However, as part of the growing promotion of anti-Semitism by the Stalinist bureaucracy, The Black Book documenting the Holocaust that he and fellow writer Ilya Ehrenburg co-authored was pulped in 1947. Grossman was the first journalist to cover the Nazi genocide of Eastern European Jewry. During World War II, he became one of the most popular war correspondents with the Red Army.

In the late 1920s and early 1930s, Grossman met Left Oppositionists, including the Trotskyist literary critic Alexander Voronsky, and many figures from the Communist International (Comintern).Īlthough many of his friends and colleagues were arrested and executed, Grossman survived the Great Terror of 1937-1938. Though never a party member, he witnessed first hand the major political and literary debates and struggles of the 1920s, in which Leon Trotsky’s Left Opposition opposed the nationalist betrayal of the October Revolution by the Soviet bureaucracy. After the 1917 October Revolution and the civil war, Grossman moved to Moscow in 1923 where he studied to become an engineer. Soviet writer Vasily Grossman ( Stalingrad, Life and Fate, The People Immortal) was born in 1905, the year of the first Russian Revolution, in Berdichev, a town in what is now Ukraine, which then formed part of the Russian Empire.

Stalingrad book grossman