By John Pickard, Brentwood Labour Party
Vasily Grossman’s novel Stalingrad has been published in English for the first time and like its sequel, Life and Fate, it stands squarely in the best traditions of Russian epic novels and is well worth the read.
There is a very interesting back story to the writing and publication of Stalingrad. It was written between 1946 and 1949, when Joseph Stalin was still firmly in control of the USSR and this fact is heavily reflected in both the content and the tone of the book. To get it published – eventually, serialised in Novy Mir in late 1952 – Grossman had to jump through bureaucratic hoops that would have driven many a novelist to despair. He even at one point wrote directly to Stalin himself, appealing for permission to have the book published.
As a result of the bureaucratic obstacle course Grossman was obliged to pick his way through, there are several versions of the novel, with paragraphs or whole sections included in some but not others. Some characters appear in one version but not another. The differences were due to the strictures of the state Stalinist state censors, or the ‘advice’ of the Soviet Writers’ Guild, or following ‘discussions’ with Communist Party members. What made it more difficult still was the fact that the advice shifted from one month to the next.
Entire sections changed
Grossman had to get it ‘right’ because the battle for city of Stalingrad, between August 1942 and March 1943, was a key turning point in the war. Stalingrad, it should be noted, was formerly the city of Tsaritsyn (now Volgograd) named after Stalin himself as a tribute to his completely legendary role in saving the city for the Red Army during the Civil War. It was in the Second World War that the Battle of Stalingrad became an internationally-recognised symbol for the dogged determination and heroism of the Russian people. Grossman was a correspondent during the war years and he would have visited the city.
In the Afterword, the book’s editors write, “The reason for the extreme caution shown by Grossman’s editors is that the Soviet victory at Stalingrad had acquired the status of a sacred myth – a myth that legitimized Stalin’s rule. There was no room, therefore, for even the slightest political error.”
After August 1942, Stalingrad was almost completely captured by the German army: almost but not quite, because a narrow sliver of land on the banks of the Volga was stubbornly defended by the Red Army. Here, in cellars, sewers, bombed-out buildings and in a large variety of holes in the ground, Red Army units desperately hung on. Stalin had issued the order not to surrender another step. And despite overwhelming odds against them in troop numbers, fire-power, tanks and aircraft, that’s exactly what the Red Army did.
Eventually those three famous Russian generals, December, January and February, came to the aid of their compatriots. That and the fact that the Soviet bureaucracy was able to transplant almost its entire war industry further east, to the Urals and Siberia, well out of reach of the German army. The failed siege of Stalingrad and the mobilisation of the whole of Russian society is described by Grossman through the experiences of one family in particular, as well as groups of individuals, including young army recruits, miners and steelworkers. The awful bombing of Stalingrad before the siege, in which forty thousand lost their lives, and the crippling hardships endured by the mass or ordinary people, is graphically described. As is so often the case with the best writers, it is often in the tiny details and minutiae that he is able to give these events a real and living character.
Parts written to suit the Soviet censors
Many parts of the book are clearly written to suit the Soviet censors in those immediate post-war years, when the Great Leader, Stalin was still alive and when the city that bore his name had gone down in legend. Some of these passages, it has to be said, are enjoyable. In one dialogue, one of the characters, Mostovskoy, describes the advances made in Russia after the revolution as a result of state ownership of the economy and planning.
“Thousands of inns, taverns and cabaret venues had disappeared – as had parish schools, institutes for the daughters of the nobility, monastery lands, private estates, stock exchanges and the grand mansions of wealthy capitalists…Workers and peasants had become the masters of life. A whole new panoply of professions had been born: industrial and agricultural planners, peasant scientists, beekeeper scientists, cattle breeders, vegetable growers, kolkhoz engineers, radio operators, tractor drivers, electricians…”. An entire page like this could be taken out and reproduced as a summary justification for the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution, in far better prose that you could find in Ragged-trousered Philanthropist.
But some elements in the book are slightly irritating, like the constant refrain, sometimes page after page, about ‘mother Russia’ and the indomitable spirit of the Russian people to fight, and so on and so forth. We see read of miners enthusiastically doing double shifts and soldiers making unbelievable sacrifices, all the while making superb speeches to their comrades while looking glassy-eyed into the near distance. It’s all about the motherland. Clearly, much of the tone and at least some of the content of the book is a direct result of the many massages the book was given by the Stalinist censors between 1949 and 1952 when it finally saw the light of day.
But having said all that, Stalingrad is nonetheless a marvellous book and it stands comparison with modern epic Russian novelists like Sholokhov and Solzhenitsyn and before them, Tolstoy’s War and Peace.
Understanding the context of the writing and publication
For a Marxist, it shouldn’t necessarily follow that the political views or weaknesses of an author should invalidate the worth of the writing. But knowing the context in which the author writes and the background to the publication of the book are essential elements in appreciating a work. It is useful to have one eye on the political background in judging this book.
It should be said that despite Grossman’s three-year sparring contest with Soviet censors, in Stalingrad there are dozens of descriptions of bureaucratic privileges. The top bureaucrats are never in his Grossman’s sights, and comrade Stalin, on the few occasions where he is mentioned, is spoken of in a positive context. But petty officials like kolkhoz chairmen, local party officers, commissars or other local functionaries, in dozens of little incidents throughout the book are able to get their hands on clothes, accommodation or foodstuffs where others suffer in silence. It is as if the privilege of the petty bureaucracy is just a part and parcel of everyday life and so no-one questions it.
Grossman’s sequel to Stalingrad – Life and Fate – has many of the same characters and continues the narrative immediately after the end of the first book: at the peak moment of the Stalingrad siege. Although Life and Fate was written later, it was always Grossman’s intention that they form one book, rather than two. However, having been written later and being completed years after Stalin’s death, Life and Fate has far fewer of the irritating Soviet stereo-types and the wartime Stalin-speak of the first book. It is because of its later publication that Life and Fate was the first to be translated into English with its prequel, Stalingrad, coming several years afterwards. So we’ve had to read them, unfortunately, in the wrong order.
Despite the clear overlay of the Stalinist censors, Stalingrad is a book well worth reading. But a word of warning: the hard-back has 950 pages and weighs in at 1.6kg, so it’s not exactly a pocket edition. Wait until it comes out in paper-back and put it on your Christmas list
August 20, 2019
