“You have been insulted—and your ideals desecrated,” the National Socialists said to the German intelligentsia. “Your enemies write contemptuously about Germany, examining with cold skepticism the history of a great nation. Your thought has been castrated, your pride crucified. There is no one who needs your talents and knowledge. You, the salt of the earth, are doomed to become waiters and taxi drivers. Can you not see the cold eyes looking out of the fog that now surrounds Germany? Can you not see the cold merciless eyes of the world’s Jews—of the Jew who is the eternal, hate-filled enemy of the national hearth; the Jew who is without country; the Jew who hates and despises your poor nation; the Jew who now excitedly awaits the triumph of his age-old dream of dominion? Let us fight shoulder to shoulder for our national honor, for a dignity that has been vilified. Let us cleanse the world, let us cauterize it of Jewry.”
Grossman’s original text was refused by Red Star and remained unpublished until 1988. The first two sections were published, in Yiddish translation, in consecutive issues of Eynikayt (the journal of the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee, an organization established in 1942 to gather international political and material support for the fight against Nazi Germany), but the last two sections never appeared—and no explanation was given for this. An article titled “The Ukraine” was published in the monthly journal Znamya, but this is an entirely separate article and it contains only a single— albeit powerfully worded—mention of the massacre at Babi Yar. These details are significant. Grossman was one of the first journalists to write about what is now being called the “Shoah by bullets,” the massacres of Jews in the western Soviet Union; he was also one of the first journalists to write about the death camps in Poland, the “Shoah by gas.” His moral and imaginative courage appears still more remarkable if we bear in mind that he was doing this at a time when the Soviet authorities were moving toward a policy of what would now be called Holocaust denial. There was not yet an outright ban on all mention of the mass murders of Jews, but there was no doubt as to what was the authorities’ preferred line: that all nationalities had suffered equally under Hitler. A frequently used slogan—all the more effective, no doubt, because of its apparent nobility—was “Do not divide the dead!”
From 1943 to 1946, along with Ilya Ehrenburg, Grossman worked for the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee on The Black Book, a documentary account of the massacres of Jews on both Soviet and Polish soil. As well as editing the testimonies of others, Grossman also intended to include two articles he had written himself. “The Murder of the Jews in Berdichev” is a soberly written account of life in the Berdichev ghetto and the massacre of September 15, 1941, at an airfield just outside the town; Grossman does not mention that one of the twelve thousand victims was his mother. Dated November 4, 1944, this too remained unpublished until long after Grossman’s death. The other article, “The Hell of Treblinka,” though probably refused by Red Star, was published in Znamya in November 1944; it was republished in 1945, in the form of a very small hardback book. It seems to have been impossible, at this date, to publish a substantial article about the extermination of Jews in the Soviet Union, but it was evidently at least a little easier to write about what had happened in Poland.
The Black Book was ready for production in 1946; all that was needed was for the authorities to confirm their final approval. No such confirmation was forthcoming. On February 3, 1947, Georgy Aleksandrov, the head of the Agitprop Department of the Central Committee, wrote that “the book presents a distorted picture of the real nature of Fascism [since the impression it gave was that] the Germans fought against the Soviets only in order to annihilate the Jews.” A final decision was announced on August 20, 1947: The Black Book was not to be published. And in 1948, after yet another year had passed, the plates were destroyed. Now that the war had been won, now that there was no longer any need to solicit international support against Hitler, no amount of compromises by the editors could render The Black Book acceptable. Admitting that Jews constituted the overwhelming majority of the dead would have entailed admitting that members of other Soviet nationalities had been accomplices in the genocide; in any case, Stalin appears to have understood that anti-Semitism was a force that he could exploit in order to unite the majority of the population behind his regime.
Grossman had devoted himself to The Black Book for much of the preceding four years, and in late spring 1945 he had taken over from Ilya Ehrenburg as head of the editorial board. What he must have felt when The Black Book was finally aborted is hard to imagine.
