The Road (7 page)

His comrades continued to make jokes. “So, Aleksandr Nikiforovich, you’re going to be the husband of a deputy people’s commissar. One word from her, and they’ll transfer you to Moscow, to the General Staff Academy. You’ll have quite a life!”

He smiled calmly and said nothing.

Gagareva was moved by this development, which really, of course, concerned only Goryacheva and Karmaleyev. She observed Goryacheva benevolently, with sadness and resignation. There seemed to be some law governing the fates of different generations. “So now it’s their turn to be happy,” she would say to herself. “Well then, may they be happy!” And she would recall her own youth—political debates, trips to Sparrow Hills, and years in exile after her husband had escaped from a tsarist prison colony and she had abandoned her studies to join him in France. She even felt proud that she had come to a philosophical understanding of time and of Russian life, that she had grasped the meaning of all the sacrifices, the meaning of movement itself. “Yes, yes,” she thought. “It’s true, we didn’t struggle and suffer in vain. Whole generations didn’t sacrifice themselves for nothing.” She did a great deal of thinking, and she was so taken up with her thoughts that she stopped visiting Kotova, preferring to spend all her time on her own. To have reached this universal understanding was no mean achievement—and Gagareva looked at the young people around her with a kindly but condescending smile.

During the last week of August it began unexpectedly to rain; this, apparently, was very unusual—something that happened only once every ten or fifteen years. The mountains were hidden by clouds, a cold wind was blowing off the sea, and it rained several times every day. Many of the visitors left. Goryacheva left on the twenty-sixth. She might have stayed longer, but Karmaleyev had received a telegram recalling him to the Far East. He had to set off on the twenty-sixth, and Goryacheva had decided to go with him as far as Moscow. Gagareva, however, stayed in the house of recreation; she did not mind the bad weather. She had brought her galoshes and raincoat with her and, unless it was raining particularly hard, she carried on going out for walks down the graveled paths. She even liked this kind of weather. It was more in keeping with her mood; her mind worked better during these gray sad days.

***

Late one November afternoon Gagareva called on Goryacheva in her office. She found her in conversation with a visiting instructor, a man who worked in the provinces.

“Is this going to take long?” Goryacheva asked her.

“No, no, it’s all right, I’ll wait, it’s about something very particular,” said Gagareva, smiling and sitting herself down on the sofa. She looked at Goryacheva’s face, which was lit by the lamp on her desk, and thought, “She’s lost her tan, and she looks very thin. She never stops, she works day and night—she must be missing her husband.”

The instructor left. With an embarrassed little laugh, Gagareva said, “Comrade Goryacheva, there’s something I want to say to you. I do, after all, know the stand you took last year, when there was a possibility of my being dismissed. Well, now I want to share some good news with you: my daughter’s case is to be reviewed. She may soon be back here in Moscow.”

They chatted for a few minutes. Then Goryacheva remembered that she had a meeting. She left the room. Gagareva went to the secretariat and said to Goryacheva’s secretary, “Lydia Ivanovna, do you know what? It may not be long till my daughter comes back.”

The usually stern secretary looked Gagareva straight in the eye, laughed joyfully, and shook her hand.

“But tell me—is everything all right with Goryacheva? She’s not ill, is she?” asked Gagareva. “She seemed a little strange just now.”

Glancing at the door, the secretary said quietly, “She’s been having a terrible time. It’s been one tragedy after another for her. In October her mother died of a heart attack. She was doing the laundry—and she just dropped dead. And then, only a few days ago, she was told that her husband had been killed in action, on the Far East border. They were married the day they got back from the Crimea, and he had to leave that same evening.”

Gagareva walked across to the window and watched the bright automobile headlights down below. Precipitately, as if out of nowhere, they arose out of the fog and gloom, then swiftly traversed the square. “No, it’s not like I thought,” she said to herself. “I don’t understand anything at all about the laws of life.”

But she was feeling happy, and so she no longer wanted to think. She no longer wanted to understand the laws of life.

The War, the Shoah

Grossman (far left) in a just-liberated village, January 1942

In the
early hours of June 22, 1941, Hitler invaded the Soviet Union. Stalin had refused to believe more than eighty intelligence warnings of Hitler’s intentions, and Soviet forces were taken by surprise. More than two thousand Soviet aircraft were destroyed within twenty-four hours. The Germans repeatedly encircled entire Soviet armies. By the end of the year the Wehrmacht had reached the outskirts of Moscow and more than three million Soviet soldiers had been captured or killed.

Before the German invasion, Grossman appears to have been depressed. He was overweight and, though only in his mid-thirties, he walked with a stick. In spite of this—and his poor eyesight—he volunteered to serve in the ranks. Assigned instead to
Red Star
(
Krasnaya zvezda
), the Red Army newspaper, he quickly became one of the best-known Soviet war correspondents, astonishing everyone with his courage, tenacity, and physical endurance; he even proved to be an excellent shot with a pistol.

David Ortenberg, the chief editor of
Red Star
, was evidently impressed by the articles and stories that Grossman contributed. In May 1942 he allowed Grossman a three-month leave to work on a novel about a Soviet military unit that breaks out of German encirclement. Grossman worked fast, and
The People Immortal
—the first Soviet novel about the war—was serialized in
Red Star
in July and August. Today much of it seems propagandistic, but at the time it was admired for its realism. As always, Grossman not only has a fine eye for a vivid detail but also the ability to make unexpected use of this detail. One memorable passage ends with a political commissar glimpsing the burning ruins of the town of Gomel as reflected in the eye of a dying horse: “The horse’s dark, weeping, torment-filled pupil, like a crystal mirror, absorbed the fire of the burning buildings, the smoke swirling through the air, the luminous, incandescent ruins and this forest of thin, tall chimneys now growing in the place of the buildings which had vanished in flames. And Bogaryov suddenly had the thought that he too had taken into himself all this destruction—this nighttime destruction of
an ancient and peaceful town.”

