From the Front Line: Stalingrad–Treblinka–Berlin, 1941–1945 by Vasily Grossman translated from Russian by Robert Chandler and Elizabeth Chandler. NYRB Classics, 512 pages. 2026
During the final days of World War II, Vasily Grossman entered Adolf Hitler’s office study in the New Reich Chancellery in Berlin. Designed by Albert Speer, the building was meant to be the executive center for the new German empire; Grossman noted that among the ruins of the office “the giant globe that had long stood beside [Hitler’s] desk” had been “flattened into a pancake” when the ceiling collapsed. The entrance hall to the New Reich Chancellery, fitting the megalomaniacal Nazi style, was a massive corridor stretching, Grossman estimated, “hundreds of meters long.” Here, Grossman observed “two young Red Army soldiers are trying to ride bicycles along it. They are not having much success, but this does not upset them.” To get to this point, Grossman had advanced more than fifteen hundred miles over the course of four years.
Grossman’s two major novels, Stalingrad and Life and Fate, form a mirrored portrayal of Soviet society and WWII. While they are connected novels, with overlapping characters and storylines and a common emphasis on the nature of shared sacrifice within the Soviet state, they have fundamentally different aesthetic and ideological approaches. Across dozens of characters, Stalingrad emphasizes the struggle of the Soviet people against the Nazis, but this struggle is given meaning and purpose as towards the development and preservation of the socialist project. Life and Fate, using the same characters, also emphasizes the struggle of the Soviet people, yet not just against the Nazis but also against the Soviet state itself, emphasizing how they are trapped in a dual war both outwardly and within as the socialist project breaks down into an ideological justification for power and authority.
Stalingrad was first published in serial form in 1952, with the title For a Just Cause. Grossman began drafting it during the battle; the novel exemplifies the Soviet approved socialist realist approach, combining a rousing patriotic tribute to the war effort with detailed, almost photographically precise prose, and is explicitly modeled on Tolstoy’s War and Peace. Stalingrad when first published initially received wide praise and was nominated for a Stalin Prize, the highest award for achievement across a range of disciplines in the Soviet Union at the time. In an abrupt shift, following the turn towards state-approved antisemitism with the fabrication of the Doctors’ Plot, Stalingrad was denounced and was almost pulled from circulation. Stalin’s death in March 1953 saved the novel. Life and Fate was written by Grossman across the 1950s and reflects his growing dissatisfaction with the Soviet state. In contrast to Stalingrad, it moves away from socialist realism, explicitly comparing the Soviet Union with Nazi Germany at points, and contains bitter depictions of the Soviet labor camps and the denunciations and moral compromises demanded of the intellectual and scientific class in the state. Soon after Grossman submitted a manuscript of Life and Fate to a Soviet journal in the autumn of 1960, his apartment was raided by the KGB. Agents seized his draft notebooks and the remaining manuscripts in his apartment; Grossman died believing that his masterpiece had been lost, but a manuscript copy that Grossman had given to a friend was eventually smuggled out of the Soviet Union in 1970.
Grossman died early at the age of fifty-eight in 1964, having written novels that chronicled the Soviet experience, alongside a mountain of articles, essays, and short stories. Over the past twenty years NYRB Classics has put out seven books by Grossman, collecting almost all of his output, translated to wide acclaim by the husband-and-wife team of Robert and Elizabeth Chandler, working in collaboration across various volumes with the Russian editors and translators Julia Volohova, Olga Mukovnikova, Anna Aslanyan, and Yury Bit-Yunan. The Chandlers’ latest translation of Grossman—with editorial help from the independent Russian scholar Julia Volohova—is From the Front Line: Stalingrad–Treblinka–Berlin, 1941–1945, a mix of articles that Grossman wrote while a front-line war correspondent embedded with the Red Army and making the notes for what would become Stalingrad. The Chandlers have crosschecked their translations of the articles from drafts from Grossman’s own notebooks, and typescripts submitted to the newspaper prior to staff editing, producing the fullest versions of these articles in any language, as well as having painstakingly traced, and in some places restored, where sentences were cut or altered by editors from Grossman’s typescripts. Split into six sections, From the Front Line follows Grossman’s reporting from the summer of 1942 through his time at Stalingrad, and then across Ukraine, Poland, and Germany, until his final wartime articles from Berlin and postwar reflections. Read with A Writer at War: Vasily Grossman with the Red Army, 1941-1945, translated and edited by Antony Beevor and Luba Vinogradova, the present collection makes for a more or less comprehensive whole of Grossman’s writing during the war.
