In the mind of Vasily Grossman, the October Revolution was nothing but the newest stage of a 900 year march of "nonfreedom" in Russia. Centuries of czarist oppression instantaneously collapsed; replacing it was the purest incarnation of serfdom yet known to mankind.
"Implacable suppression of the individual ran continuously throughout Russia's thousand-year history. Slave subjugation of the individual to the state and to the sovereign. ... The shattering of Russian life carried out by Lenin was thoroughgoing. Lenin destroyed the way of life dominated by the outlook of the landed nobles; he destroyed the factory owners and merchants. Yet Lenin himself was a slave of Russian history, and he preserved that link between progress and slavery that has historically been Russia's curse."
As Russia slowly developed to the tune of the West through the 18th and 19th centuries, serfdom slowly intensified--only to be shattered by Alexander II. Into the void flowed a host of revolutionary Western ideas which destabilized and eventually toppled the throne.
But the nation of nonfreedom could not shake off its shackles. At first, the new state was a theoretical means to a utopian end. If liberty was to be sacrificed in the short-term, so be it. Quickly it became apparent that the state was a self-perpetuating end. In 1937, the radicals of 1917 were liquidated. Those who had swept the path of communism had become hindrances, anachronisms. The apparatus was set in motion.
"Lenin laid the foundations. Stalin erected the superstructure. And now the state without freedom has been put into operation."
Grossman was a victim of the third, "automated" stage of the communist succession. Born into a family of emancipated Ukranian Jews, Grossman studied mine engineering and worked in that profession until he devoted his life to writing. He was one of the luckier Soviet authors of the era. Although his father was a Menshevik and his common-law wife fell under the eye of the Great Purge, Grossman's socialist-realist early work was met with approval by the authorities.
Myopic and short in stature, the young writer was overlooked for military service upon the outbreak of the Great Patriotic War. Instead, he became a front-line journalist. Grossman's candid reporting for Krasnaya Zvezda, a military periodical, instantaneously won him the admiration of the soldiers of the Red Army. He accompanied that body on its struggle from Stalingrad to Berlin, witnessing most major operations firsthand and becoming one of the first to document the horrors of the Holocaust. An excellent assemblage of writing from his journey can be found in Writer at War.
Although he did not definitively know it at the time, his mother was one of those killed in the Holocaust. Along with almost 30,000 other Jews, she was shot outside the Grossmans' hometown of Berdichev. In a chapter of his greatest novel, Life and Fate, Grossman reconstructs his mother's fate through a letter to his semi-autobiographical main character.
Life and Fate is a searing indictment of the Soviet Union. Pre-dating One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich by three years, Grossman's magnum opus demonstrates the congruence between Nazi Fascism and Soviet Communism. Upon presenting the manuscript for publication in 1959, the KGB raided his apartment and confiscated all traces of the book. Although Khrushchev's thaw was under way, the Party's ideological overlord, Mikhail Suslov, declared that the book would not be published for at least 200 years. Only in the 1980s did Andrei Sakharov and Vladimir Voinovich manage to smuggle photographic film of a hidden copy out of the Soviet Union to be published in the West.
After the unsuccessful publication of Life and Fate, Grossman became a non-entity in his nation. In 1963, one year before his death, Grossman completed his last novel, Forever Flowing. It was not to be published in the Soviet Union until 1989.
Grossman's grand historical narrative of nonfreedom in Russia touched upon at the beginning of this post occupies the last segment of Forever Flowing. It is an observation of Grossman's main character, Ivan Grigoryevich, who has returned to mainstream society after 30 years of torture, imprisonment, and hard labor. Ivan initially travels to Moscow, where he meets his cousin, Nikolai Andreyevich. Possessing false pride in never having abetted the implementation of Stalin's purges, Nikolai wants to confess his guilt through complacency to Ivan, but cannot muster the courage to atone. He and his petty wife are relieved when Ivan soon departs.
Thinking that St. Petersburg might provide an emotional haven, Ivan finds that history has moved on without him. The love of his life, who apparently stopped inquiring about him many years hence, was still alive and free while he suffered in the Gulag; although Ivan does not know it, the old and prosperous university comrade he encounters on the street was his chief denouncer. Longing to retreat into the solace of his childhood, Ivan makes his final peregrination of the book and turns south to a city near his birthplace on the Black Sea.
Grossman's protagonist barely ekes out a living at a factory that employs the handicapped and rents a nook in war widow Anna Sergeyevna's home. She is the only one who understands Ivan's suffering. In one chapter Anna provides a vivid account of her time working in a small Ukrainian Party bureau, when she witnessed the great famine following the liquidation of the kulaks. This story alone, fictional though it may be, discredits communism, autocracy, and indifference.
At two points in the book--once at the beginning in his mind, and once at the end in person--Ivan returns to his childhood home. It is a scar in the earth, like the Circassian villages destroyed by czarist conquest generations before. Soon nature will obliterate its remains forever. Like Ivan, it will leave no mark.
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