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<h1 class="reader-title">Vasily Grossman’s Stalingrad: A Soviet
masterpiece about World War II appears in English for the
first time</h1>
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<p>Vasily Grossman, <em>Stalingrad</em>. Translated by
Robert and Elizabeth Chandler, New York Review of Books,
2019</p>
<p>In 2019, Vasily Grossman’s novel, <em>Stalingrad </em>(in
Russian: <em>Za pravoe delo</em> or <em>For a Just
Cause</em>)<em>,</em> appeared for the first time in a
complete English translation, almost seven decades after
its first publication in 1952. The work is the prequel
to Grossman’s well-known novel <em>Life and Fate</em>
(1959)<em>.</em> The author, in fact, conceived of the
two as a unified whole. The publication of this
masterpiece is a cultural event of considerable
significance.</p>
<figure><figcaption>Stalingrad cover</figcaption></figure>
<p>The novel begins with a meeting between fascist
dictators Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini on April 29,
1942, in which they discuss the progress of the war.
Less than a year earlier, on June 22, 1941, the Nazis
had invaded the Soviet Union, launching the bloodiest
conflict in the history of mankind. By the end of the
war, in 1945, at least 27 million Soviet citizens,
including 1.5 million Soviet Jews, would be dead.
Despite the Stalinist degeneration of the Soviet Union
and the Great Terror of 1936-38, the Soviet masses rose
up to defend the conquests of the October Revolution
against the fascist invaders.</p>
<p>In a partial but significant manner, the spirit that
animated the Red Army during its early years, after it
was created by Leon Trotsky and the Bolsheviks to defend
the revolution, was revived. It is this same spirit that
permeates Grossman’s novel.</p>
<p>The plot of <em>Stalingrad</em> is too complex to be
recounted in full. Many of the protagonists, especially
the physicist Viktor Shtrum and the Shaposhnikov family,
will be familiar to readers of <em>Life and Fate</em>.
Grossman offers a panoramic view of Soviet society at
war. He portrays sections of the technical
intelligentsia; miners in Siberia working in war
production; children orphaned by the war; historical
figures such as Gen. Andrey Yeryomenko, but, above all,
Soviet civilians and soldiers, drawn from the working
class and peasantry in Stalingrad.</p>
<p>The last portion of the work is focused entirely on the
Nazi attack on Stalingrad, a vital industrial and
transportation center in southern Russia, and the Soviet
defense of the city through the first two weeks of
September 1942. It was the battle of Stalingrad (August
23, 1942 to February 2, 1943), on the western bank of
the Volga in the “heart of Russia,” that effectively
helped decide the outcome of the war and sealed the fate
of the Nazis’ Third Reich. And everyone at the time,
from Moscow to Berlin, London and Washington, understood
this.</p>
<p>The Red Army had been taken by surprise by the Nazi
invasion, largely due to the criminal Hitler-Stalin Pact
of 1939 and the beheading of the army’s leadership in
Stalin’s Great Terror. It had been forced to retreat
deeply into Soviet Russia, at the cost of millions of
lives, until the autumn of 1942. However, throughout
that year, the Soviet Union was able to mobilize immense
economic resources for the war effort, thanks in large
part to the planning principles in place, however
limited and distorted by the bureaucracy, and the
enormous sacrifices made by the Soviet population.</p>
<h4>The Battle of Stalingrad</h4>
<p>Though initially vastly outnumbered by the <em>Wehrmacht</em>
(the German armed forces), the Red Army was able to
defend Stalingrad and eventually go over to the
offensive. By early February 1943, the entire 6th Army
of General Friedrich Paulus had been destroyed, the
first major military defeat suffered by the Nazis in the
course of the war. As Leon Trotsky had predicted in
1934, “should the Russian Revolution … be forced to
direct its stream into the channel of war, it will
unleash a terrific and overwhelming force.”</p>
<figure>
<p><img
src="https://www.wsws.org/asset/2a5575c8-8a98-46a1-beb0-338c808b2459?rendition=image1280"></p>
<figcaption>A map of German advances in 1942</figcaption></figure>
<p>The tide in the war had been turned. The morale of the
population throughout the Soviet Union and in
Nazi-occupied Europe was boosted dramatically. The
battle also galvanized the anti-Nazi resistance in
Germany, including the “White Rose” group of Sophie and
Hans Scholl.</p>
<p>The sheer scale and brutality of the battle—the largest
of the Second World War and, in fact, in all of human
history—still almost defies comprehension. Well over one
million men were involved in the battle on both sides,
and the majority of them perished. On the Soviet side,
conservative estimates put the number of military dead
at 479,000, but it may be twice as high. The <em>Wehrmacht</em>
lost an estimated 295,000 men.</p>
<p>Grossman’s descriptions of the nightmarish bombardment
of the city, which set the entire city ablaze, leave a
profound impression. At least 40,000 people are believed
to have died within just three days. He describes at
length the desperate efforts by isolated Soviet troops
from the 308th Rifle Division to hold fragments of the
city, in the face of numbing and deafening shelling from
the <em>Wehrmacht</em>, until reinforcement comes. In
virtually every case, they do so at the cost of their
own lives. For good reason these hellish experiences
became deeply engrained in popular consciousness in the
former Soviet Union.</p>
<p>Scenes of horrifying violence are followed by scenes
that are humorous, poetic and tender. His depictions of
the many who knowingly went to their deaths, defending
the Soviet Union, are outstanding. Grossman has a keen
sense for the complexity of human psychology in the face
of these enormous historical convulsions and the
accompanying mass destruction.</p>
<p>In one scene, Lena Gnatyuk, a young Red Army nurse, in
some of the last moments of her life, is given an
American aid package.</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Lena removed the cord and began to unwrap the parcel.
