The Life and Fate of Vasily Grossman

John Garrard, Carol Garrard

• Publisher: Pen & Sword Military
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781781594049
• Topic: Littérature
• Subtopic: Biographies littéraires

"A definitive treatment of one of the Soviet Union's most significant writers."—The Russian Review Vasily Grossman (1905–64), one of the greatest authors of the twentieth century, served for over 1, 000 days with the Red Army as a war correspondent on the Eastern front. He was present during the street-fighting at Stalingrad, and his 1944 report "The Hell of Treblinka, " was the first eyewitness account of a Nazi death camp. Though he finished the war as a decorated lieutenant colonel, his epic account of the battle of Stalingrad, Life and Fate, was suppressed by Soviet authorities, and never published in his lifetime. Declared a non-person, Grossman died in obscurity. Only in 1980, with the posthumous publication in Switzerland of Life and Fate was his remarkable novel to gain an international reputation. This meticulously researched biography by John and Carol Garrard uses archival and unpublished sources that only became available after the collapse of the Soviet Union. A gripping narrative. "Fascinating... gives the reader a very clear insight into the horrors of the War on the Eastern Front... For anyone interested either in WWII or Soviet Communism, this book is a must."—R.J. (Dick) Lloyd, author of Three Glorious Years "Grossman is a sufficiently important Soviet cultural figure to deserve a biography, and through his the Garrards say a good deal about cultural politics, internal repression, and antisemitism in the Soviet Union."— Foreign Affairs

Chapter 1

THE TSAR'S STEPCHILDREN ENTER THE PROMISED LAND

Instead of allowing each day, pushed back by the next, to lapse into imprecise memory, [the artist] shapes again the experiences which have shaped him. He is at once the captive and the liberator.

—Richard Ellman, James Joyce

Fiddler on the Roof, the successful Broadway musical based on the short stories of Sholem Aleichem, offers a somewhat rosy picture of prerevolutionary Jewish life in the same region of Ukraine near Kiev where Grossman was born and spent his childhood. In fact, Sholem Aleichem also lived for several years in Berdichev and used it as one of the models for Anatevka, the fictional setting of some of his stories. But Grossman, although born and brought up in Berdichev, came from a stratum of Jewish society that is not portrayed in the musical: its professional upper class. Grossman's parents were not only Russified but Europeanized, and they had little in common with the characters of Fiddler on the Roof, or indeed those of the town of Berdichev itself. Grossman confided once to his daughter, Katya:

We were not like the poor shtetl Jews (mestechkovaya bednota) described by Sholem Aleichem; the type that lived in hovels and slept side by side on the floor, packed like sardines. No, our family comes from a quite different Jewish background. They had their own carriages and trotters. Their women wore diamonds, and they sent their children abroad to study.¹

Grossman's parents had no interest in Judaism or any other religion. They spoke and read Russian, not Yiddish (Ukrainian was spoken chiefly by the lower classes). His mother was fluent in French, and his father must have known German very well because he studied at Bern University in Switzerland. Grossman himself never tried to learn Yiddish, the language of the overwhelming majority of Berdichev's Jews.²

Grossman's parents had only one thing in common with the Jewish characters that populated both Aleichem's fictional world and the real one in Ukraine: they, and other wealthy Jews, shared with their impoverished brethren the predicament of living in a state of suspended tension—like Rebbe Tevye's image of the fiddler on a roof in Anatevka. However much at home they might feel with Russian culture, people like Grossman's parents were poised astride two communities, neither of which would accept them: the Jews of the shtetl on the one hand, and the Christian Russians and Ukrainians on the other. The typical Orthodox Christian believers of the Russian Empire regarded their Jewish compatriots with the same mixture of religious contempt and hostility once universal centuries before in Catholic Europe, particularly during and immediately after the Crusades.

