Life and Fate (Stalingrad, #2)

by Vasily Grossman

Anti-Semitism is always a means rather than an end; it is a measure of the contradictions yet to be resolved. It is a mirror for the failings of individuals, social structures and State systems. Tell me what you accuse the Jews of – I’ll tell you what you’re guilty of.

Even a genius like Dostoyevsky saw a Jewish usurer where he should have seen the pitiless eyes of a Russian serf-owner, industrialist or contractor. And in accusing the Jews of racism, a desire for world domination and a cosmopolitan indifference

towards the German fatherland, National Socialism was merely describing its own features.

Anti-Semitism is also an expression of a lack of talent, an inability to win a contest on equal terms – in science or in commerce, in craftsmanship or in painting. States look to the imaginary intrigues of World Jewry for explanations of their own failure. At the same time anti-Semitism is an expression of the lack of consciousness of the masses, of their inability to understand the true reasons for their sufferings. Ignorant people blame the Jews for their troubles when they should blame the social structure or the State itself. Anti-Semitism is also, of course, a measure of the religious prejudices smouldering in the lo...

It was during the dawn of capitalism that Jewish tradesmen and usurers made their first appearance. During the industrial revolution many Jews made names for themselves in the realms of industry and mechanics. During the atomic age many talented Jews have been nuclear physicists. And during the epoch of revolutionary struggle, many of the most important revolutionary leaders were Jews. Rather than relegating themselves to the periphery, Jews have always chosen to play a role at the centre of a society’s industrial and ideological development. This constitutes a third distinguishing trait of Jewish minorities.

In the twentieth century, an ill-fated nationalist regime lit the bonfires of Auschwitz, the gas ovens of Lyublinsk and Treblinka. These flames not only lit up Fascism’s brief triumph, but also foretold its doom. Historical epochs,

individuals hoping to better their lot all turn to anti-Semitism as a last resort, in an attempt to escape an inevitable doom.

In the course of two millennia, have there ever been occasions when the forces of freedom and humanitarianism made use of anti-Semitism as a tool in their str...

There are also different levels of anti-Semitism. Firstly, there is a relatively harmless everyday anti-Semitism. This merely bears witness to the existence of failures and envious fools. Secondly, there is social anti-Semitism. This can only arise in democratic countries. Its manifestations are in those sections of the press that represent different reactionary groups, in the activities of these groups – for example, boycotts of Jewish labour and Jewish goods – and in their ideology and religion. Thirdly, in totalitarian countries, where society as such no longer exists, there can arise State anti-Semitism. This is a sign that the State is looking for the support of fools, reactionaries and failures, that it is seeking to capitalize on the ignorance of the superstitious and the anger of the hungry. The first stage of Stat...

Stalingrad itself had continued to hold out. For all the vast forces involved, the German attacks had still not led to a decisive victory. Some of the Russian regiments now only numbered a few dozen soldiers; it was these few men, bearing all the weight of the terrible fighting, who confused the calculations of the Germans. The Germans were simply unable to believe that all their attacks were being borne by a handful of men. They thought the Soviet reserves were being brought up in order to reinforce the defence. The true strategists of the Soviet offensive were the soldiers with their backs to the Volga who fought off Paulus’s divisions. The remorseless cunning of History, however, lay still more deeply hidden. Freedom engendered the Russian victory. Freedom was the apparent aim of the war. But the sly fingers of History changed this: freedom became simply a way of waging the war, a means to an end.

‘I don’t know if I really am made for war,’ he said to Getmanov. ‘The best thing in the world would be to live in a hut in the forest together with the woman you love. You’d go hunting during the day and come back home in the evening. She’d cook

you a meal and then you’d go to bed. War’s no nourishment for a man.’

It was impossible to ascertain the name of the provocateur who had betrayed his comrades. Probably he was executed by the Gestapo together with the men he betrayed.