Grossman showed the Soviet soldiers their own dignity, and his propaganda value would not be lost on the authorities.
During the siege of Leningrad, copies of Soviet newspapers were smuggled into the city through the Axis blockade. These newspapers were then plastered onto the walls of buildings to remind the public that the Red Army was fighting for their liberation. Throughout the war, they were, in the words of the writer Victor Nekrasov, “read and reread by us until they were in tatters.” The Soviet newspaper system was vast during the war; according to the historian Brandon Schechter “over 1,300 newspapers and journals were produced for the army, with a total circulation of over 4.38 million. There were nearly five thousand full-time journalists and writers in the army and hundreds of thousands of soldiers who wrote occasional pieces and letters.” The newspaper was the key form of written material for all members of Soviet society during the war; Grossman was one of the most acclaimed and well-known of the front-line Soviet writers.
Grossman’s life was inextricably bound up with the trajectory of the Soviet state. He was born into a middle class assimilated Jewish family in 1905 in Berdichev, a historically Jewish-majority city southwest of Kiev in Ukraine. As a teenager Grossman attended Moscow State University to study—following his father’s footsteps—chemical engineering in the 1920s, as part of the Soviet push to create a technical cadre to develop the state. At the beginning of the 1930s, Grossman worked in the Donbas region of eastern Ukraine at a coal mine outside of the city of Donetsk, then known as Stalino, as a chemist performing air quality tests in the mine.
Grossman had already begun publishing long form journalism in the late 1920s. While in the Donbas Grossman continued his journalism career and also began writing and publishing short stories. Grossman soon moved to Moscow from the Donbas, taking a job at a pencil factory. Grossman wrote his first novel, Glückauf, between 1931 and 1932 and published it in 1934. Grossman quit his job at the pencil factory before Glückauf went to print, becoming a full-time writer. He published another novel, Stepan Kolchugin, in serialization between 1937 and 1940. By the outbreak of the war, he was one of the most prominent writers in the country.
Whereas Grossman’s contemporaries, like Curzio Malaparte, were prone to editorialization of the realities of occupation and militarization, Grossman’s wartime reporting is strikingly free of ego. Malaparte, the aristocratic fascist aesthete whose nightmarish war novels Kaputt and The Skin are dense with allusions to high culture, couldn’t be more different from the Jewish communist with a background in journalism and Soviet approved socialist realism. Ironically, Malaparte and Grossman faced each other in the opening months of the invasion of the Soviet Union by the Nazis and their Axis allies, Malaparte posted with a Romanian army advancing into southwestern Ukraine as a frontline reporter for an Italian Fascist newspaper, Grossman on the eastern side of the great Ukrainian steppe covering the retreat of the Red Army—two great writers separated by hundreds of miles, the gulf between them the fate of the twentieth century.
Grossman had a renowned talent for solidarity with his subjects; a veteran of Stalingrad who encountered him during the battle remembered how Grossman was able to have a conversation with his whole platoon. Grossman’s editor at Red Star, David Ortenberg, commented on how Grossman was able to become “like one of the family” after he had spent a week with an anti-tank unit. Ortenberg wrote in his memoirs how Grossman was able to establish a rapport with a famously taciturn general from Siberia while at Stalingrad, to the astonishment of the other Soviet reporters, getting this general “to talk freely to him for six hours, during one of the fiercest days of the battle.” Grossman’s colleague, the great Soviet writer Ilya Ehrenburg, also noted that, “The soldiers at Stalingrad did not look on Grossman as a journalist, but rather as one of their comrades in arms.” Grossman never makes himself the central subject in his reporting; he never presumes that the reader is interested purely in what he himself thinks and feels. The rare moments where he discusses himself are always a launching point to a further investigation of the world and the people around him. For example, in a brief excerpt from an article titled “The Stalingrad Army,” Grossman recalls the New Year’s Day, 1943 spent listening to a recording of one of Beethoven’s “Twenty-Five Irish Songs” on a gramophone in a cellar HQ with a group of Soviet soldiers, with its refrain asking a female personification of Death to “wait behind the door” while a blizzard rages outside. Grossman writes that this “was probably one of my most intense experiences of the entire war.” And yet he goes on to recount the battle for Stalingrad, listing the names of individual soldiers, their faces, features, and heroism. Grossman’s interest is in the common man. Grossman is merely a conduit.
