Vasily Grossman reported from the front for over 1,000 days

Person: Vasily Grossman
Lived: 1905–1964
Field: Novelist & war correspondent
From: Soviet

The story

When Germany invaded the Soviet Union on 22 June 1941, Vasily Grossman was 35, a chemical engineer turned novelist who had joined the Union of Writers in 1937. His mother was trapped in his home town of Berdichev, in Ukraine, as the German army advanced. Grossman volunteered for combat but was rejected on medical grounds, so he joined the Red Army as a reporter for its official newspaper, Krasnaya Zvezda (Red Star).

He spent more than 1,000 days at the front, roughly three of the four years of the war between Germany and the Soviet Union. He reported on the defence of Moscow, on the Battle of Stalingrad, on Kursk and finally on the fall of Berlin, living alongside the soldiers he wrote about. He became known as an honorary frontovik, a front-line soldier, and his biographers John and Carol Garrard argue that he witnessed more action than any other correspondent in any theatre of the Second World War.

His honest, vivid dispatches were widely read and made him a wartime celebrity. In April 1942 he was given leave to write a novel about life at the front, and The People Immortal was published about three months later, appearing in newspapers. By the end of the war he was regarded as a legendary figure, and his war writings were reprinted several times by the state publisher.

As the Red Army pushed west through Ukraine and Poland in 1943 and 1944, Grossman also became one of the first writers to record the Holocaust. He saw the mass graves at Babi Yar and in Berdichev, where his mother had been murdered, and his 1944 essay The Hell of Treblinka was later used as evidence at the Nuremberg trials.

The notebooks he kept at the front laid the foundation for his novels about Stalingrad, For a Just Cause and its sequel Life and Fate, now regarded as one of the great novels of the twentieth century. In 2005 the historian Antony Beevor and Luba Vinogradova published a selection from them in English as A Writer at War, giving new readers a soldier's-eye view of the Eastern Front.

Why it matters

Grossman's war reporting gave readers a truthful record of the Eastern Front, honoured the courage of ordinary soldiers and preserved some of the first evidence of the Holocaust.

About Vasily Grossman

Red Army correspondent who wrote one of the first accounts of a Nazi death camp, then the novel Life and Fate, so dangerous to the Soviet state that the KGB “arrested” the manuscript.

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Vasily Grossman

1905–1964 · Novelist & war correspondent

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