A writer at war: Vasily Grossman with the Red Army, 1941-45 Edited by Antony Beevor and Luba Vinogradova, Harvill, ? 20

Some critics rate Grossman?s novel, Life and Fate, more highly than Boris Pasternak?s Doctor Zhivago. The raw material for this book came from the notebook Grossman wrote during the Great Patriotic War, which saw him accompany the Red Army as a special correspondent of Red Star. Translated into English for the first time, Grossman?s notes reveal the terrible conditions on the eastern front.

Grossman never followed the ?party line?. While the Stalinist regime focussed on the Stakhnovite philosophy of emphasizing the collective role of soldiers, Grossman was interested in the thoughts and actions of particular Soviet soldiers. He was often pulled up by the party hacks for ?unnecessarily? emphasizing individualism. And yet soldiers? emotions, sufferings and passion continued to interest Grossman ? he noted the incident of a Red soldier offering water to a wounded German soldier. Grossman also wrote about the Red Army?s advance into Germany, mass rapes of both German and Russian women by the Red soldiers. What was worse was the Soviet authorities? negligence regarding these issues. Gender equality and honour, even for Russian women, were not high in the Stalinist agenda.

Grossman was interested in the humanity of all the combatants. Hence he had no qualms about portraying the experiences of the Soviet state?s mortal enemy ? the Germans. In 1943, as the Wehrmacht was withdrawing, Grossman interviewed an Ukranian woman in whose house German soldiers used to stay. The woman told him that one German was found crying when he received a letter from home containing information that his wife and children had been killed by Allied bombing. Such representations of the German soldiers as human did not sit pretty with the official propaganda about German troops.

The divergence of opinion widened to a point of no return over the Jewish question. In late 1944, as the Red Army advanced into Poland, the horrors of Hitler?s pogrom became clear to Moscow. When the Red Army reached the death camps of Treblinka and Sobibor, Grossman was present. Grossman was a Ukranian Jew. Naturally, he sympathized with the sufferings the Jews had undergone. But the party line was different. Stalin, like Hitler, believed that Jews could never be absorbed totally within the national mainstream of the country they inhabited. Grossman?s articles which narrated the chilling horror of theHolocaust were not accepted in the principal Soviet newspapers. Ironically, Grossman?s account of Treblinka was used in the Nuremberg trials.

Not only Jewish but all sorts of sub-nationalism were anathema to Stalin. When Grossman collected evidence about the Ukranian collaboration with the Nazis during 1942 in eliminating the Jews and fighting between Ukranian partisans and the advancing Red Army in 1944, Moscow sidelined him. When the war ended, Grossman had become a persona non grata with the Soviet regime. In 1960, he was told that Life and Fate would not be published in the next 200 years. He died broken hearted and poor in 1964.

Many books have been written about the Red Army and wartime Russia which portray the Soviet civilians and soldiers as automatons motivated by communism. Grossman shows the clashes and contradictions in ordinary Russians in a time of trouble.