Vasily Grossman and the Soviet Century

February 18, 2019
Popoff (Sophia Tolstoy), a formerly Moscow-based journalist, offers a fine biography of Soviet dissident writer Vasily Grossman. Born into a Ukrainian-Jewish family in 1905 and initially trained as an engineer, Grossman worked as a journalist while travelling with the Soviet army during WWII. He witnessed not only the Battle of Stalingrad, but the liberation of the Treblinka death camp, the ruins of Warsaw, and the fall of Berlin. He also lost his mother to the Holocaust. Much of this was recorded in his last, great novel, Life and Fate, modeled on Tolstoy’s War and Peace. But unlike Boris Pasternak’s contemporaneous and similarly antitotalitarian Dr. Zhivago, Grossman’s 1960 novel was successfully kept from readers by Soviet authorities. Grossman’s particular offense had been to equate fascism to Stalinism, likening the two ideologies to “gazing into a mirror.” The novel was not published until 1980 in the West, denying Grossman—who died of stomach cancer in 1964—his chance to lastingly affect the public consciousness. Nevertheless, Popoff argues, Grossman, with his recurring phrase “there is nothing more precious than human life,” provided a valuable, deeply humane perspective on a violent era. This well-researched portrait should introduce many new readers to a significant writer whose stand against totalitarian ideology, as Popoff’s epilogue on Putin’s veneration of Stalin demonstrates, has taken on new relevance and urgency today.