The crinkly paper squeaked and rustled. There were
many different items inside, some very small, and she
squatted down to prevent anything falling out and
getting lost. There was a beautiful woolen blouse,
embroidered with a red, blue and green pattern; a
fluffy bathrobe with a hood; two pairs of lacy
trousers with matching shirts adorned with little
ribbons; three pairs of silk stockings; some tiny
lace-embroidered handkerchiefs; a white dress made
from fine lawn, also trimmed with lace; a jar of some
fragrant lotion; and a flask of perfume tied with a
broad ribbon.</p>
<p>Lena looked at the two commanders. There was a moment
of silence around the station, as if to prevent
anything from disturbing the grace and delicacy of her
expression. Her look said a great deal: not only that
she knew she would never become a mother but also that
she took a certain pride in her harsh fate. As she
stood there in the pit, in her soldier’s boots and
badly fitting uniform, about to refuse these exquisite
gifts, Lena Gnatyuk looked overwhelmingly feminine.
“What use is all of this?” she said. “I don’t want
it.” The two men felt troubled. They understood
something of the young woman’s feelings—her pride, her
understanding that she was doomed and her mistaken
belief that she looked awkward and ugly.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Within hours, all these people would be dead.</p>
<p>The scenes involving the German troops are also
important. Grossman gives a sharp and damning portrait
of a careerist <em>Wehrmacht</em> soldier, Stumpfe,
from the German petty bourgeoisie, who dearly loves his
own family but engages in violent assaults on and
plunder of the Soviet population. He denounces fellow
soldiers critical of Hitler to the unit’s Gestapo
representative and seeks to be “promoted” to work in one
of the “death factories” for the Jews of occupied
Poland, hoping this will give him more opportunity for
self-enrichment.</p>
<figure>
<p><img
src="https://www.wsws.org/asset/e9554030-214a-4bdf-abe6-390389004680?rendition=image1280"></p>
<figcaption>Fighting in Stalingrad’s industrial
district, October 1942. Photographer/ Georgy Samsonov</figcaption></figure>
<p>Schmidt, by contrast, is a former trade unionist, who
used to work with revolutionary socialist leader Karl
Liebknecht. Indifferent to the ridicule and humiliation
he is subjected to by Stumpfe and others, he is
disgusted by the war and the Nazi regime but does not
know how to connect with like-minded soldiers. Grossman
clearly rejected the Stalinist lie that the entire
German people had willingly followed Hitler (the theory
of “collective guilt”), a lie propagated widely
especially during the war in an effort to cover up for
the Stalinists’ own responsibility for the disaster of
Hitler’s coming to power in 1933.</p>
<p>Grossman’s presentation of his characters is perceptive
and, at times, scathing but never judgmental. Underlying
all of it is a profound and deeply felt sympathy for
their suffering and the enormous traumas that Soviet
society had gone through—not simply in the bloody war
but also in the Stalinist Great Terror of the 1930s.