***
In 1943, Grossman had begun work not only on The Black Book but also on the first of his two epic novels centered on the battle of Stalingrad. Six years later, in August 1949, Grossman submitted this novel, then titled Stalingrad but soon to be retitled For a Just Cause, to the journal Novy mir. In what seems strangely like a literary reenactment of the battle, Grossman appears to have had to fight with his editors over every chapter, if not every paragraph, of his novel.
The battle lines are laid out in an exchange in December 1948 between Grossman and Boris Agapov, one of the members of the editorial board:
Agapov: “I want to render the novel safe, to make it impossible for anyone to criticize it.”
Grossman: “Boris Nikolaevich, I don’t want to render my novel safe.”
Even though Konstantin Simonov (chief editor of Novy mir until February 1950), Aleksandr Tvardovsky (chief editor of Novy mir from February 1950), and Aleksandr Fadeyev (general secretary of the Writers Union for most of the period from 1937 until 1954) seem genuinely to have admired For a Just Cause, its publication was repeatedly postponed. The Russian State Archives now contain no less than twelve different typed versions. The first six are Grossman’s own early versions; the last six were produced, between 1949 and 1952, in response to editorial “suggestions.” These suggestions range from the most trivial to the most sweeping; one of the more extraordinary was that Grossman should remove from the novel the central figure of Viktor Shtrum—because he was Jewish. At one point Tvardovsky suggested that Grossman should make Shtrum the head of a military commissariat rather than an important physicist; in reply, Grossman asked what post he should give Einstein. On another occasion Grossman was asked to remove all the “civilian” chapters; the editors appear to have thought that a documentary, or near-documentary, account of the fighting would be “safer” than a work of fiction. The novel was set in type three times, but on each occasion the decision to publish was countermanded and the type broken up—although it seems that, at least on two of these occasions, a very few copies were, in fact, printed. The April 30, 1951, entry in Grossman’s “Diary of the Journey of the Novel For a Just Cause through Publishing Houses” reads, “Thanks to the splendid, comradely attitude of the technical editors and printing-press workers, the new typesetting was carried out with fabulous speed. I now have in my hands a new copy: second edition; print run—6 copies.”
The reason for the anxiety shown by Grossman’s editors is that the Soviet victory at Stalingrad had acquired the status of a sacred myth—a myth that legitimized Stalin’s rule. With regard to a matter of such importance, there could be no room for even the slightest political error. Tvardovsky and Fadeyev found it necessary, even when they themselves were satisfied with the novel, to ask for approval from a variety of different bodies: the Writers Union; the Historical Section of the General Staff; the Institute of Marx, Engels, and Lenin; the Central Committee of the Communist Party. They were afraid of offending Nikita Khrushchev, who is portrayed in the novel in his role as a senior political commissar at Stalingrad, and they were, no doubt, still more concerned about Stalin’s reaction; they could not have forgotten that Grossman had twice been nominated for a Stalin Prize—for his novel about the Revolution, Stepan Kolchugin, in 1941, and for The People Immortal, his novel about the first year of the war, in 1943—and that his candidacy had been vetoed both times, almost certainly at the instigation of Stalin himself. Grossman evidently unde
rstood the need for Stalin’s explicit approval, and in December 1950 he sent him a letter which ends, “The number of pages of reviews, stenograms, conclusions, and responses is already approaching the number of pages taken up by the novel itself, and although all are in favor of publication, there has not yet been a final decision. I passionately ask you to help me by deciding the fate of the book I consider more important than anything else I have written.”
Stalin, it seems, did not reply. Nor did Molotov, to whom Grossman wrote in October 1951. Nevertheless, after a last flurry of new suggestions for the title, the novel was finally published in 1952, in the July through October issues of Novy mir. In a letter to Fadeyev, Grossman wrote, “Dear Aleksandr Aleksandrovich [...] Even after being published and republished for so many years, I felt more deeply and intensely moved, on seeing the July issue of the journal, than when I saw my very first story [‘In the Town of Berdichev’] in Literaturnaya gazeta.”