In the autumn of 1942, Grossman was posted to Stalingrad. Unlike other Soviet journalists, who stayed in relative safety on the left bank of the Volga, Grossman spent nearly three months on the right bank. Earlier, before crossing the Volga, he had said to a group of colleagues, “To write about the Stalingrad battle one needs to have been on the right bank of the Volga, among those who are fighting in the ruins and on the bank of the river. Until I have been there I do not have the moral right to write about the
defenders of Stalingrad.” Once on the right bank, he shared the soldiers’ lives and won their trust. In the words of his fellow war correspondent Ilya Ehrenburg, “The soldiers at Stalingrad did not consider Grossman a journalist, but rather
one of their comrades in arms.”

Grossman achieved particular renown for his reports from Stalingrad, but he covered all the main battles of the war, from the defense of Moscow to the vast tank battle of Kursk and the fall of Berlin, and his articles were valued by ordinary soldiers and generals alike. Groups of frontline soldiers would gather to listen while one of them read aloud from a single copy of
Red Star
; the writer Viktor Nekrasov, who fought at Stalingrad as a young man, remembers how “the papers with [Grossman’s] and Ehrenburg’s articles were read and reread by us
till they were in tatters.” And it was not only Soviet citizens who valued Grossman’s articles.
The Years of War
, a collection of Grossman’s reports from Stalingrad and elsewhere, was translated into a number of languages, including English, French, Dutch, and—in 1945—German. According to the historian Jochen Hellbeck, “a German Stalingrad veteran, Wilhelm Raimund Beyer, a young soldier during the war and later a noted philosopher and Hegel scholar, writes with great admiration about Grossman’s war stories [...] as coming very close to
his own experience of the battle.”

Yekaterina Korotkova has written that “A Stalingrad veteran once told me that he witnessed my father drawing an entire platoon—every last man of them—into a general conversation. And I myself often saw him in conversation with yardmen or listening attentively to a little woman we all despised and
whom we had nicknamed Zhuchka.” Grossman had a remarkable gift for listening and no less a gift for evoking—even in the space of only a few lines—the uniqueness of an individual life. Ortenberg records that Grossman was always interested in someone’s life as a whole, not merely in his or her wartime experiences, and he suggests that this may have been one of the reasons why otherwise inarticulate people were often so very
ready to talk to him. This concern for the individual, perhaps not surprisingly, also sometimes brought Grossman into conflict with the authorities. For all his wholehearted commitment to the Soviet cause, he was no less wholeheartedly opposed to the unnecessary sacrifice of individual lives for the apparent good of this cause. Korotkova has summarized Grossman’s own account of a meeting at the editorial office of
Red Star
: “Ortenberg once summoned three correspondents—Aleksey Tolstoy, Vasily Grossman, and Pyotr Pavlenko—and suggested that one of them write an article to illustrate the necessity for the new decree about the execution of deserters. My father responded sharply, ‘I’m not going to write such a piece.’ Pavlenko somehow ‘wriggled up to my father and, hissing like a snake,’ said, ‘You’re a proud man, Vasily Semyonovich, a very proud man.’ Only one man remained silent—Aleksey Tolstoy. It was he who then wrote
the required article.”

After encircling the German Sixth Army at Stalingrad, the Red Army began its long march westward. The liberation of the Ukraine, however, almost certainly brought Grossman more bitterness than joy. In the autumn of 1943 he learned about the massacre at Babi Yar, a ravine on the outskirts of Kiev, where a hundred thousand people, nearly all Jews, were shot in the course of six months, more than thirty-three thousand of them during the first two days, September 29 and 30. Soon afterward, in Berdichev, he learned the details of the death of his mother, Yekaterina Savelievna, in what was probably the first of the Einsatzgruppen massacres carried out in the Ukraine
in September 1941. This knowledge must have been all the harder to bear because Grossman blamed himself for failing to fetch Yekaterina Savelievna from Berdichev while this was still possible during the first weeks of the war.

One of the most striking of Grossman’s wartime works is “The Ukraine Without Jews”—an article that combines factual detail and moving lament. It also includes a remarkable passage in which Grossman not only analyzes the appeal of Nazism but also, through the use of incantatory, almost folkloric repetition, forces the reader to feel this appeal:

“You fear proletarian revolution,” the National Socialists said to the German industrialists. “You fear Communism, which is a hundred times more terrible for us than any Versailles treaty. We too fear proletarian revolution—so let us fight together against the Jews. They, after all, are an eternal source of sedition and bloody rebellion. They know how to incite the masses. They are orators and authors of revolutionary books. It is they who gave birth to the ideas of class struggle and proletarian revolution!”

“You are suffering from the consequences of the Versailles treaty,” the National Socialists said to the laboring masses of Germany. “You are hungry, you are without work. The heavy millstone of the reparations is crushing your exhausted shoulders. But look whose hands are turning the wheel that moves this stone. It is the hands of the Jewish plutocracy, the hands of Jewish bankers—the uncrowned kings of America, France, and England. Your enemies are our enemies—let us fight shoulder to shoulder against them!”

“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.”