A Soviet edition of The Black Book had been ready for production in 1946, but in February 1947 Georgy Alexandrov, the head of the Agitprop Section of the Communist Party’s Central Committee, declared 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 not to publish The Black Book was announced in August 1947, and in 1948 the plates were destroyed.6 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 those shot at Babi Yar and other Nazi execution sites might have led people to realize that members of other Soviet nationalities had been accomplices in the genocide. In any case, Stalin had no wish to emphasize Jewish suffering; antisemitism was a force that he could exploit in order to bolster support for his regime.
In the late spring of 1945 Grossman had taken over from Ehrenburg as head of the editorial board of The Black Book. Grossman’s mother had been shot at Berdichev and he himself had written the first published account of Treblinka. What he must have felt when The Black Book was aborted is hard to imagine. That he simply continued doggedly working on Stalingrad—his other great postwar project—testifies to an extraordinary strength of character.
3
It should come as no surprise that Stalingrad—written during the increasingly repressive and antisemitic last years of the Stalin regime—is haunted by the presence of what cannot be talked about. During a meeting at Viktor Shtrum’s institute, his colleague Maximov talks about his recent visit to German-occupied Czechoslovakia; he is appalled by what he has seen of the reality of fascism. The Nazi– Soviet non-aggression pact is still in force, so the institute director and another colleague try to silence him. In the early typescripts of Stalingrad, Viktor then encourages Maximov to write an article about fascism; Viktor hopes, audaciously, to publish it in the institute’s bulletin. Maximov writes no fewer than eighty pages and brings them round to Viktor’s dacha. But Hitler invaded the Soviet Union only a week later, and neither Viktor nor Grossman’s readers ever get to see so much as a word of this article. Viktor and Maximov do not even manage to talk about fascism together, even though both desperately want to.
A still more important document we never read is the last letter Viktor Shtrum receives from his mother, Anna Semyonovna. This is as powerful a presence in Stalingrad as in Life and Fate. We do not—in Stalingrad—get to read Anna’s words, but we read about her letter again and again. Grossman describes each stage of the letter’s journey from the Berdichev ghetto to Viktor’s dacha. Altogether, the letter is passed from hand to hand seven times. There are moments of black humour along the way. At one point the Old Bolshevik Mostovskoy takes the letter to the Stalingrad apartment of Viktor’s mother-in-law, Alexandra Vladimirovna. When he hands it to Tamara, the young friend of the family who opens the door to him, she responds, “Heavens, what filthy paper—anyone would think it’s been lying in a cellar for the last two years.” And she promptly wraps it “in a sheet of the thick pink paper people use to make decorations for Christmas trees.”
Tamara then gives the package to Colonel Novikov, who is about to fly to Moscow. Novikov goes to Viktor’s apartment, where he happens to interrupt a romantic tête-à-tête between Viktor and a pretty young neighbour by the name of Nina. Viktor drops the package into his briefcase, then forgets about it. Twenty-four hours later, at his dacha, he momentarily mistakes it for a bar of chocolate—intended, at least in the early typescripts, as a present for this same Nina.
The morning after finally reading the letter Viktor looks at himself in the mirror, “expecting to see a haggard face with trembling lips.” He is surprised to find that he looks much the same as he did the day before. From then on Viktor carries the letter with him wherever he goes, but he is unable to talk about it. He can hardly even talk about it to himself:
Viktor reread the letter again and again. Each time he felt the same shock as at the dacha, as if he were reading it for the first time.
Perhaps his memory was instinctively resisting, unwilling and unable fully to take in something whose constant presence would make life unbearable.
After the suppression of The Black Book, Grossman must have been well aware that he could not write freely about the events Viktor’s mother describes. It seems likely that, rather than toning her letter down to make it acceptable, he took a conscious decision simply to leave a blank space, to replace her letter with an explicit, audible silence. If so, this is a powerful example of Grossman’s unusual ability to make creative use of editorial interference.