If, on the day of judgment, Kaltluft had been called upon to justify himself, he could have explained quite truthfully how fate had led him to become the executioner of 590,000 people. What else could he have done in the face of such powerful forces – the war, fervent nationalism, the adamancy of the Party, the will of the State? How could he have swum against the current? He was a man like any other; all he had wanted was to live peacefully in his father’s house. He hadn’t walked – he had been pushed. Fate had led him

A man may be led by fate, but he can refuse to follow. He may be a mere tool in the hands of destructive powers, but he knows it is in his interest to assent to this. Fate and the individual may have different ends, but they share the same path.

When a person dies, they cross over from the realm of freedom to the realm of slavery. Life is freedom, and dying is a gradual denial of freedom.

These people are innocent – what can their wives and children be guilty of? It’s you who should repent, you who should be begging forgiveness. And you want to prove my inferiority, to destroy my good name – simply because I’m related to these innocent victims? All I’m guilty of is failing to help them. At the same time, another, quite opposite train of thought was running through Viktor’s mind . . . I didn’t keep in touch with them, I never corresponded with enemies of the Party, I never received letters from camps, I never gave them material help, I met them only infrequently and by chance . . .

At this, Viktor lost his head. No one had ever spoken to him about his work with such undisguised hostility – least of all an Academician who was the director of his own Institute! No longer afraid of the consequences, Viktor blurted out everything that was on his mind. He said that it was of no concern to physics whether or not it confirmed philosophy; that the logic of mathematical proof was more powerful than that of Engels and Lenin; that it was for Badin of the Scientific Section of the Central Committee to accommodate Lenin’s views to mathematics and physics, not for mathematicians and physicists to accommodate their views to Lenin’s. He said that an excessive

It was terrifying even to think what heresies he had uttered to the director. At the same time, however, Viktor felt strong. His very helplessness was a source of strength. How could he ever have guessed that on his return to Moscow, at the moment of his scientific triumph, he would be having a conversation like this? Although no one could have heard about his confrontation with Shishakov, his colleagues seemed to be treating him with a particular warmth. Anna Stepanovna took his hand, squeezed it and said: ‘Viktor Pavlovich, I don’t want to appear to be thanking you – but I do know that you’ve been true to yourself.’ Viktor stood beside her in silence. He felt very moved, almost joyful. ‘Mother, mother,’ he thought suddenly, ‘can you see?’

A dead soldier, a note in his gas-mask that he’d written before the attack: ‘I died for the Soviet way of life, leaving behind a wife and six children . . .’ A member of a tank-crew who had burned to death – he had been quite black, with tufts of hair still clinging to his young head . . . A people’s army, many millions strong, marching through bogs and forests, firing artillery and machine-guns . . .

‘The concept of personal innocence is a hangover from the Middle Ages. Pure superstition! Tolstoy declared that no one in the world is guilty. We Chekists have put forward a more advanced thesis: “No one in the world is innocent.” Everyone is subject to our jurisdiction.

If a warrant has been issued for your arrest, you are guilty – and a warrant can be issued for everyone. Yes, everyone has the right to a warrant. Even if he has spent his whole life issuing warrants for others. The Moor has ta’en his pay and may depart.’

He himself had received political reports from his informers in the ranks. The usual thing. The usual denunciations. ‘Soldier Ryaboshtan wears a cross next to the skin and refers to Communists as atheists.’ Did he survive long after being transferred to a penal battalion? ‘Soldier Gordeev doesn’t believe in the strength of the Soviet armed forces and considers Hitler’s final victory to be inevitable.’ Did he survive long in a penal company? ‘Soldier Markeevich said: “The Communists are just thieves. One day we’ll prong the whole lot of them on our bayonets and the people will be free.”’ He had been sent to a firing squad by a military tribunal. And he had denounced people himself.

Churchill and Roosevelt trusted him; but he knew that their trust was by no means unconditional. What annoyed him most was the way, although they were only too willing to confer with him, they always first discussed everything between themselves. They knew very well that wars came and went, but politics remained politics. They admired his logic, his

knowledge, the clarity of his reasoning; but he knew they saw him as an Asiatic potentate, not as a European leader.

