A Writer at War: Vasily Grossman with the Red Army 1941-1945 by Anthony Beevor

A Writer at War: Vasily Grossman with the Red Army 1941=1945 by Anthony Beevor and Luba Vinogradova

I read this book straight after reading Anthony Beevor’s Stalingrad, (see review). Whereas Stalingrad focused upon both the Red Army and the German forces in that battle, this book deals with Grossman’s experiences as a war correspondent for the Red Army publication Red Star. He covered various fronts throughout the war, but Stalingrad was central to his experience.

Using extracts from Grossman’s notebooks and filling in the wider details, Beevor and Vinogradova tell the story of the Red Army retreat in 1941, the fight back at Moscow, the battle for Stalingrad and the encirclement and push to Berlin through Grossman’s eyes. It is a story of courage, great suffering and sacrifice, cruelty, political expediency and victory. Grossman, a Russian Jew who never joined the Communist Party, is a cipher of his times, encapsulating the suffering peoples of Europe and the marginal Russian citizen in his life and work.

At the beginning of Operation Barbarossa, the German advance into Soviet Russia, Grossman travelled back with the disorganised Red army which was bereft of leadership after the Stalinist purges of the late 30’s. His decision not to go and collect his Jewish Mother was to haunt him through the war, as her town was occupied by German forces very quickly, and she was amongst the population massacred nearby.

The centre of his account concerns Stalingrad and his experiences talking to and relating stories of courage and cowardice from Red Army soldiers. It was a tough regime to fight for, and many defected to the German side. Hundreds of thousands more were shot by NKVD units preventing soldiers from deserting the terrible carnage that became Stalingrad. Any hint of complicity, such as not shooting at deserting comrades, was quickly dealt with by death squads.

Beevor and Vinogradova evaluate the information, especially the inflated accounts of expertise and bravery such as the sniper Vasily Zayetsev with whom Grossman went out on a mission. The film Enemy at the Gates is based upon Zayetsev’s story, but the German sniper sent to kill him was never found in the German accounts leading Beevor and Vinogradova to conclude that some of the story was inflated for propaganda purposes. In fact Grossman’s accounts of the personal bravery and sacrifice of Red Army troops was very popular in the Red Star.

The campaign to push back German forces after Stalingrad revealed the terrible conditions of the occupation, including the likely circumstances of Grossman’s mother’s death. Beevor and Vinogradova include a horrific and yet sensitively moving reconstruction of the system used at Treblinka for murdering Jews and Gypsies written by Grossman after its liberation. This harrowing and powerful account was used at the Nuremburg trials.

Grossman was disappointed, after his experiences of the Nazi occupation, with the conduct of his Red Army comrades who took part in looting and rapes on German territory. Beevor and Vinogradova noted that his criticism of the Red Army in his notes constituted a threat to his liberty if they had been read by the authorities.

At this time, anti-Semitism was on the increase in the Soviet hierarchy, and Grossman found himself moved from covering important aspects of the victory. His involvement in the Jewish Anti-Nazi Committee put him under serious threat of arrest, despite the fact that the existence of the committee had encouraged the US to supply the Red Army.

The book is a fascinating yet difficult read and through the course of the war you begin to build a picture of Soviet citizens fighting to the death for a regime that has brought them from the serfdom of the pre-Bolshevik era to the industrial might that was able to take on the Nazis. The mythology of Mother Russia and The Great Leader was compounded by the cruelty and illogical horror inflicted upon the Russian people with the invasion. The figures are appalling – over 20 million Russian dead, a third of the Polish population killed. It’s no wonder they fought so bravely.

Upon crossing Germany, a question that many Red Army soldiers asked upon looking at the relative riches of the German state was “Why did they invade? What did we have that they wanted?” Beevor and Vinogradova do a good job of presenting Grossman’s notebooks in a coherent narrative that enthrals the reader and horrifies them at the same time.

That was interesting and well written, Paul, and not a part of WWII that I know much about. Thank you.

Thanks. Seeing it from the Red Army side is illuminating - particularly given the image we have of the Red Army soldiers from the Cold War, and how human this makes them in the account.