The prevailing antisemitism of late-nineteenth-century Russia partook of the same medieval mind-set expressed half a millennium earlier by Chaucer. His Prioress speaks of a seven-year-old boy killed by Jews and ends her tale by alluding to the case of “yonge Hugh of Lyncoln, slayn also/With cursed Jewes” (lines 1874–75)—a famous case that had occurred in 1255. In 1290 all Jews were expelled from England; they were permitted to return in small numbers only in the seventeenth century and later. This kind of fanatical hatred, inspired by the Crusades and deliberately fanned by church leaders, endured for centuries. However, growing secularization in Western Europe and the influence of humanism and the Enlightenment made the life of Jews more tolerable, especially from the time of Napoleon.

In direct contrast, the Russian Orthodox church remained suspended, immobilized, in a medieval time warp. After the fall of Constantinople to the Turks in 1453, Moscow came to view itself as the queen of Christendom, a “Third Rome” shining as a beacon of hope to all other Christian countries, and particularly to the Orthodox Serbs in the Balkans under Turkish domination. The first Rome had fallen to the “Latin heretics.” The second Rome was Emperor Constantine's namesake on the Bosporus, now in the hands of the Muslim Turks. With their own patriarch living in Moscow, Russians considered their capital the only center of the true faith of Orthodoxy and indeed of all Christianity. There was no place at all for Jews in the Third Rome, and the “Latin Heretics” were admitted only very cautiously by the ambitious Tsar Ivan the Terrible in the sixteenth century. But their activities were circumscribed, and they were kept in a kind of Western ghetto, the so-called Foreign Quarter of Moscow (the Nemetskaya sloboda).

It was Peter the Great who ended Russia's isolation at the beginning of the eighteenth century by moving the capital from Moscow to a newly created city on the Baltic, modestly named after himself and canonized, St. Petersburg. Russian conservatives, most notably within the Orthodox church itself, strongly opposed this subversive accommodation with the Latin heretics, but there was little they could do when the Empress Catherine, a minor German princess, had her dull-witted Prussianized husband killed, usurped the throne in 1762, and declared that she was going to continue Peter's policies of modernizing, that is, of Europeanizing Russia. It was in fact Catherine who incidentally created Russia's “Jewish problem” in the late eighteenth century by absorbing large chunks of Poland and what had been Polish-controlled Belorussian and Ukrainian territorities into her expanding empire. She also created her own personal dilemma because she saw herself as enlightened; she corresponded with Voltaire and welcomed Diderot to her court. The empress thus felt obliged to implement a rational Jewish policy in her domains. Furthermore, she realized that the power of an expanding Russia depended on mercantile activity as well as military conquest, and she knew from her native Germany that educated Jews had abilities that could prove useful. Catherine's opening up of opportunities to Jews in Russia reflects the more liberal treatment of Jews in Western Europe at this same time.

An overwhelming majority of Jews lived in the cities and towns of the Russian Empire, so in 1780 Catherine assigned them to two existing legal categories, merchants (kuptsy) and townsmen (meshchane), depending on their socioeconomic position.³ The meshchane became an instant urban lower class in a state where well over 90 percent of the population worked on the land. In 1785 Catherine decided to define the merchant class in greater detail. She issued her Charter to the Towns, which decreed that the merchants be subdivided into three newly established guilds. Catherine did not stress her enlightened attitude by singling out Jews and insisting that they were to be admitted to the guilds. Rather she made it clear that no persons who possessed the necessary wealth could be excluded from the guilds, whether they were Jewish or belonged to any other religious, ethnic, or social group, or were women:

Any persons, whatever their sex, or age, or birth, or line, or family, or commerce, or business, or handicraft, or trade, who by their own declaration have wealth in excess of one thousand rubles up to fifty thousand rubles, are permitted to be registered in a guild.⁴

A minimum requirement to enter the third guild was possession of wealth amounting to between 1,000 and 5,000 rubles. Those whose wealth ranged between 5,000 and 10,000 rubles could register in the second guild. Only those fortunate enough to possess between 10,000 and 50,000 rubles in property and money (an astronomical sum in late-eighteenth-century Russia) could register within the first guilds.⁵ Presumably those with wealth exceeding 50,000 rubles could aspire to membership in the nobility (dvoryanstvo), a restricted class of serf-owning landed gentry and aristocrats who enjoyed numerous privileges without having any obligations—as a direct result of Catherine's decrees.

