Life and Fate

In an interview on 20th-Century Russia

Your first choice is about one of Stalin’s henchmen – Khrushchev: The Man and his Era by William Taubman.

Khrushchev started off a miner’s son and had one of those rocket rides in the social stratosphere that could happen once Stalin had got rid of all the old Bolsheviks and needed a completely new political class. He went being from being a semi-literate party member out in the country to the deputy mayor of Moscow in about five years, and he finally ended up as one of Stalin’s inner circle. He worked closely with Stalin for nearly 20 years and approved thousands of arrests and executions and then went on to lead Russia during the Cold War.

For me this is a magisterial biography and strangely funny. Khrushchev was a funny guy – it is one of the things about him which was appealing and then, when you think about it, more worrying still. Of all the Soviet leadership Khrushchev is the one who is recognisable as a human being. He had that rare gift among politicians of remaining recognisable, thinking on his feet and cracking jokes. He had an almost Clintonesque gift of the gab, which really wasn’t a crucial skill among high-level Stalinists. In some ways I would guess that he survived at the top of Stalin’s Russia in spite of it.

He was assumed to be too nice and too much of a peasant to be threatening, as a result of which he outwitted all of his contemporaries. One of the things I like about this biography is that as well as being the best record of Khrushchev, with the most use made of the archival stuff that has become available in the last 20 years, it is also a continuous lively attempt to think through the man, to keep fitting the new stuff you find into a picture that makes sense of him.

There is a wonderful passage about Khrushchev succeeding as Stalin’s henchman which talks about just how often he records what nice guys the other members of the group are, and not just to butter them up but in conversations as well. Taubman makes the point that some of these people were the worse mass murderers of the 20th century. And Taubman concludes that what he was doing is reflecting a genuine part of his personality on to them. Compared to his colleagues it was important for him to seem a ‘nice guy’ despite everything he was doing.

Khrushchev was a true monster and he also had an undestroyed conscience, which was a very awkward combination, and once he had fought his way ruthlessly to the top and succeeded Stalin he tried his best to undo the worst excesses of Stalinism and to justify the suffering of the past by a genuine effort to deliver everything that the revolution had promised. He was not an immensely clever or subtle man but he really did believe that the land of milk and honey was coming in the Soviet Union.

In an interview on the European Civil War, 1914-1945

That’s an appropiate point to bring in your final choice for us, Vasily Grossman’s Life and Fate.

This is a wonderful, rich, melancholic, hopeful book. It’s a bit like Like A Tear in the Ocean: it embeds a piece of history in a well-crafted work of fiction and its characters represent the cornerstones of the period. It does that phenomenally well. He highlights the coexistence of conflicting emotions and choices within the same personalities. The conflict happens because you need to survive.

Viktor Shtrum is a good example of this: he spends the majority of the book as a victim of his beliefs. Then comes this magnificent phone call from Stalin, which knocks you for six when you read it. Very quickly thereafter he denounces two innocent scientists because it would be crazy to risk again his new position as favourite scientist to the great leader.  

It also has the most moving account you’ll ever read of the gas chambers in Poland. Grossman drew on his pathbreaking article about Treblinka. Then, on the next page, he asks what makes life worth living. The book’s conclusion? In miniature versions of the world – in the relationship between two people, for example – the meaning of life is established.

These books have an overarching historical bleakness, ending up with the Candide thing of cultivating your own garden or a small child. Is this how you think about the period?

Yes. I think any large-scale plan to reorganise society is impossible. You just start with what you can reorganise. This is usually restricted to a relatively small number of people.

But then you might end up being a libertarian or some kind of mad, ultra-right-winger.

It is conservative in a sense. Although in the way Michael Oakeshott described it. He said: “To be conservative is to prefer the familiar to the unknown, the tried to the untried, fact to mystery, the actual to the possible, the limited to the unbounded, the near to the distant, the sufficient to the superabundant, the convenient to the perfect, present laughter to utopian bliss.”

That's a useful summary of what I believe is the right approach to organising society. And it's the approach in books like Life and Fate and Like a Tear in the Ocean. I think it is impossible to reconcile, the desire to improve everyone's life - and the emphasis here must be on everyone's for it is possible to do so for some people or groups of people - and the maintenance of personal liberty. Ultimately the overarching ambition can't succeed other than through the gradual progress of history.

In an interview on War

Quite a few people have chosen the Vasily Grossman book.

Yes, Life and Fate. I wanted a book about the Second World War and where that war was really fought, apart from in the Atlantic, was on the Eastern Front between the German and Russian armies. Vasily Grossman was himself involved in the battle of Stalingrad, but he was also a frontline spectator of the rest of the war. He set out to write the equivalent of Tolstoy’s War and Peace. Well, he didn’t quite succeed in doing that, but it is nonetheless an amazing and terrifying account, not simply of the battles, but of the armies fighting them. Not simply the armies, but the regimes. Of course, behind the German army was the Nazi regime, the Holocaust, not just of the Jews but the massacres taking place as the German army advanced, committing mass murder of the civil populations they overran. Not to get rid of the partisans but because they were eliminating the Jews, eliminating Ukrainians and eliminating anyone who was going to get in the way of their conquering these countries. They were joined in that by other nationalities who did their dirty work for them as well. So there is the combination of the nightmare of the mass murders, mass shootings and the nightmare of the front line.

On the other side are the Russians, fighting desperately to protect their own country, commanded by a fanatical regime, concerned not simply with defeating the Germans but with preserving a totalitarian regime and eliminating anybody who they think presents a threat to them. So, in the Russian army, a general who is fighting skilfully, courageously, bravely against appalling odds, suddenly finds himself ripped out of the front line because he is regarded as being politically unreliable and either shot or sent to a prison camp. Behind them all are these terrible camps without which the Soviet regime could never have survived. So there is total war at its most terrifying in a way which has very seldom been seen in human history before. A nightmare world in which force, violence and terror permeates not only the front lines but the very societies of the people fighting. It’s a nightmare book and a nightmare experience. Although it’s a damn great thick book and not an easy read, anybody who wants to understand what war at its most extreme can be like has got to read it.