Life and Fate (Stalingrad, #2)

by Vasily Grossman

‘But an invisible force was crushing him. He could feel its weight, its hypnotic power; it was forcing him to think as it wanted, to write as it dictated. This force was inside him; it could dissolve his will and cause his heart to stop beating (. . .) Only people who have never felt such a force themselves can be surprised that others submit to it. Those who have felt it, on the other hand, feel astonished that a man can rebel against it even for a moment – with one sudden word of anger, one timid gesture of protest.’12

Grossman describes the development of a spirit of camaraderie and egalitarianism among the defenders of Stalingrad; he then shows this spirit being stamped out by Party functionaries who see it as more dangerous even than the Germans. He writes equally movingly about the general sadness in Stalingrad after the Russian victory, when the ruined city has ceased to be the focus of the world’s attention, a ‘world capital’ whose ‘soul was freedom’, and has been reduced to being merely a ruined city like any other ruined city.

the unusual idea that totalitarian states operate on the same principles as modern physics, both concerned more with probabilities than with cause and effect, more with vast aggregates than with individual people or particles, threads its way through the whole length of the novel.

‘whenever we see the dawn of an eternal good (. . .) whenever we see this dawn, the blood of children and old people is always shed. (. . .) Human history is not the battle of good struggling to overcome evil. It is a battle fought by a great evil struggling to crush a small kernel of human kindness.’

The people with green stripes on their jackets, the thieves and burglars, were a privileged caste: the authorities relied on them to supervise the politicals. Giving common criminals power over political prisoners was yet another innovation of National Socialism.

Fascism arrived at the idea of the liquidation of entire strata of the population, of entire nations and races, on the grounds that there was a greater probability of overt or covert opposition among these groupings than among others: the mechanics of probabilities and of human aggregates.

One of the most astonishing human traits that came to light at this time was obedience. There were cases of huge queues being formed by people awaiting execution – and it was the victims themselves who regulated the movement of these queues.

The instinct for self-preservation is supported by the hypnotic power of world ideologies. These call people to carry out any sacrifice, to accept any means, in order to achieve the highest of ends: the future greatness of the motherland, world progress, the future happiness of mankind, of a nation, of a class.

Man’s innate yearning for freedom can be suppressed but never destroyed. Totalitarianism cannot renounce violence. If it does, it perishes. Eternal, ceaseless violence, overt or covert, is the basis of totalitarianism. Man does not renounce freedom voluntarily. This conclusion holds out hope for our time, hope for the future.

No. Chekhov is the bearer of the greatest banner that has been raised in the thousand years of Russian history – the banner of a true, humane, Russian democracy, of Russian freedom, of the dignity of the Russian man. Our Russian humanism has always been cruel, intolerant, sectarian. From Avvakum to Lenin our conception of humanity and freedom has always been partisan and fanatical. It has always mercilessly sacrificed the individual to some abstract idea of humanity. Even Tolstoy, with his doctrine of non-resistance to Evil, is intolerant – and his point of departure is not man but God. He wants the idea of goodness to triumph. True believers always want to bring God to man by

‘Chekhov said: let’s put God – and all these grand progressive ideas – to one side. Let’s begin with man; let’s be kind and attentive to the individual man – whether he’s a bishop, a peasant, an industrial magnate, a convict in the Sakhalin Islands or a waiter in a restaurant. Let’s begin with respect, compassion and love for the individual – or we’ll never get anywhere. That’s democracy, the still unrealized democracy of the Russian people.

Once, during his last year at university, Viktor had thrown a copy of Pravda on to the floor and said to a fellow student: ‘It’s so deadly boring. How can anyone ever read it?’ Immediately afterwards he had felt terrified. He had picked up the newspaper, smoothed its pages and smiled weakly. Even now, years later,

the memory of that pitiful, hang-dog smile was enough to make him break out into a sweat.

I’ve just been reading Hemingway. When his characters have a serious conversation, they are always drinking. Cocktails, whisky, rum, cognac, more cocktails, more cognac, still more different brands of whisky. Whereas the Russian intelligentsia has always had its important discussions over a glass of tea. The members of “People’s Will”, the Populists, the Social Democrats all came together over glasses of weak tea. Lenin and his friends even planned the Revolution over a glass of weak tea. Though apparently Stalin prefers cognac.’