The totality of Grossman’s world emerges in his profiles of a young sniper, “going on twenty,” who trained himself to be able to tell distances at a glance relative to his own steps; the members of a Red Army unit trapped in a coal mine for three weeks in the steppe outside Donetsk; a tankman defending a command post in Stalingrad who, after running out of ammunition, threw stones at the Germans; and the soldiers in Berlin at the end of the war marveling at the wealth concentrated there and wondering why the Germans attacked the poor-by-comparison Soviet Union. Intentionally or not, Grossman’s descriptions of Soviet soldiers often highlight the true poverty of the Soviet Union. “Millions of our people have seen the superb German roads linking one village to another, and they have seen the latest in transport technology—autobahns with eight or ten lanes. In Berlin’s suburbs and in the surrounding countryside our people have seen two-story houses with baths, gas, and electricity, and beautiful gardens.” But these impoverished men, if we are to accept Grossman’s gloss, are why the Soviets won the war: Victory was not nameless and faceless but the aggregate result of millions sacrificing everything. Grossman showed them their own dignity in that struggle, and his propaganda value would not be lost on the authorities.
Red Star had a circulation of around three hundred thousand, part of the trinity of official Soviet organs alongside Pravda and Izvestia. Considering that these newspapers were then widely circulated among units, plastered on buildings, or read aloud to military units en masse, Grossman’s true audience could have numbered in the millions. In an era before mass television, amid the chaos of a rapidly shifting front, it was difficult for news to travel. Articles like Grossman’s were a lifeline—not to mention a morale booster. With his built-in credibility as a popular novelist, Grossman was given a prominent placement as a war correspondent because his writing was deemed supremely useful by the Soviet authorities. Grossman’s ability to convince people of all ranks to talk to him meant that he could distill strategic and philosophical talks with officers with deep firsthand perspectives of life on the front for an ordinary soldier. A memorable exchange in the collection is Grossman’s brief interview with Colonel General Andrey Yeromenko in the article “The Stalingrad Front.” Yeromenko rose from a rural conscript in WWI to leading the defense of Stalingrad during WWII, eventually being raised to the highest rank of Marshal of the Soviet Union in 1955. Yeromenko commented to Grossman on the banality of war and the common fear of death. “’Who wants to die?’ he once asked me, chuckling like an old man. He then answered his own question: ‘No one’s particularly keen to die.’”
These were men who were only recently uplifted from illiteracy. The 1926 census established that only 51 percent of the Soviet population over the age of nine was literate. The Soviet Union in the interwar years was notoriously brutal in its drive for industrialization—but its campaign against illiteracy was an unambiguous success. In 1939, 89.1 percent of Soviet citizens between the ages of nine and forty-nine were literate; among men, it was 95.1 percent. Writers held special sway in the Soviet Union, not just because they were the carriers of the Russian language, but also because they were the embodiment of the achievements of the state and the people, proof that some kind of socialist development and modernization was not just possible but had already occurred, via the spread of mass literacy. Reading the newspaper then was not merely an act of curiosity or keeping up with the times, it was itself a revolutionary process within the logic of the Soviet state and its project of socialist development towards communism.
Grossman’s contribution to the war effort was born out of necessity given his poor eyesight and physical condition: Chandler and Volohova note in the Introduction that he was walking with a cane at the war’s outbreak, likely due to his poor eyesight, and he was also severely overweight. Being passed over for a combat role when he volunteered for the army that summer of 1941 likely saved Grossman’s life: many of Grossman’s colleagues among Soviet writers joined militias in the first great wave of signups for the military in the days and weeks after the Nazi invasion and were killed by the end of the year. At Red Star, Grossman was supported by the editor David Ortenberg, who have him much editorial freedom. Ortenberg even secured permission for Grossman to be given two months leave in the late spring and early summer of 1942 to write a short novel. The People Immortal, the first Soviet novel written about the war, chronicling the struggle of a small Red Army unit encircled by the Germans in the late summer and autumn of 1941, was serialized in Red Star between July and August 1942, further boosting Grossman’s prestige as the pre-eminent frontline writer of the war.
