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