Stalin felt happy, full of strength; he no longer had that taste of lead in his mouth, that ache in his heart. To him, the sense of life itself was inseparable from a sense of strength. Since the first days of the war he had felt a constant weariness. It hadn’t left him even when he’d seen his marshals freeze with fear at his anger, even when thousands of people stood up to greet him as he entered the Bolshoy Theatre. He always had the impression that people were laughing at him behind his back, that they remembered his confusion during the summer of 1941. Once, in Molotov’s presence, he had seized his head in his hands and muttered: ‘What can we do . . . what can we do?’ And during a meeting of the State Defence Committee his voice had suddenly broken; everyone had looked the other way. He had several times given absurd orders and realized that everyone was aware of their absurdity.

This was his hour of strength. What was being decided now, what was at stake, was the fate of the State Lenin had founded: now the rational, centralized force of the Party would be able to realize itself in the construction of huge factories, atomic power stations, jetplanes, intercontinental missiles, space rockets, immense buildings and palaces of culture, new canals and seas, new roads and cities north of the Arctic Circle.

On the night of 22–23 November Paulus received orders from Hitler to name the zone occupied by his troops ‘Fortress Stalingrad’. The preceeding order had read: ‘The Army Commander will transfer his headquarters to Stalingrad itself. The 6th Army will establish a perimeter defence and await further orders.’

Stalin’s secretary, Poskrebyshev, was present when Vasilevsky reported by radio that the encirclement of the German armies had been completed. For a few moments Stalin just sat there, his eyes half-closed as though he were going to sleep. Poskrebyshev held his breath and tried not to move. This was his hour of triumph. He had not only defeated his current enemy; he had defeated the past. In the village the grass would grow thicker over the tombs of 1930. The snow and ice of the Arctic Circle would remain dumb and silent. He knew better than anyone that no one condemns a victor.

Tolstoy’s claim was indisputably true for his time. But, like most of the thoughts of great men about war and politics, it was by no means an eternal truth.

It had been beyond the capacities of a mere man to found the New Germany, to kindle the war and the ovens of Auschwitz, to create the Gestapo. To be the founder of the New Germany and its Führer, one had to be a superman. His thoughts and feelings, his everyday life, had to exist outside and above those of ordinary men. The Russian tanks had brought him back to his starting-point. His thoughts, decisions and passions were no longer directed towards God and the destiny of the world. The Russian tanks had brought him back among men.

The Moscow victory had served chiefly to change people’s attitudes towards the Germans. After December 1941, the mystical fear aroused by the German Army disappeared. The Stalingrad victory, on the other hand, served mainly to change people’s attitudes towards themselves, to develop a new form of self-consciousness in the army and in the population as a whole. Soviet Russians began to think of themselves differently, to adopt a different manner towards other nationalities. The history of Russia was no longer the history of the sufferings and humiliations undergone by the workers and peasantry; it was the history of Russian national glory.

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; it came between him and his family; it insinuated itself into his past, into his childhood memories.

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.

When Yevgenia was seventh in the queue, the window slammed shut and a twenty-minute break was announced. Everyone sat down on the chairs and benches. There were wives and mothers; there was a middle-aged engineer whose wife – an interpreter in the All Union Society for Cultural Relations – had been arrested; there was a girl in her last year at school whose mother had been arrested and whose father had been sentenced in 1937 to ‘ten years without right of correspondence’; there was an old blind woman who had been brought here by a neighbour to enquire after her son; there was a foreigner, the wife of a German Communist, who spoke very poor Russian. She wore a foreign-looking checked coat and carried a brightly-coloured cloth handbag, but her eyes were the eyes of an old Russian woman. There were Russian women, Armenian women, Ukrainian women and Jewish women. There was a woman who worked on a kolkhoz near Moscow. The old man who had been filling in the form turned out to be a lecturer at the Timiryazev Academy; his grandson, a schoolboy, had been arrested – apparently for talking too much at a party.