On the surface, the Stalingrad dilogy has much in common with War and Peace. Both include general reflections on history, politics, and philosophy. Both are divided between accounts of military and civilian life; the Stalingrad dilogy is structured around a single extended family much as War and Peace is structured around a group of families who become linked by marriage. There is, however, a fundamental difference. For all Grossman’s appearance of being an omniscient and dispassionate narrator, his dilogy is more personal than War and Peace. Grossman, unlike Tolstoy, lived through the war he describes. He felt profoundly guilty about having allowed his mother to stay in Berdichev rather than insisting that she join him and his wife in Moscow. Her death troubled him for the rest of his life, and the last letter from Anna Semyonovna—who is clearly a portrait of Grossman’s mother—lies at the centre of Stalingrad like a deep hole. Or, in Viktor’s words, “like an open grave.”
4
Stalingrad is, amongst much else, an act of homage. One of Grossman’s aims was to honour the dead—especially those who had been forgotten. He writes of those who died in the many small battles of the first months of the war, “There were men who, recognizing they were hopelessly outnumbered, fought only the more fiercely. These are the heroes of the first period of the war. Many are nameless and received no burial. It is to them, in large part, that Russia owes her salvation.” This may sound like orthodox Soviet rhetoric, but Grossman is, in fact, courting controversy. The brutality with which the Soviet authorities treated their own soldiers and their soldiers’ families is hard for a Western reader to comprehend. Most of the men Grossman calls heroes would have been officially classified as “missing” rather than “killed in action.” If there were no witnesses to their death, they might—in the eyes of the authorities—simply have been deserters. Their families, therefore, would have received no pension and would have lived under a shadow for the rest of their lives.
Grossman also remembers more famous figures. In particular, he pays homage to the biologist and plant breeder Nikolay Vavilov, one of the most important scientists to fall victim to Stalin’s purges. With surprising straightforwardness—hiding him, perhaps, in plain sight—Grossman gives his name to one of his most appealing characters, the wise and heroic Pyotr Vavilov whom we see receiving his call-up papers and setting out for the war in one of the novel’s first chapters. The similarities between the famous scientist and Grossman’s peasant soldier are clear, though they seem to have gone unnoticed. The cultural historian Rachel Polonsky writes of Nikolay Vavilov, “For him, the practice of science was an aspect of a wider commitment to social justice. . . . He wanted . . . to improve agriculture, improve the quality of grain, make better harvests, feed the Soviet people. . . . He believed in global research; he wanted to understand the plant world of the whole planet, the cultivation and migration of grain varieties—rye, wheat, rice and flax.”7 Another historian, Gary Paul Nabhan, writes, Vavilov “was one of the first scientists to really listen to farmers—traditional farmers, peasant farmers around the world—and why they felt seed diversity was important in their fields.”8 And Grossman says of his peasant soldier, “Vavilov thought of the terrestrial globe as a single vast field that it was the people’s responsibility
to plough and sow. . . . Vavilov would ask people about their lives in peacetime: ‘What’s your land like? Does your wheat grow well? Are there droughts? And millet—do you sow millet? Do you get enough potatoes?’”
Later, in Life and Fate, Viktor Shtrum laments “dozens of people who had left and never returned”; among them is Nikolay Vavilov. In Stalingrad, Grossman has to write more obliquely. Nevertheless, he takes pains to draw our attention to the name Vavilov. One of Pyotr Vavilov’s fellow soldiers asks him, for no apparent reason, if he is related to yet another Vavilov, a regimental commissar. Pyotr replies that he is not related—he just happens to have the same surname. The function of this seemingly rather pointless exchange is, of course, to summon up the memory of the murdered scientist.
Another of Grossman’s allusions to Nikolay Vavilov is more complex. The manager of a prestigious Moscow hotel is proud that famous scientists have visited his hotel and he even remembers which room each stayed in, but he gets oddly confused when he mentions Vavilov, failing to remember that he was a biologist. Vavilov’s ambition was to end world hunger, but in 1943 he died in prison of starvation. It is no wonder that the hotel manager gets confused—as if there is something he is unable to take in, or that he half realizes it might be best not to remember.