The steppe has one other unchanging characteristic: day and night, summer and winter, in foul weather or fine weather, it speaks of freedom. If someone has lost his freedom, the steppe will remind him of it .

‘Incidentally, there’s only one of you I really respect – and that’s Stalin. He’s a real man! The rest of you are just cissies. He understands the true basis of Socialism in One Country: iron terror, labour camps and medieval witch-trials!’

Nevertheless, though he had several Jewish friends himself, he had to admit that there was such a thing as a German soul and a German character – which meant that there must also be a Jewish soul and a Jewish character.

It was as though Marx were a physicist who had based a theory of the structure of matter on centrifugal forces and had felt only contempt for the universal forces of gravitational attraction. He had defined the centrifugal forces between the different classes and had succeeded more clearly than anyone in showing how they had operated throughout human history. But, like many great theoreticians, he had overestimated the importance of the forces he had discovered; he had believed that these forces alone determined the development of a society and the course of history. He had not so much as glimpsed the powerful forces that hold a nation together in spite of class differences; his social physics, based on a contempt for the universal law of national attraction, was simply absurd. The State is not an effect; it is a cause! The law that determines the birth of a nation-state is something miraculous and wonderful. A state is a living unity; it alone has the power to express what is most precious, what is truly

immortal in millions of people – a German character, a German heart, a German will, a German spirit of sacrifice.

The campaign in Africa had begun triumphantly. Fierce punishment had been meted out to the English at Dunkirk, in Norway and Greece – and yet the British Isles remained unoccupied. There had been magnificent victories in the East, they had marched thousands of miles to the Volga – and yet the Soviet armed forces had still not been smashed once and for all. It always seemed that what mattered had already been achieved; that only chance, only some trivial delay had prevented a victory from being decisive . . .

Summer 1942! Probably only once in a lifetime is a man allowed to live through days like those. He had felt the breath of India on his face. He had felt what an avalanche would feel – if it had feelings – as it smashes through forests and forces rivers out of their beds.

He looked into Schmidt’s intelligent, piercing eyes. ‘It’s not for us to impose our will on a great strategist.’

But just as Maxwell destroyed Newton’s system of mechanics while thinking he had confirmed it, so Lenin considered himself a builder of internationalism while in actual fact he was creating the great nationalism of the twentieth century . . . And we learnt many things from Stalin. To build Socialism in One Country, one must destroy the peasants’ freedom to sow what they like and sell what they like. Stalin didn’t shilly-shally – he liquidated millions

all mankind, in turn gave way to a purely Christian good; the good of the Muslims was now distinct. Centuries passed and the good of Christianity split up into the distinct goods of Catholicism, Protestantism and Orthodoxy. And the good of Orthodoxy gave birth to the distinct goods of the old and new beliefs. At the same time there was the good of the poor and the good of the rich. And the goods of the whites, the blacks and the yellow races . . . More and more goods came into being, corresponding to each sect, race and class. Everyone outside a particular magic circle was excluded.

And what did this doctrine of peace and love bring to humanity? Byzantine iconoclasticism; the tortures of the Inquisition; the struggles against heresy

in France, Italy, Flanders and Germany; the conflict between Protestantism and Catholicism; the intrigues of the monastic orders; the conflict between Nikon and Avvakum; the crushing yoke that lay for centuries over science and freedom; the Christians who wiped out the heathen population of Tasmania; the scoundrels who burnt whole Negro villages in Africa. This doctrine caused more suffering than all the crimes of the people who did evil for its own sake . .

There is a deep and undeniable sadness in all this: whenever we see the dawn of an eternal good that will never be overcome by evil – an evil that is itself eternal but will never succeed in overcoming good – whenever we see this dawn, the blood of old people and children is always shed. Not only men, but even God himself is powerless to lessen this evil.