The man on duty today was one of the good ones . . . They don’t accept tinned food in the Butyrka . . . You really must bring onion and garlic, they’re good for scurvy . . . There was a man here last Wednesday who’d come to pick up his documents, he’d been three years in the Butyrka without once being interrogated and had then been released . . . Usually people are sent to a camp about a year after they’ve been arrested . . . You mustn’t bring anything too good – at the transit prison in Krasnaya Presnaya the ‘politicals’ are put together with the common criminals and everything gets stolen . . . There was a woman here the other day whose elderly husband, an important engineer and designer, had been arrested. Apparently he’d had a brief affair in his youth and gone on sending the woman alimony for a son he’d never even set eyes on. The son, now adult, had deserted to the Germans. And the old man had got ten years for fathering a traitor to the Motherland .

‘And then there’s a second, quantitative, line of evolution. If we assume the weight of an average man to be fifty kilos, then humanity now weighs 100 million tons. That’s a great deal more than, say, a thousand years ago. The mass of animate matter will constantly increase at the expense of that of inanimate matter. The terrestrial globe will gradually come to life. After settling the Arctic and the deserts, man will burrow under the earth, continually pushing back the horizons of his underworld cities and fields. Eventually there will be a predominance of animate matter on earth. Then the other planets will come to life. If we try to imagine the evolution of life over infinity, then the animation of inanimate matter will take place on a galactic scale. Inanimate matter will be transformed into free, living matter. The universe will come to life. Everything in the world will become alive and thus free. Freedom – life itself – will overcome slavery.’

The coming century will bring a solution to the problem of the transformation of matter into energy and the creation of life itself. There will be a parallel development towards the attainment of extreme speeds and the conquest of space. More distant millennia will see progress towards the harnessing of the very highest form of energy – psychic energy.’

‘Man will learn to materialize in his laboratory the content and rhythm of the psychic activity of rational beings throughout the metagalaxy. Psychic energy will cross millions of light-years of space instantaneously. Omnipresence – formerly an attribute of God – will have become one more conquest of reason. But man won’t just stop there. After attaining equality with God, he will begin to solve the problems that were beyond God. He will establish communication with rational beings from the highest level of evolution, beings from another space and another time to whom the whole history of humanity seems merely a dim flicker. He will establish communication with the life of the microcosm whose whole evolution occurs within the twinkling of a man’s eye. The abyss of time and space will be overcome. Man will finally be able to look down on God.’

‘Dmitry Petrovich,’ he said, ‘when you began, I was thinking that I might be arrested any day and that I wasn’t in the mood for philosophy. Suddenly I quite forgot about Kovchenko, Shishakov and comrade Beria; I forgot that I might be thrown out of my laboratory tomorrow and into prison on the following day. But what I felt as I listened to you was not joy, but utter despair. We think we’re so wise – to us Hercules seems like a child with rickets. And yet on this very day the Germans are slaughtering Jewish children and old women as though they were mad dogs. And we ourselves have endured 1937 and the horrors of collectivization – famine, cannibalism and the deportation of millions of unfortunate peasants . . . Once, everything seemed simple and clear. But these terrible losses and tragedies have confused everything. You say man will be able to look down on God – but what if he also becomes able to look down on the Devil? What if he eventually surpasses him? You say life is freedom. Is that what people in the camps think? What if the life expanding through the universe should use its power to create a slavery still more terrible than your slavery of inanimate matter? Do you think this man of the future will surpass Christ in his goodness? That’s the real question. How will the power of this omnipresent and omniscient being benefit the world if he is still endowed with our own fatuous

self-assurance and animal egotism? Our class egotism, our race egotism, our State egotism and our personal egotism? What if he transforms the whole world into a galactic concentration camp? What I want to know is – do you believe in the evolution of kindness, morality, mercy? Is man capable of evolving in that way?’ He gave Chepyzhin a rueful look. ‘Forgive me for throwing a question like that at you. It seems even more abstract than the equations we were just talking about.’ ‘No,’ said Chepyzhin. ‘It’s not so very abstract. It’s a question that’s had a very real effect on my life. I took a decision not to take part in any research relating to nuclear fission. You said yourself that man isn’t yet kind enough or wise enough to lead a rational life. Just think what would happen now if he was presented with the power within the atom! Man’s spiritual energy is still at a lamentable level. But I do believe in the future. I believe that it is not only man’s power that will evolve, but also his soul, his capacity for love.’