However enlightened Catherine's decree might have appeared to her French correspondents, most Russians found the presence of Jews in their midst intolerable, and they were particularly unhappy about the mercantile activities of their new neighbors. As the age of Enlightenment was giving birth to the United States of America at the western margins of European civilization, Catherine, on its eastern margins, felt obliged to backtrack from her earlier enlightened position. To assuage the outrage expressed by Orthodox Russians, she imposed feudal requirements on her Jewish subjects. Like medieval serfs who could not leave their lord's domain and the Russian serfs of Catherine's time, Jews were restricted to an area known as the the Pale of Settlement (cherta osedlosti) and could not venture into the territory of Russia proper without special permission. The Pale was made law by an edict that Catherine sent to the Senate on December 23, 1791. In it she stated, “We hereby rule that Jews have no right whatsoever to register as merchants in the towns and in the internal harbors of Russia, and only by our express command have they been permitted to enjoy civil and urban rights in White Russia [Belorussia].”⁶ Thus the Pale of Settlement calmed both the envy and the religious fervor of devout Russians and also served the more mundane purpose of removing Jewish competition in commerce and trade.

Ironically, the language of Catherine's decree speaks of “rights” in the same breath that it denies them. In this very same year of 1791, the “Rights of Man” had been enshrined in the first ten amendments to the U.S. Constitution. America guaranteed religious tolerance. Jews in the United States were to be on exactly the same legal footing as all other citizens, a fact made clear by President George Washington, who politely but firmly refused a request from the chaplains of the Continental Army to have “Christ” or “Christian” enshrined in the new Constitution. The Jews in Russia, deemed to have no inalienable rights, would have to dance for favors from an autocrat. In place of inherent rights, such as those extolled in the French Revolution's “Liberté, Égalité, Fraternité,” the tsarist dynasty committed itself to an atavistic trinity, “Orthodoxy, Autocracy, and Nationalism,” though the precise formulation would have to wait for fifty years.

The result of Catherine's attempt to strike a balance between Russian antisemitism and European Enlightenment was to pinion her Jewish subjects on the horns of a dilemma. She encouraged Jews to continue their commercial activities, but she imposed restrictions on them to satisfy the Russian Orthodox church and its faithful believers. Even guild Jews did not constitute an official entity in Christian Russia, since births, marriages, and deaths were presided over by the church. Jews were cut off from every activity or profession except finance and trade, then blamed for doing well in these restricted fields, just as their forebears had been in medieval Europe, where Christians were forbidden to engage in “usury” since it had supposedly been condemned by Jesus in the Gospels, when he threw the moneychangers out of the temple. Jewish financial success in tsarist Russia was likewise dismissed as usury and formally condemned as an occupation forbidden to the pious.

Catherine's refusal to grant equality to her newly acquired Jewish subjects had destructive and far-reaching consequences in later Russian history. Subsequent tsars struggled with their “Jewish problem,” but it was at root insoluble, since solving it would have meant disestablishing Russian Orthodoxy as the state religion. The United States avoided a similar problem because it had wisely decided not to follow the major European states in favoring an official church. It was from the merchant class established by Catherine the Great in the eighteenth century that the thin layer of middle- and upper-class Jews, and the Jewish intelligentsia, were to spring a hundred years later. And the poor meshchane, who often enough worked for Jewish guild merchants, formed the basis of the industrial proletariat that was energized by the politically radical Jewish Bund (Union) at the end of the nineteenth century and later melded with non-Jewish workers to form the backbone of the revolutionary movement.⁷

Grossman thus came from a thin stratum of Jews who lived as a minority within a minority. Most of the empire's Jews were both religious and poor. His forebears were neither; their very sophistication and secular outlook left them isolated from and indeed alien to the religious and ethnic identity with which the tsars and the Russian Orthodox church persistently labeled them. Grossman's ancestors belonged to the second merchant guild, a clear mark of significant standing and wealth.⁸ Grossman's father, Semyon Osipovich, came from a family of merchants in Bessarabia. He was born in Reni, located just inside what is now the southern border that the newly independent state of Mordova shares with Rumania. The family traded in wholesale grain. On his mother's side, Grossman descended from the Vitis family, which had emigrated to Odessa from Lithuania generations earlier. Family lore suggested that a rather shady character had helped establish the Vitis fortunes in Odessa, a center for Jewish criminals, graphically recorded in Isaak Babel's famous collection, Odessa Tales. Odessa developed rapidly in the nineteenth century as the major port for Russian grain sales abroad, until the American combine harvester led to a price war that practically destroyed the Russian grain trade.