Nikolay Vavilov remained well-known; it was impossible for the authorities to erase his memory. There is another historical figure, however, of still greater importance to the Stalingrad dilogy, who has emerged from oblivion only recently. The German Ukrainian scholar Tatiana Dettmer has established that Viktor Shtrum, Grossman’s fictional nuclear physicist, is modelled on a real-life figure—Lev Yakovlevich Shtrum, one of the founders of Soviet nuclear physics. Lev Shtrum was born in 1890 and executed in 1936; like many of the victims of Stalin’s purges, he was accused of Trotskyism. After his death, his books and papers were removed from libraries and he was deleted from the historical record. No Grossman scholar before Dettmer appears to have been aware of his existence.
During the years Grossman lived and studied in Kiev (1914–19 and 1921–23), Lev Shtrum taught physics and mathematics at several Kiev educational institutes. Eventually he became the head of the Kiev University Department of Theoretical Physics. Historians of science have been surprisingly slow to resurrect such figures, and it was only in 2012 that a group of Ukrainian and Russian scholars published an article about Lev Shtrum, drawing attention to a theory he formulated in the 1920s about particles moving faster than the speed of light. Until then, it had been thought that such particles (now known as tachyons) were first hypothesized only in 1962.
Grossman calls our attention to the name Shtrum, much as he calls our attention to the name Vavilov. During his visit to Moscow, Colonel Novikov telephones Colonel Ivanov. Ivanov says there is a postcard for him. Novikov asks him to look at the signature and say who it is from. “There was a brief silence. Ivanov was clearly struggling to decipher the handwriting. Finally, he said, ‘Shturm, or maybe Shtrom, I’m not quite sure.’” And in Life and Fate Viktor Shtrum ponders a long, intimidating questionnaire: “1. Surname, name and patronymic. . . . Who was he, who was this man filling in a questionnaire at the dead of night? Shtrum, Viktor Pavlovich? His mother and father had . . . separated when Viktor was only two; and on his father’s papers he had seen the name Pinkhus—not Pavel. So why was he Viktor Pavlovich? Did he know himself? Perhaps he was someone quite different—Goldman . . . or Sagaydachny? Or was he the Frenchman Desforges, alias Dubrovsky?”9 Sagaydachny (the name both of a seventeenth-century Cossack hetman and of an artist living in Kiev in the early 1920s) and Pushkin’s fictional hero Dubrovsky (an impostor and outlaw) may be little more than random names, but Alexander Goldman was another professor of physics, working in Kiev in the 1920s and 1930s. He was Lev Shtrum’s supervisor and taught at the institute where Grossman studied from 1921 to 1923.
Goldman was arrested in 1938, two years after Lev Shtrum. Unlike Lev Shtrum, however, he survived and was able to return to physics after the war. In Dettmer’s words, “If we assume that Grossman knew the eventual fates of Lev Shtrum and Goldman, then Viktor’s words in the novel about whether he was Shtrum, rather than Goldman, take on a deeper significance. Both Goldman and Lev Shtrum were victims of Stalin’s Terror. Goldman, however, survived, while Lev Shtrum did not—except in so far as he is resurrected in the pages of Grossman’s novel.”
There are many parallels between the lives of the fictional Shtrum and the historical Shtrum. Both were nuclear physicists with a particular interest in relativity; both were also concerned with broader social and political questions. Like Viktor, Lev had two children—a son (called Viktor!) from his first marriage and a daughter from his second marriage. Lev would certainly have known most of the physicists whom Viktor meets or thinks about in the pages of Life and Fate: Abram Ioffe, Nikolay Mitrofanovich Krylov, Igor Kurchatov, Lev Landau, Leonid Mandelstam, and Igor Tamm.10 And the conflicts Grossman describes in Viktor’s Physics Institute—the demotion of important scientists and laboratory workers and the promotion of less talented but more servile figures—seem to be closely modelled on real conflicts in the Moscow University physics faculty in 1944.