very clever – but very timid. He prostrates himself before the State and believes that there is no power except that of God. Markov? Markov hasn’t the slightest inkling of questions of good and evil, of love and morality. His is a strictly practical talent. His attitude to scientific problems is that of a chess-player. Savostyanov – the man I was just talking about? He’s charming and witty and a splendid physicist. But at the same time he’s just a gay young fellow without a thought in his head. When we were evacuated, he took with him a whole pile of photos of young women in bathing costumes. He likes playing the dandy, he likes dancing and getting drunk. He sees science as another kind of sport – understanding some particular phenomenon, solving a particular problem is the same as setting a new athletic record. All he cares about is getting there first. And I’m no better. I’ve never thought seriously about these matters myself. Science today should be entrusted to men of spiritual understanding, to prophets and saints. But instead it’s been left to chess-players and scientists.

Viktor looked at Lyudmila and Yevgenia. It was as though he had only now, for the first time, fully understood the difficulty and seriousness of life on earth, the true importance of close relationships. At the same time he knew that life would go on in its usual way, that he would still get upset over trifles, that he would still be infuriated by his wife and daughter.

remained silent. Others applauded noisily. And we remained silent during the horrors of general collectivization . . . Yes, we spoke too soon about Socialism – it’s not just a matter of heavy industry. Socialism, first of all, is the right to a conscience. To deprive a man of his conscience is a terrible crime. And if a man has the strength to listen to his conscience and then act on it, he feels a surge of happiness. I’m glad for you – you’ve acted according to your conscience.’

‘That’s enough sermonizing, Vitya,’ said Lyudmila. ‘Stop confusing the poor girl. You’re not the Buddha

He remembered stories about how the Germans had made fun of the poverty of the peasant huts, how they had gazed in surprise and disgust at the simple cradles, the crude stoves, the earthenware pots, the pictures on the walls, the wooden tubs, the painted clay cocks, at the beloved and wonderful world in which the boys then fleeing from their tanks had been born and brought up.

Four Germans were carrying one of their comrades on a greatcoat. You could tell from their faces, from their straining necks, that soon they too would fall to the ground. They swayed from side to side. They tripped over the tangled rags wound round their feet. The dry snow lashed their mindless eyes. Their frozen fingers gripped the corners of the greatcoat like hooks. ‘So much for the Fritzes,’ said the driver.

Suddenly he felt a wave of happiness. Straight through the steppe, in a cloud of mist and snow, Soviet tanks were making their way to the West. They looked quick and fierce, strong and muscular . . .

The colonel stepped to one side. As the German came up to him, he gave him a push with his boot. The feeble blow was enough to break him. He collapsed on the ground, his arms and legs splayed out on either side. The German looked up at the man who had just kicked him. His eyes were like those of a dying sheep; there was no reproach or suffering in them, nothing at all except humility. ‘A fine warrior that shit makes!’ said the colonel, wiping the sole of his boot on the snow. There was a ripple of laughter among the onlookers.

‘Comrade Colonel,’ he said, ‘Russians don’t kick a man when he’s down.’ ‘What do you think I am then?’ asked the colonel. ‘Do you think I’m not a Russian?’ ‘You’re a scoundrel,’ said Darensky. He saw the colonel take a step towards him. Forestalling the man’s angry threats, he shouted: ‘My surname’s Darensky. Lieutenant-Colonel Darensky – inspector of the Operations Section of Stalingrad Front Headquarters. I’m ready to repeat what I said to you before the commander of the Front and before a military tribunal.’ In a voice full of hatred, the colonel said: ‘Very well, Lieutenant-Colonel Darensky. You will be hearing from me.’