Moreover, the writer understood that in the midst all of
this, people lived on, raised children, established,
maintained and broke off relationships, acting at times
in a petty and despicable or trivial, but often also in
a noble, manner. He never isolates the individual from
society and the historical process but rather shows the
profound, but complex and not always direct,
interconnection between the decisive social and
political events of the time and the personal lives of
individuals.</p>
<p>The characters of Krymov and Zhenya Shaposhnikova, his
young and beautiful former wife, are perhaps among the
most complex and important ones in this regard. Krymov
is a convinced Stalinist but also dedicated to the
revolution. A former official in the Communist
International, he has lost many of his friends and
comrades to the purges of 1936-38. Krymov himself only
barely survives, yet his faith in Stalin remains
unshaken. Zhenya leaves him during the terror, not out
of concern for her own fate or disappointment with her
husband’s declining career, but because she simply fell
out of love.</p>
<p>With <em>Stalingrad</em>—and <em>Life and Fate</em>—Grossman
no doubt wanted to produce a 20th century version of Lev
Tolstoy’s <em>War and Peace</em>. However, unlike
Tolstoy, in his monumental account of the Napoleonic
wars in the early 19th century, the Soviet author does
not take the nobility, or their contemporary
equivalents, or the generals as his protagonists. His
primary concern is with the body of the people, in all
its social, political and psychological contradictions,
its different layers and countless shades of character
and personality.</p>
<p>Grossman keenly understood that the masses of humanity
made history and that, while national elements played a
role, the ideals of the 1917 October Revolution above
all—social equality and freedom from oppression of all
kinds—motivated the heroic efforts of the Soviet masses
in resisting the Nazis. He no doubt thought of his work
as a tribute to their heroism and sacrifices. In the
traditions of the Russian socialist intelligentsia,
Grossman conceived of art as something relentlessly
honest and a means of contributing to the people and the
cause of social progress more broadly.</p>
<h4>Grossman’s battle with censorship</h4>
<p>He began writing the novel in 1943, in the midst of the
war, and completed it in 1949. His deep grasp of the war
was rooted in his own experiences. As a journalist for
the <em>Krasnaya Zvezda</em> (<em>Red Star</em>)<em>,</em>
an official military newspaper, he accompanied the Red
Army during many of the conflict’s most critical
battles. He witnessed the battle of Stalingrad from
September 1942 through January 1943 and the Soviet
liberation of Ukraine, parts of Poland and Germany. For
years, he spoke to soldiers in the trenches. He wrote
about their lives and experiences and what he called
“the ruthless truth of war” in articles that often only
appeared after heavy censorship. His well-known courage
at the front, his honesty and love of detail with which
he conveyed the experience of the Soviet people during
the war made him one of the most popular and respected
figures in the USSR, especially within the Red Army.</p>
<figure><figcaption>Vasily Grossman in Stalingrad in 1942</figcaption></figure>
<p>Grossman also authored some of the first accounts of
the Nazi genocide of European Jewry. He was born in
1905, the year of the first Russian revolution, in the
small Ukrainian <em>shtetl</em> Berdychiv. His mother
was murdered in a massacre by an SS Einsatzgruppe of the
town’s entire Jewish population of more than 30,000 in
the first months of World War II. Grossman’s essay on
Treblinka, one of six death camps in Nazi-occupied
Poland, later served as evidence in the Nuremberg
Trials. Together with Ilya Ehrenburg, he compiled <em>The
Black Book of Soviet Jewry</em> (1944), a
comprehensive documentation of the Holocaust in the
Soviet Union.</p>
<p>The Holocaust also features in <em>Stalingrad,</em>
above all, through the character of Viktor Shtrum, whose
mother, like Grossman’s, is murdered in a massacre in
Ukraine. In fact, the character of Shtrum was one of the
points of contention with the censors. In 1949, as
Grossman was finishing his novel, Stalin’s anti-Semitic
purges of sections of the intelligentsia and bureaucracy
were underway. The Holocaust had become a taboo topic
and would remain so for many years to come. Copies of
Ehrenburg and Grossman’s <em>Black Book</em> were
pulped, and the censors tried unsuccessfully to convince
the latter to remove Shtrum’s character from <em>Stalingrad</em>.</p>
<p>Other elements of the book also made it “dangerous,”
from the Stalinist point of view. The scene where a Red
Army soldier on the front mockingly reminds Krymov that
the latter had “proved” to him and others in 1932
“definitely” that the victory of fascism in Germany was
absolutely impossible “with statistics of every kind”
could not but have infuriated the censors. The repeated
references to the terror, too, placed the book at
obvious risk of censorship. Stalin is invoked as an
admirable figure only by convinced Stalinists and
otherwise is hardly mentioned at all.</p>
<p>“Bureaucrat” is a recurring and disparaging term used
by both civilians and soldiers in <em>Stalingrad</em>.