We know that Grossman himself was deeply interested in physics from his teenage years to his death. In a letter to his father he wrote, “From when I was fourteen to when I was twenty [that is, when he was living and studying in Kiev], I was a passionate devotee of the exact sciences and was not interested in anything else.”11 Grossman’s wartime notebooks include a diagram of a chain reaction. Like Lev Shtrum, Grossman passionately admired Einstein; an illustration in John and Carol Garrard’s biography of Grossman shows two photographs of Einstein on a bookshelf in his study.12 Similarly, one of the few surviving photographs of Lev Shtrum shows him in his study, where there is one photograph of Einstein and one of Max Planck.
Two of Grossman’s school friends, Lev and Grigory Levin, were cousins of Lev Shtrum. In a letter to his father in 1929, Grossman casually mentions visiting Lev Shtrum and borrowing money from him. This suggests that he knew Shtrum very well. There is, as yet, no incontrovertible documentary evidence for this, but it is highly probable that, when Grossman was still living and studying in Kiev, Shtrum was one of his teachers. This vivid passage from Stalingrad, an account of lectures given by Viktor Shtrum’s mentor Chepyzhin, may well be Grossman’s evocation of lectures that he himself was inspired by:
These formulae seemed full of human content; they could have been passionate declarations of faith, doubt or love. Chepyzhin reinforced this impression by scattering question marks, ellipses and triumphant exclamation marks over the board. It was painful, when the lecture was over, to watch the attendant rub out all these radicals, integrals, differentials and trigonometric signs, all these alphas, deltas, epsilons and thetas that human will and intelligence had shaped into a single united regiment. Like a valuable manuscript, this blackboard should surely have been preserved for posterity.
If Grossman did indeed have Lev Shtrum in mind, this last sentence is all the more poignant; Grossman has preserved this blackboard for posterity.
As Dettmer has pointed out, Grossman bestowed on the central figure of his dilogy the name, the profession, the family, the interests, and even the friends of an “enemy of the people.” Grossman was anything but naive; he would have been well aware of the danger to which he was exposing himself and his novel. One can only conclude that Lev Shtrum must have been a figure of extraordinary importance to him, and that he must have felt deeply indebted to him.13
5
In the aftermath of the war, Grossman may have hoped that his novel would play a healing, conciliatory role. Bitter arguments had erupted as to whether it was the Soviet infantry or the Soviet artillery that saved Stalingrad. Grossman goes to some length to establish that neither could have achieved anything without the other.
He takes a similarly balanced line with regard to a more important and still unresolved question. He insists that the Red Army
’s absolute determination not to retreat a step farther arose spontaneously among the rank-and-file soldiers at the same time as Stalin issued his draconian “Not One Step Back” Order of 28 July 1942. Grossman sees the soldiers’ courage and patriotism as genuine; he would certainly not agree with those Western historians who have suggested that the soldiers fought with such desperation simply because they were terrified of being shot by the security police if they were seen to desert. But Grossman also sees Stalin’s order as crucial; he sees Stalin as giving voice to the soldiers’ sense of patriotism and so reinforcing it.
In other respects, however, Grossman is more challenging. His most sustained argument in Stalingrad is with Maxim Gorky. In 1932, Grossman was struggling to publish his first novel, Glyukauf, set in a mining community in the Donbass; an editor had recently told him that some aspects of the novel were “counter-revolutionary.” Gorky was, at the time, the most influential figure in the Soviet literary establishment, and Grossman tried to enlist his support. In his first letter to Gorky, Grossman wrote, “I described what I saw while living and working for three years at mine Smolyanka-11. I wrote the truth. It may be a harsh truth. But the truth can never be counter-revolutionary.” Gorky replied at length, clearly recognizing Grossman’s gifts but criticizing him with regard to his attitude to truth:
It is not enough to say, “I wrote the truth.” The author should ask himself two questions: “First, which truth? And second, why?” We know that there are two truths and that, in our world, it is the vile and dirty truth of the past that quantitatively preponderates. But this truth is being replaced by another truth that has been born and continues to grow. . . . The author sees the truth of the past quite well, but he doesn’t have a very clear understanding of what to do with it. The author truthfully depicts the obtuseness of coal miners, their brawls and drunkenness, all that predominates in his—the author’s—field of vision. This is, of course, truth—but it is a disgusting and tormenting truth. It is a truth we must struggle against and mercilessly extirpate.14
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