Initial reviews were enthusiastic and on October 13 the Prose Section of the Union of Soviet Writers nominated the novel for a Stalin Prize. On January 13, 1953, however, an article appeared in Pravda titled “Vicious Spies and Killers Passing Themselves off as Doctors and Professors.” A group of the country’s most eminent doctors—all of them Jewish—had allegedly been plotting to poison Stalin and other members of the political and military leadership. These accusations were intended to serve as a prelude to a vast purge of Soviet Jews.
A month after this, on February 13, Mikhail Bubyonnov, who in 1948 had won a State Prize for The White Birch—a novel, like Grossman’s The People Immortal, about the first year of the war—published a denunciatory review of For a Just Cause. A new campaign against Grossman quickly gathered momentum. Major newspapers printed articles with such titles as “A Novel That Distorts the Image of Soviet People,” “On a False Path,” and “In a Distorting Mirror.” In response, Tvardovsky and the editorial board of Novy mir duly acknowledged that publication of the novel had been a grave mistake. What seems to have hurt Grossman most was being betrayed by Tvardovsky; Tvardovsky was a true writer, not merely a literary functionary, and he probably genuinely liked and admired Grossman. When Grossman called in at Novy mir and—it would seem—spoke his mind, Tvardovsky retorted, “What, do you think I should have returned my Party membership card?” “Yes, I do,” said Grossman. Still more angrily, Tvardovsky said, “I know where you’re going now. Go on then, get going. There’s obviously a lot you haven’t understood yet. It’ll be explained to you there.”
Earlier that day Grossman had received a telephone call asking him to go to the head office of Pravda; he had called in at Novy mir on his way there. Grossman probably did not know the exact reason for his summons to Pravda; he had been told only that it was “in connection with the fate of the Jewish people.” Tvardovsky, however, evidently knew that Grossman was among the Jewish writers and journalists who were being asked to sign a letter calling for the execution of the “Killer Doctors.”
Not long before this, Grossman had stood firm when Fadeyev begged him to renounce his novel and make a show of public repentance. Uncharacteristically, however, Grossman agreed to sign the letter about the “Killer Doctors.” He was, no doubt, feeling lost and confused after quarreling with Tvardovsky. He may have thought—reasonably enough—that the doctors were certain to be executed anyway and that the letter was worth signing because it affirmed that the Jewish people as a whole was innocent. Whatever his reasons, Grossman at once regretted what he had done. He drank vodka on the street and, by the time he got back home, he was feeling badly sick. This act of betrayal—as he himself soon saw it—haunted Grossman for the rest of his life; a passage in Life and Fate based on this incident ends with Viktor Shtrum (who has just signed a similar letter) praying to his dead mother to help him never to show such weakness again.
Rather than being corroded by guilt, Grossman seems to have been able to find a way to draw strength from it. Most important of all, he was able to put his sense of guilt to creative use. Few writers have written more subtly about so many forms of personal and political betrayal, and it is possible that no one has articulated more clearly how hard it is for an individual to withstand the pressure of a totalitarian State. Several years later, in Life and Fate, Grossman was to write,
But an invisible force was crushing him. He could feel its weight, its hypnotic power; it was forcing him to think as it wanted, to write as it dictated. This force was inside him; it could dissolve his will and cause his heart to stop beating [...] Only people who have never felt such a force themselves can be surprised that others submit to it. Those who have felt it, on the other hand, feel astonished that a man can rebel against it even for a moment—with one sudden word of anger, one timid gesture of protest.
At the time, however, Grossman’s act of betrayal did nothing to ease his position. The campaign against him continued to intensify. At a meeting of the Writers Union, Bubyonnov quoted Mikhail Sholokhov: “Grossman’s novel is spittle in the face of the Russian people.” Fadeyev published an article full of what Grossman described in his “Diary” as “mercilessly severe political accusations.” Voenizdat, the military publishing house that had agreed to publish For a Just Cause in book form, asked Grossman to return his advance—in view of what Grossman caustically referred to as “the now unexpectedly discovered anti-Soviet essence of the book.”