In one scene during the bombardment of the city, the
bureaucrat-officials running a hospital are said to
refrain, not to anyone’s surprise, from saving the
patients, while the entire staff risk their own lives
and run into the bombed and burning building. The
officials only return once the danger has passed, to
continue commanding their subordinates. Grossman
captures the anti-bureaucratic sentiments that were not
only widespread, but also relatively open during the
war. These sentiments, often expressed in the hope that
after dealing with Hitler, the Soviet people might do
away with Stalin, were one of the major reasons that the
bureaucratic caste engaged in another round of purges
after the war and murderously suppressed oppositional
youth groups in the early 1950s.</p>
<figure><figcaption>After returning to Stalingrad,
refugees sit on the ruins where their home once stood,
March 1943. Photographer/ N. Sitnikov</figcaption></figure>
<p>Other, seemingly secondary, depictions of the realities
of the war also touched on taboo subjects and themes:
the depictions of the chaotic mass evacuations from
burning Stalingrad, of massive defeats and retreats and
of the handful of bitterly anticommunist peasants who
eagerly await the Nazis’ occupation of their village.
All this—the plight of the civilian population and the
presentation of pro-Nazi sympathies and collaborators
within the Soviet population—were erased from the
history books by the Stalinists. The portrayal of army
commanders in a less than heroic manner, which includes
their petty jealousies and rivalries, likewise caused
the ire of censors and sections of the military
leadership that became involved in the discussions about
the book. Other dictated changes and excised passages
were the result of the narrow-minded, anti-Marxist
conceptions of “socialist realism.”</p>
<p>This battle with government and military censors took
several years. The novel was ultimately published in
1952 in the journal <em>Novy Mir.</em> However, this
was not the version preferred by Grossman. In fact,
there are no less than 11 variations of this work. Most
publications have so far relied on the 1956 variant.
This version, assembled by the principal translator
Robert Chandler in collaboration with Yury Bit-Yunan on
the basis of three editions and Grossman’s archives, is
the most complete edition in any language. The editors
and translators have explained their decisions in
careful notes, which allow the reader to trace the
history of the manuscripts. They are to be commended for
their work.</p>
<p><a
href="https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2008/10/defe-o21.html">Speaking
in Copenhagen</a> in 1932, Leon Trotsky noted, “The
most profound meaning of the Revolution, but the hardest
to submit to immediate measurement, consists in the fact
that it forms and tempers the character of the people.”
More than perhaps any other Soviet writer, Grossman
sensed precisely that—the impact of the October
Revolution on the thoughts, feelings and aspirations of
the Soviet people—and he was able to capture it in his
writing, both as a journalist and a novelist. While his
<em>Life and Fate</em> indicates growing disillusionment
and pessimism, he remained a committed socialist until
the end of his life. In a moving <a
href="https://youtu.be/J2z3aline2g" target="_blank"
rel="noopener">Russian documentary</a>, his son
recalled how every year on Victory Day, May 9, Grossman
would put on his Red Army uniform and sing war songs. He
was proud to be considered a writer of the war and never
wavered in his conviction that the Red Army’s struggle
against fascism was a historic contribution to the
progressive development of humanity.</p>
<p>For Grossman, who depended as an artist so strongly on
the interaction with his audience, it was no doubt a
great tragedy that he never saw either this work or <em>Life
and Fate</em> appear in his lifetime in the versions
that he wanted. (<em>Life and Fate</em> was not
published at all until decades after his death.) In
1991, the Stalinist bureaucracy dissolved the Soviet
Union and restored capitalism, carrying out what the
Nazis had failed to accomplish in World War II.</p>
<p>Today, three decades later, the English translation of
<em>Stalingrad</em> will not only finally introduce a
broad readership to a masterpiece of world literature.
It will also help new generations, and especially young
people, to understand the enormous impact of the October
Revolution and to reconnect with this critical history.</p>
<p><em>Recommended further reading:</em></p>
<p>Antony Beevor and Luba Vinogradova (editors): <em>A
Writer at War. Vasily Grossman with the Red Army,</em>
1941-1945, Pimlico 2006.</p>
<p>Jochen Hellbeck, <em>Stalingrad. The City that
Defeated the Third Reich</em>, Public Affairs 2015.</p>
<p>David North, Introduction to Leon Trotsky’s <a
href="https://www.wsws.org/en/special/library/revolution-betrayed/introduction-david-north.html">
<em>The Revolution Betrayed</em> </a></p>
<p>David North, <em>The Russian Revolution and the
Unfinished Twentieth Century,</em> Mehring Books 2014.
<a
href="https://www.wsws.org/en/special/library/russian-revolution-unfinished-twentieth-century/00.html">https://www.wsws.org/en/special/library/russian-revolution-unfinished-twentieth-century/00.html</a></p>
<p>John G. Wright, <a
href="https://www.marxists.org/history/etol/writers/wright/1941/08/su-war.htm"
target="_blank" rel="noopener"> <em>The Soviet Union
at War</em> </a> (1941).</p>
<p>WSWS Topic page on the <a
href="https://www.wsws.org/en/topics/_beta/1917-russian-revolution">1917
Russian Revolution</a></p>
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