I saw people being annihilated in the name of an idea of good as fine and humane as the ideal of Christianity. I saw whole villages dying of hunger; I saw peasant children dying in the snows of Siberia; I saw trains bound for Siberia with hundreds and thousands of men and women from Moscow, Leningrad and every city in Russia – men and women who had been declared enemies of a great and bright idea of social good. This idea was something fine and noble – yet it killed some without mercy, crippled the lives of others, and separated wives from husbands and children from fathers. Now the horror of German Fascism has arisen. The air is full of the groans and cries of the condemned. The sky has turned black; the sun has been extinguished by the smoke of the gas ovens. And even these crimes, crimes never before seen in the Universe – even by Man on Earth – have been committed in the name of good.

And yet ordinary people bear love in their hearts, are naturally full of love and pity for any living thing. At the end of the day’s work they prefer the warmth of the hearth to a bonfire in the public square. Yes, as well as this terrible Good with a capital ‘G’, there is everyday human kindness. The kindness of an old woman carrying a piece of bread to a prisoner, the kindness of a soldier allowing a wounded enemy to drink from his

The private kindness of one individual towards another; a petty, thoughtless kindness; an unwitnessed kindness. Something we could call senseless kindness. A kindness outside any system of social or religious good. But if we think about it, we realize that this private, senseless, incidental kindness is in fact eternal. It is extended to everything living, even to a mouse, even to a bent branch that a man straightens as he walks by.

This senseless kindness is condemned in the fable about the pilgrim who warmed a snake in his bosom. It is the kindness that has mercy on a tarantula that has bitten a child. A mad, blind, kindness. People enjoy looking in stories and fables for examples of the danger of this senseless kindness. But one shouldn’t be afraid of it. One might just as well be afraid of a freshwater fish carried out by chance into the salty ocean. The harm from time to time occasioned a society, class, race or State by this senseless kindness fades away in the light that emanates from those who are endowed with it. This kindness, this stupid kindness, is what is most truly human in a human being. It is what sets man apart, the highest achievement of his soul. No, it says, life is not evil!

This kindness is both senseless and wordless. It is instinctive, blind. When Christianity clothed it in the teachings of the Church Fathers, it began to fade; its kernel became a husk. It remains potent only while it is dumb and senseless, hidden in the living darkness of

the human heart – before it becomes a tool or commodity in the hands of preachers, before its crude ore is forged into the gilt coins of holiness. It is as simple as life itself. Even t...

Today I can see the true power of evil. The heavens are empty. Man is alone on Earth. How can the flame of evil be put out? With small drops of living dew, with human kindness? No, not even the waters of all the clouds and seas can extinguish that flame – let alone a handful of dew gathered drop by drop from the time of the Gospels to the iron present . . . Yes, after despairing of finding good either in God or in Nature, I began to despair even of kindness. But the more I saw of the darkness of Fascism, the more clearly I realized that human qualities persist even on the edge of the grave, even at the door of the gas chamber.

I have seen that it is not man who is impotent in the struggle against evil, but the power of evil that is impotent in the struggle against man.

The powerlessness of kindness, of senseless kindness, is the secret of its immortality. It can never be conquered. The more stupid, the more senseless, the more helpless it may seem, the vaster it is. Evil is impotent before it. The prophets, religious teachers, reformers, social and political leaders are impotent before it. This dumb, blind love is man’s meaning.

Human history is not the battle of good struggling to overcome evil. It is a battle fought by a great evil struggling to crush a small kernel of human kindness. But if what is human in human beings has not...

He was amazed at the thought that, blinded and deafened as he was, he had been comforted by the presence of this German, had mistaken his hand for Polyakov’s. Klimov and the German looked at one another. Each had been crushed by the same terrible force, and each was equally helpless to struggle against it. They looked at one another in silence, two inhabitants of the war. The perfect, faultless, automatic reflex they both possessed – the instinct to kill – failed to function.