Most of the time, in his journalism, Grossman recedes into the background, seemingly reporting from a place of omniscience. “I” statements are few and far between; we’re more likely to hear about the birds sitting on telephone and telegraph wires, the differing colors of the flashes set off by artillery, or the size of the ice blocks flowing down the Volga as the deep freeze of winter sets in. Even combat is at times given a picturesque characterization, the strange alien beauty of a deadly environment. In the article “A New Day,” Grossman highlights the contrasting blues of incendiary shells and the “paler blue eyes of Aryan searchlights.” In the same article, he compares the aural environment of combat to that of factory work:
This music of destruction sounds strangely like the factory’s peacetime work. It could be the sounds of riveting, or steam hammers flattening pig iron, or scrap metal being broken up in the pile-driver workshop to feed the Marten furnaces. The light now flickering on the young Volga ice could be the pink glow of liquid steel streaming into giant scoops.
In the “The Battle of Stalingrad,” we are given a tableau of the sky. “Hundreds of luminous threads—red, white, and blue lines of tracer bullets—stretched up to the bombers from the German antiaircraft guns. In return our bombers spewed out white threads of machine-gun fire at the German searchlights.” An article on the Red Army’s advance across Poland in the summer of 1944 opens by noting the various kinds of grain and fruit that grow in the country, and how bountiful the cherry harvest was that season. At the start of “The Hell of Treblinka,” on the subject of the operations of the death camp, Grossman notes the soil quality in the area’s surroundings: “The soil here is poor and barren, and the peasants do not cultivate it. And so the wilderness has remained wilderness. The ground is partly covered by moss, with scraggly pines here and there. Now and then a jackdaw flies by, or a bright-colored crested hoopoe.” Grossman also consistently describes how loud the guns are, what the shriek of dive bombers sounds like, the rumble of the tanks, how jeeps shake and rattle.
Grossman wrote these articles on little to no sleep, sheltering in a bunker or in the ruins of a destroyed building. Ortenberg noted that “He had taught himself to work in any conditions, however difficult—out in the open, in a bunker by the light of an oil lamp, lying in bed or in a peasant hut crammed with people.” He made the perilous journey across the Volga from Soviet HQ on the east bank into the city multiple times, staying with the soldiers fighting and dying for up to a week or more at a time. The beginning of the article “The Battle of Stalingrad” reports on the massive operation of the Soviets initially crossing the Volga under German fire and the threat of dive bombers, with one of the troop ferries being blown out of the water. The article “In the Path of the Main Thrust,” depicting the struggle of Siberian regiments tasked with defending the factories on the northern end of Stalingrad in November 1942, comes from Grossman crossing the Volga and embedding himself with the regiments. Grossman was aware of the risks; in a letter Grossman wrote to his editor Ortenberg at the end of November 1942, he discussed preparing for another crossing the Volga into Stalingrad proper for another round of reporting. “Should my visit to the west bank be accompanied by any unexpected misfortunes, I ask you to provide help to my family.”
The dark center of the collection is Grossman’s famous article, “The Hell of Treblinka,” from the autumn of 1944, his account of the death camp where some 750,000 or more people, the majority of whom were Jews, were gassed to death. “The Hell of Treblinka” was previously published by NYRB Classics in 2010 in a collection of Grossman’s miscellaneous writing and short stories, The Road: Stories, Journalism, and Essays. The translation included here is slightly updated and revised. Grossman, on top of his reporting during the war, also worked with the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee (JAC), a Soviet organization established at the beginning of the war as a propaganda effort to help boost support for the Soviet Union abroad among Jews, especially Jews in the United States, by highlighting Jewish assimilation and achievements in the Soviet Union. As the war developed, the JAC became increasingly involved in documenting Nazi crimes against Jews, becoming the first organization to investigate the Holocaust. Grossman was essential to these efforts, conducting interviews with survivors as he moved west with the Red Army, as well as gathering evidence from the testimony of witnesses and Nazi POWs. Grossman was one of the first reporters on scene for the liberation and discovery of concentration and deaths camps by the Soviets, and pooled collected material with his friend and colleague Ilya Ehrenburg to create The Black Book, one of the first efforts to document and account for the Holocaust in the Soviet Union. The Black Book was initially approved by the Soviet authorities and was prepared for publication, but in early 1947 the book was criticized as presenting, according to an official of the Agitprop Section of the Central Committee, a “distorted picture of the real nature of fascism.” This criticism functioned in two ways, one in terms of denying accounts of the particularity of Jewish suffering during the war, which presented a threat to the official viewpoint of the Soviet people as having suffered in common, and the other in that The Black Book gave accounts of collaboration by various Soviet peoples and nationalities with the Nazis and the carrying out of the Holocaust. In both ways, The Black Book presented an inconvenient and implicit critique of the loadbearing concepts of Soviet unity and shared suffering in the war. To focus on Jewish suffering was, in the eyes of the Soviet authorities, to engage in nationalist chauvinism. Publication of The Black Book was officially scrapped in August 1947, with various copies sent abroad by members of the JAC to try to salvage the project. A full Russian text of The Black Book wouldn’t be published until 1980, in Jerusalem. A complete English translation was not published until 2002.
