and Finland were all in military alliance with Germany and Italy. Powerful elements in the ruling circles of Spain, Portugal, Turkey and Bulgaria were also complicit with fascism.

  In the ten months since Germany had first invaded the Soviet Union, Hitler’s forces had seized not only Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania but also Belorussia, Moldavia and Ukraine. They were in control of all the provinces of Pskov, Smolensk, Oryol and Kursk, and large parts of the provinces of Leningrad, Kalinin, Tula and Voronezh.

  The military-industrial machine created by Hitler had absorbed vast riches: French steelworks, French engineering and car factories, the iron mines of Lorraine, Belgian coal mines and steel furnaces, Dutch precision mechanics and radio factories, Austrian metalworking companies, the Skoda arms manufacturer in Czechoslovakia, the Romanian oil industry, Norwegian iron mines, Spanish tungsten and mercury mines, and the textile factories of Łódź. And all over occupied Europe the long drive belt of the “new order” was spinning the wheels of hundreds of thousands of smaller businesses of every kind.

  In twenty countries, mills were grinding barley and wheat, and ploughs turning over fields, for the fascist occupiers. In three oceans and five seas fishermen were catching fish to supply fascist cities. Hydraulic presses were at work in plantations throughout Europe and northern Africa, pressing grape juice, olive oil, and flax and sunflower oil. A fine harvest was ripening
on the branches of millions of apple, plum, orange and lemon trees; fruit already ripe was being packed into wooden crates stamped with a black eagle. The Reich’s iron fingers were milking Danish, Dutch and Polish cattle, shearing sheep in Hungary and the Balkans.

  Dominion over vast areas of Europe and Africa appeared to be strengthening the power of fascism with every year, every day, every hour.

  With sickening servility, those who had betrayed freedom, goodness and truth were predicting the defeat of all Hitler’s opponents and proclaiming Hitlerism to be a truly new and higher order.

  The new order established by Hitler throughout conquered Europe had seen the modernization and renewal of all the methods and techniques of violence that had arisen in the course of thousands of years of the rule of the few over the many.

  This meeting in Salzburg heralded a major German offensive in southern Russia.

  2

  HITLER and Mussolini began their meeting in their usual way, displaying all the gold and enamel of their false teeth in broad, friendly smiles and saying how delighted they were that circumstances once again allowed them to meet.

  Mussolini at once thought that the past winter and the cruel defeat outside Moscow had left their mark on Hitler. There was more grey in his hair, and not just at his temples. The dark rings under his eyes had become more pronounced and his general complexion was pale and unhealthy; only his trench coat still looked fresh. All in all, the Führer looked grimmer and harsher than ever.