{"id":69248,"date":"2019-04-08T17:05:04","date_gmt":"2019-04-08T15:05:04","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/?p=69248"},"modified":"2019-04-08T16:46:11","modified_gmt":"2019-04-08T14:46:11","slug":"17-05-40","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/?p=69248","title":{"rendered":"Robert Fulford: Brave Soviet dissident Vasily Grossman gets recognition at last"},"content":{"rendered":"
<\/a>Robert Fulford: Brave Soviet dissident Vasily Grossman gets recognition at last<\/a><\/strong><\/span><\/h5>\n

Robert Fulford<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n

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A century later, the quality of Vasily Grossman’s work has given him a spectacular posthumous victory.Wikipedia<\/em><\/span><\/p>\n

A Soviet censor who checked out a novel by Vasily Grossman, Life and Fate, delivered some bad news to the author. Not only was he banning Life and Fate but he also had a bleak prediction of Grossman\u2019s future as an author. He said an explosive book of that kind probably wouldn\u2019t be publishable for another 200 or 300 years.<\/strong><\/p>\n

By the 1940s Grossman (1905-1964) had learned to expect this treatment. He was one of a kind, an author who lived under a severe dictatorship but nevertheless wrote as a free man, conveying his own empathy for people he found suffering. Censors managed to keep Life and Fate unpublished till after his death, rightly claiming that it criticized the Soviet government and even Joseph Stalin himself. Grossman\u2019s book defended the rebel Leon Trotsky and cast doubt on the Soviet system. It compared the U.S.S.R. to Hitler\u2019s Nazi regime. This issue was turned over to the secret police, who raided Grossman\u2019s apartment and confiscated every scrap of the manuscript.<\/span><\/p>\n

Roughly a century later, the quality of Grossman\u2019s work has given him a spectacular posthumous victory. Far from being a nobody who could be brushed aside by civil servants and censors, Grossman now looks like a heroic Russian writer who managed to oppose both Hitler and Stalin as equally brutal dictators. Published first in Switzerland, Life and Fate gave him a large reputation through translations.<\/span><\/p>\n

He was one of a kind, an author who lived under a severe dictatorship but nevertheless wrote as a free man<\/strong><\/p>\n

The latest of many tributes to him is a biography, Vasily Grossman and the Soviet Century (Yale University Press), by Alexandra Popoff. She\u2019s clearly spent years in loving dedication of her research, effectively reviving a remarkable life and career.<\/span><\/p>\n

He was a journalist and war correspondent with the Russian army who revealed the Nazi death camps, then went home and recognized the horror of Stalin\u2019s regime. He first encountered the Nazi Holocaust at Treblinka in Poland, where more than 700,000 Jews died and where he wrote that the Nazis condemned Jews to \u201cthe abyss of nonbeing.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

A Jew himself, he worked at revealing the extent of the Holocaust, contributing to the 500-page Black Book. He realized \u201cthe paramount importance of facing facts.\u201d He wrote of \u201cthe writer\u2019s duty to tell the terrible truth, and it is a reader\u2019s civic duty to learn this truth.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

From left to right, former Russian leader Josef Stalin and Soviet politician Nikolai Bukharin are seen Nov. 21, 1930. AP Photo<\/em><\/span><\/p>\n

Popoff incorporates \u201cand the Soviet Century\u201d in her book\u2019s title. Her intention, well carried out, is to depict Grossman\u2019s life and the life of the Soviet Union as they developed. You cannot read her book without learning a great deal about Soviet life. She sees him dealing with the routine difficulties of day-by-day Soviet existence even as the leaders of the state improvise in the face of both factual and fictional challenges. The notorious fantasy of the \u201cDoctors\u2019 Plot\u201d demonstrates the perverse evolution into paranoia of a whole society.<\/span><\/p>\n

In December, 1952 Stalin declared during a meeting of U.S.S.R. leaders: \u201cEvery Jew is a nationalist and an agent of American intelligence.\u201d This announced a new level of mental illness flowing through Russia. A month later, Pravda\u2019s front page announced the \u201cDoctors\u2019 Plot.\u201d TASS, the government news wire, reported that nine \u201cdoctors-saboteurs\u201d had been arrested as terrorists. Six of them were Jews, said to be linked to an international Jewish bourgeois-nationalist organization, guided by American intelligence. Supposedly, they were intent on destroying the Soviet leadership. Other newspapers wrote about \u201ckiller doctors\u201d and their plot. Shortly after, Stalin had a stroke and his colleagues asked which doctors should be summoned. Several were named but all of them were in prison. During Stalin\u2019s sickness, The Literary Gazette said the Soviet writers had a task portraying \u201cthe greatest genius of all time and all peoples \u2014 the immortal Stalin.\u201d After Stalin died, the plot was slowly forgotten.<\/span><\/p>\n

It would be pleasant to report that Grossman\u2019s work is now cherished by his fellow Russians. But the last paragraph in Popoff\u2019s book suggests that he doesn\u2019t appeal to a nation that still yearns (as Vladimir Putin does) for the restoration of national pride.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cGrossman remains unpopular in Russia. It\u2019s easier to believe in a glorious past than to admit that Stalinism and Nazism were mirror images of each other.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

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Robert Fulford: Brave Soviet dissident Vasily Grossman gets recognition at last Robert Fulford A century later, the quality of Vasily Grossman’s work has given him a spectacular posthumous victory.Wikipedia A Soviet censor who checked out a novel by Vasily Grossman, Life and Fate, delivered some bad news to the author. Not only was he banning […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[6],"tags":[26,24],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/69248"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=69248"}],"version-history":[{"count":10,"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/69248\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":69270,"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/69248\/revisions\/69270"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=69248"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=69248"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=69248"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}