A Writer at War: Vasily Grossman with the Red Army 1941–1945, Anthony Beevor and Luba Vinogradova.
Soviet novelist Vasily Grossman (1905-64) worked as a journalist and kept notebooks throughout both the German invasion of Soviet territory, and the subsequent Soviet liberation and race to Berlin. Such practices were strictly forbidden (not to mention highly dangerous) under Stalin, and Grossman's jottings about the events he bore witness to thus represent a extraordinary testimony of the attitudes and conditions experienced by both the Red Army soldier and Soviet citizens more generally.
Writing for Красной Звезды (Krasnaya Zvezda, ‘The Red Star’), the Red Army's official newspaper, Grossman’s honest and frank character observations of both military and civilian life during both the disastrous retreat of 1941, the fierce battle for Stalingrad and the genocide the subsequent Soviet advances revealed. Antony Beevor – for mine the foremost writer of ‘humanist’ military histories – deftly connects Grossman's brusque sketches with a broader commentary about the course of the war and Grossman's movements at the battlefront.
While his official dispatches usually describe scenes fitting with Soviet orthodoxy, Grossman's notebooks also record the bloody-mindedness, the despair and the disaffection that permeated Soviet ranks as the Red Army struggled with the adaption to modern warfare. A perceptive observer with an eye for essential detail, Grossman’s vignettes of the fighting as well as life during wartime for civilians, and the melancholic realism of his description of Treblinka are both fascinating and shattering. I can’t imagine how a this text could be surpassed as an eyewitness accounts of Soviet Russia's war on the Eastern Front. A fantastic read, I cannot recommend it highly enough.
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