All this happened in less than six weeks. The viciousness of the campaign, and its suddenness, is remarkable even by Soviet standards. David Fel'dman—a researcher into Soviet literary politics—has provided a striking explanation. Grossman was a central figure in what were probably the two most important postwar Soviet ideological projects. One was the creation of an internal enemy; now that the war was over, Stalin needed a new enemy in order to justify his continued dictatorship. The other was the creation of a “Red” Leo Tolstoy. The choice of internal enemy was simple enough— it could only be the Jews. The choice of a Soviet Tolstoy, however, was more complicated. There had always been rivalry between the Writers Union and the Agitprop Department (the Department of Agitation and Propaganda) of the Communist Party’s Central Committee. In this instance the Agitprop Department was backing Bubyonnov, while Fadeyev, Tvardovsky, and the Writers Union were backing Grossman, who was by far the greater writer. The two projects, inevitably, collided. Fadeyev and Tvardovsky had, for all their political acumen, underestimated how fiercely the anti-Jewish campaign would intensify. They began publishing For a Just Cause during the very month—July 1952—when most of the leading members of the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee were undergoing secret trial.
During the war, Grossman was sometimes called “Lucky Grossman” because of the number of times he narrowly escaped death. On one occasion a grenade landed between his feet—and failed to explode. What happened in February and March 1953 was of the same order; Grossman was fortunate that Stalin died on March 5, 1953.
Denunciations of Grossman and his novel continued for another few weeks, but by April the campaign had petered out, and in mid-June Grossman received a letter from Voenizdat, repeating their original offer to publish For a Just Cause. The final, laconic entry in Grossman’s “Diary” reads, “26 October, 1954. The book is on sale on the Arbat, in the shop the Military Book.”
***
The period covered by this section begins with Grossman, after the Nazi invasion, feeling a renewed commitment to the Soviet cause, and ends with him, in the early 1950s, breaking with this cause irrevocably. The first of the stories, “The Old Man,” is based on accounts of the German occupation he had heard from Russian villagers. No less vivid for being entirely Soviet in both matter and manner, it was published in Red Star in February 1942.
The second and much longer story, “The Old Teacher,” is set in an unnamed town that seems like a smaller Berdichev. It represents Grossman’s first attempt to address the fate of his mother. Soviet troops had not yet liberated the western Ukraine, but Grossman had evidently already learned a
great deal about the massacres the Einsatzgruppen had carried out there. Published in the September and October 1943 issues of Znamya, “The Old Teacher” is among the first works of fiction about the Shoah in any language.
The story’s main character is male but, like Grossman’s mother, Yekaterina Savelievna, he is a retired schoolteacher. The final scene, during which a small child shows great kindness to this teacher just before they are both shot, is one of several scenes in Grossman’s work that show a Jewish parent—or parent figure—and a child affirming their love during the last minutes of their lives. In a memorable chapter from Life and Fate, Sofya Levinton, an unmarried doctor, befriends a child on the way to the gas chamber and feels that she has, at last, become a mother. In “The Old Teacher,” however, it is the bachelor teacher who feels like an abandoned child and the little girl who unexpectedly takes upon herself the role of mother.
The next piece in this section, “The Hell of Treblinka”—one of the first publications in any language about a Nazi death camp—was quickly translated into a number of European languages. Grossman presents a clear overall picture of the camp’s organizational structure, and he writes with insight about the satanically astute understanding of human psychology that made it possible for so few SS guards to murder such a vast number of people. There are, however, both major errors and minor inaccuracies, and there is no doubt that Grossman would have corrected these had he been granted the opportunity. We have therefore provided both detailed notes and a separate appendix.