He began, rather timidly, to explain. ‘The Fascists have exiled the brilliant Einstein and their physics has become the physics of monkeys. But we, thank God, have halted the advance of Fascism. It all goes together: the Volga, Stalingrad, Albert Einstein – the greatest genius of our epoch – the most remote little village, an illiterate old peasant woman, and the freedom

distinguishing between a German and an Italian, a German and a Pole. They were a strange breed, a strange race. Whoever tried to compete with them in the realms of culture and the intellect was crushed with mocking indifference. The worst thing of all was the feeling one got of their intellectual power – a lively, unaggressive power that showed in their strange tastes, in the way they respected fashion while seeming indifferent or careless towards it, in the way they loved animals yet followed a totally urban life-style, in their gift for abstract speculation that was somehow combined with a passion for everything crude and primitive in both life and art . . . It was these men who were responsible for Germany’s advances in dye chemistry and the synthesis of nitrogen, who researched the properties of gamma rays and refined the production process of high-quality steel. It was to see them that foreign scientists, artists, philosophers and engineers visited Germany. And yet these were the men who were the least German of all. Their home was anywhere in the world. Their friendships were not with Germans. And their German origins were exceedingly doubtful.

A small surprise had been laid on for Eichmann and Liss during their tour of inspection. In the middle of the gas chamber, the engineers had laid a small table with hors-d’oeuvres and wine. Reineke invited Eichmann and Liss to sit down. Eichmann laughed at this charming idea and said: ‘With the greatest of pleasure.’

‘Just imagine! In two years’ time, we’ll be sitting at a comfortable table in this same office and saying: “In twenty months we’ve solved a problem that humanity failed to solve in the course of twenty centuries.”’

In Liss’s view, there were four main categories of leaders. The first were the simple, undivided natures, usually people without particular intelligence or finesse. These people were full of slogans and formulae from newspapers and magazines, of quotations from Hitler’s speeches, Goebbels’s articles and the books of Franck and Rosenberg. Without solid ground under their feet, they were lost. They seldom reflected on the connections between different phenomena and they were easily moved to intolerance and cruelty. They

took everything seriously: philosophy, National Socialist science and its obscure revelations, the new music, the achievements of the new theatre, the campaign for the elections to the Reichstag. Like schoolchildren, they got together in little groups to mug up Mein Kampf and to make précis of pamphlets and articles. They usually lived in relatively modest circumstances, sometimes experiencing actual need; they were more ready than the other categories to volunteer for posts that would take them away from their families. To begin with, Liss had thought that Eichmann belonged to this category. The second category were the intelligent cynics, the people who knew of the existence of the magic wand. In the company of friends they trusted, they were ready to laugh at most things – the ignorance of newly appointed lecturers and professors, the stupidity and the lax morals of Leiters and Gauleiters. The only things they never laughed at were grand ideals and the Führer himself. These men usually drank a lot and lived more expansively. They were to be met with most frequently on the higher rungs of the Party hierarchy; the lower rungs were usually occupied by men of the first category.

The men of the third category held sway at the very top of the hierarchy. There was only room for nine or ten of them, and they admitted perhaps anot...

Here were no dogmas. Here everything could be discussed freely. Here were no ideals, nothing but serenity, mathematics and the ...

Liss had also noticed that the appearance of more limited minds in the higher echelons always heralded some sinister turn of events. The controllers of the social mechanism elevated the dogmatists only in order to entrust them with especially bloody tasks. These simpletons became temporarily intoxicated with power, but on the completion of their tasks they usually disappeared; sometimes they shared the fate of their victims. The serene masters then remained in control undisturbed.

The fourth category were the executives, people who were indifferent to dogma, ideas and philosophy and equally lacking in analytic ability. National Socialism paid them and they served it.

Their only real passion was for dinner-services, suits, country houses, jewels, furniture, cars and refrigerators. They were less fond of money as they never fully believed in its solidity.

But at some terrifying height, above even these leaders, above the stratosphere, was yet another world, the obscure, incomprehensible and terrifyingly alogical world of Adolf Hitler himself. What Liss found most terrifying about Adolf Hitler was that he seemed to be made up of an inconceivable fusion of opposites. He was the master of masters, he was the great mechanic, his mathematical cruelty was more refined than that of all his closest lieutenants taken together. And at the same time, he was possessed by a dogmatic frenzy, a blindly fanatical faith, a bullish illogicality that Liss had only met with at the very lowest, almost subterranean levels of the Party. The high priest, the creator of the magic wand, was also one of the faithful, a mindless, frenzied follower.