The guild system laid down rules for commercial development that worked well initially and gave successful Jews increasing opportunities to participate in Russian cultural and economic life. The privileges that extended to members of the guilds were carefully ranked and graded, like everything else in the heavily militarized and rank-conscious Russian Empire. Only members of the first guild could move and travel freely outside the Pale of Settlement. Then, during the reign of the reforming tsar Alexander II (1856–1881), a series of liberal laws gave Jews in merchant guilds some valuable civil rights. Most important, in 1859 first guild members were granted the privilege of registering to live in any city within Russia. By the latter half of the nineteenth century, a tiny number of Jews had managed to become vastly wealthy.⁹

Jews, already a stigmatized group, knew that membership in the guilds carried with it privileges that would make their lives much easier. True, they were excluded from the Table of Ranks, by which all Russian citizens above the peasantry were graded legally and administratively, since admission required an oath to the Orthodox tsar before an Orthodox priest.¹⁰ However, as members of the second guild, the Grossman and Vitis families had a special legal status, whose importance cannot be overstated. His grandparents benefited from the broad range of political, educational, and social reforms enacted by Alexander II. The “Tsar-Emancipator” not only freed the serfs in 1861; he also enabled Jews, at least those in the elite, to participate in the life of the country on a more equal basis. It was Alexander II who ended the requirement for selected Jewish boys to enter military camps (“cantonments”), where they were socialized and formally converted to Christianity. Modest as Alexander's reforms might seem to a Westerner, they led in the 1870s to a brief golden age for those Russian Jews already in the guilds. Now they could participate in life outside the Pale of Settlement.

Grossman's parents were born precisely at the outset of this decade: Semyon Osipovich in 1870 and Yekaterina Savelievna in 1871. For the next ten years upper-class, educated Jews, usually after converting to Christianity (at least nominally), entered commerce and finance and helped Russia belatedly join the nineteenth century. Alexander II began the great age of railroad building in Russia. The railroad reached Berdichev in 1870.¹¹ It was the junction for important lines: one from Zhitomir to Kazatin ran through the town, as did another from Shepetovka to the west.¹² Berdichev's strategic location as a railway nexus was crucial to its modest prosperity in the nineteenth century; it thus attracted special attention from the German Wehrmacht in 1941.

As Jews became more visible during the reign of Alexander II, their presence and their financial success increasingly aroused public expressions of envy and hostility. This atmosphere is faithfully recorded in novels by the two most celebrated writers of the time, Dostoevsky and Tolstoy. Both were conservatives, but Dostoevsky's conservativism was fundamentally religious, whereas Tolstoy's derived from his patriarchal outlook on everything from industrialization to women's rights.

As early as 1866, in Crime and Punishment Dostoevsky consistently and pejoratively links Jews with wealth and capitalism. At one point, for example, Svidrigaylov complains that “Jews have flocked here [St. Petersburg] and are hoarding money.” Raskolnikov, to whom he is speaking, makes no effort to question this opinion. In the 1870s, when Jews began to become quite prominent in Moscow and St. Petersburg circles, Dostoevsky let loose a stream of vituperative articles in a journal he edited in the last decade of his life. Leo Tolstoy was equally matter-of-fact about his prejudices. In Anna Karenina, written and set in the 1870s, Tolstoy carefully associates his dislike of Jews with the development of railroads—a symbol of evil that runs through the novel. Stiva Oblonsky, having wasted all his own money and most of his wife's inheritance on wine, women, and song, must lower himself to seek a position on a committee that deals with credi...