Roadside Picnic

In an interview on 20th-Century Russia

Your next choice is Life and Fate by Vasily Grossman.

Grossman was a Ukrainian Jew and a war correspondent for the Soviet military paper, the Red Star. He seemed to be a good Stalinist but while he was writing very conventional socialist realist novels, he was storing up in his head ways of describing Russia that didn’t at all fit the compulsory official mould. And in the 1950s he secretly wrote this book Life and Fate which, most strangely, is a sequel to one of his official novels, For a Just Cause. It has got the same characters in it and continues the story. But it’s as though suddenly a switch has been thrown – it is alive and committed to truth telling. It is about the secret similarities between Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia, and about the strange interval of freedom during the Second World War in which the Soviet regime had to trust its people because it couldn’t compel their loyalty, and how that narrow window of freedom closed again.

It is also just a wonderful epic portrayal of the Battle of Stalingrad. It was used by Antony Beevor in his Stalingrad book and Beevor is partly responsible for Grossman’s rising profile in the West. It is a fabulous piece of military re-creation. It is a wonderful piece of writing about the Holocaust and although it is still quite a creaky conventional piece of Soviet realist writing it’s animated by the most powerful possible truth-telling urge, and once it followed its Jewish characters all the way to the gas chambers you are put where Vasily Grossman wanted you to be, which is, despite everything, immeasurably grateful to the Red Army for destroying that particular evil, even at the cost of cementing the other one. I started weeping uncontrollably on the tube while I was reading those bits of Life and Fate, and that’s a good thing.