In many of the towns and cities that Grossman reported from in Ukraine, there is war again.
“The Hell of Treblinka” is both a journalistic investigation of the death camp and a philosophical rumination on its workings and meanings. Grossman writes of walking through the site of the camp, torn down by the Nazis by November 1943 in an attempt to hide its existence, the earth spongy from the loose soil filling in mass graves where hundreds of thousands of people were buried after being gassed, then later exhumed and burned in massive cremation pits created out of crisscrossed steel beams, which Grossman likens to grill pits, with bones, hair, and miscellaneous objects being found just under foot even months after the end of the camp’s operations. One of the objects Grossman found while at Treblinka was a child’s play building block. According to Grossman’s daughter, he kept this building block from the death camp on his writing desk. While Grossman penned his novels Stalingrad and Life and Fate then, he was gazing at this block, the reminder of Treblinka always in front of him.
There is some bitterness in reading this collection at the present moment. In many of the towns and cities that Grossman reported from in Ukraine, there is war again. Reading Grossman’s descriptions of Soviet soldiers advancing across the Ukrainian steppe in the spring of 1944, fighting to take cities on the southern Dnieper, such as Nikopol, bogged down by mud and rain, in his piece “Thoughts on the Spring Offensive,” I was struck by the dissonance of history. Russian drones recently attacked Nikopol at the end of May 2026. Berdichev, the city of Grossman’s birth and where his mother was killed by the Nazis, was hit with Russian air strikes at the beginning of the Russian invasion of Ukraine.
According to Grossman’s daughter, all he read during the war years was War and Peace. “Bombers. Shelling. Hellish thunder.” wrote Grossman in a letter, “It’s impossible to read. It’s impossible to read anything except War and Peace.” In his article “Volga-Stalingrad,” Grossman opened with his 1942 visit to Yasnaya Polyana, Tolstoy’s liberated estate, “The house has been rebuilt. Flowers are blossoming again. Once more the austere simplicity of the great writer’s grave touches the heart.” Tolstoy’s view of history, with its rejection of the idea of Great Men and premised on an inherent unknowability, is born out in Grossman’s wartime articles. For Grossman, it is the little men and their small actions that move history. Meanwhile, the grand narratives of Soviet progress have gone awry, the state collapsing and breaking apart. Out of a failed utopia a new corrupt state has emerged, driven by oligarchical interests and narratives of reclaiming lost greatness. The newspaper Red Star continues on as the official publication of the Russian military. Today, the men who to whom it is distributed and read by fight and die in Ukraine against fellow descendants of those who defeated the Nazis. Grossman’s own life and fate were troubled: As Robert Chandler and Julia Volohova characterize him, Grossman was split into two figures by the Soviet authorities, indicative of his two great novels; “a dissident Jew whose work must be silenced, and a ‘voice of the Soviet people,’ who could be celebrated.” Sentences adapted from Grossman’s article “In the Path of the Main Thrust” are part of the war memorial in present day Vologograd at the site of the Mamayev Kurgan, where some of the bloodiest fighting in Stalingrad took place, and on which now stands The Motherland Calls, the massive sculpture of the personification of Russia. In granite, along the wall bordering the Square of Heroes, the first sentence is from the perspective of a German soldier “They are marching toward us again; are they mortal?” Inside the mausoleum, pressed in gold, is the response: “Yes, we were mortal indeed, and few of us survived, but we all carried out our patriotic duty before holy Mother Russia.” Grossman is not credited.