Life and Fate (Stalingrad, #2)

by Vasily Grossman

‘As for what you say about the Kalmyks,’ said Darensky, ‘I couldn’t agree more. I’ve just been in the Kalmyk steppe myself. I can tell you – I’ve had enough of driving through all these Shebeners and Kicheners.’ What made him say that? He had spent a long time in the steppes and never once felt the least antipathy toward the Kalmyks. On the contrary, he had felt a genuine interest in their customs and way of life. It was as if the commissar was endowed with some magnetic power. Darensky felt a need to agree with everything he said. Novikov looked at him with a mocking smile; he knew Getmanov’s power only too well.

In this they were quite the opposite of Alexandra Vladimirovna. She herself could get upset, overjoyed or angry over matters that had nothing to do with her or anyone close to her. The period of general collectivization, the events of 1937, the fate of women who had been sent to camps because of their husbands, the children who had been put in orphanages after their parents had been sent to camps, the summary execution of Russian prisoners-of-war, the many tragedies of the war – all these troubled her as deeply as the sufferings of her own family.

This wasn’t something she had learnt from books, from the populist and revolutionary traditions of her family, from her friends, from her husband, or even from life itself. It was something she couldn’t help; it was just the way she was.

The driver stopped the car near the corpse of a dead horse and began digging about inside the engine. Lenard watched the anxious, unshaven men hewing off slabs of frozen horsemeat

Life must indeed conceal some strangely obtuse inertial force. How was it that the dazzling energy of Hitler and the terrible power of a people moved by the most progressive of philosophies had led to the quiet banks of a frozen Volga, to these ruins, to this dirty snow, to these windows filled with the blood of the setting sun, to the quiet humility of these creatures watching over a steaming cauldron of horsemeat?

and hunger, the awareness of impending disaster slowly and gradually humanized men, liberating their core of freedom.

Who among these doomed men could have understood that for millions of Germans these were the first hours, after ten years of complete inhumanity, of a slow return to human life?

but also to cut out apparently healthy tissue that might become infected at a critical moment. Rebellious spirits and hostile ideologues were purged from the Army, from the Church, from the cities, from the villages. There may be any amount of grumbling and anonymous letters, but there will never be a rebellion – not even if the enemy encircles us in Berlin itself. For that we can thank Hitler. We should give thanks to heaven for sending us such a man at this time.’

Volga, on the dead city, on the skeletons of horses. It was snowing everywhere, on earth and on the stars; the whole universe was full of snow. Everything was disappearing beneath it: guns, the bodies of the dead, filthy dressings, rubble, scraps of twisted iron. This soft, white snow settling over the carnage of the city was time itself; the present was turning into the past, and there was no future.

They lay there, side by side, without saying a word. His friends, his books, his romance with Maria, his childhood, his ties with his birthplace, his school, his university, the Russian campaign itself – his whole life had become insignificant . . . All that was simply the path he had followed on his way to this bunk fashioned from the remains of a charred door . . . The thought that he might lose this woman was appalling. He had found her, he had come to her; everything that had happened in Germany, in the whole of Europe, had been merely a prelude to this meeting. Until now he had failed to understand this. He had often forgotten her. He had enjoyed seeing her simply because he had thought there was nothing serious between them. But now she was all that remained of the world. Everything else lay buried under the snow .

She had never seen such an expression on the face of a German. She had thought that only the eyes of a Russian could look so tender, so imploring, so mad, so full of suffering.

Unable to restrain himself, he would complain in Nadya’s presence how impossible it was to read these unctuous letters addressed to ‘the great teacher, the best friend of all gymnasts, the wise father, the powerful coryphaeus, the brilliant genius,’ a man who in addition to all this was kind, compassionate and modest. It began to seem as though Stalin himself ploughed fields, forged metal, fed babies in their cradles and handled a machine-gun – while the workers, students and scientists did nothing but pray to him. But for Stalin, a whole great nation would have perished long ago like helpless cattle. One day Viktor counted eighty-six mentions of Stalin’s name in one issue of Pravda;

Something had indeed changed in Viktor. His growing horror at the destructive fury of the State, his increasing isolation and helplessness, his sense of doom – all this sometimes engendered fits of recklessness, a contempt for the dictates of prudence.

How wise, how powerful, how threatening all these officials suddenly appeared – these house managers, district police-inspectors, housing inspectors, secretaries of personnel departments! To a man with no place in the world, even a slip of a girl at a desk in a rations office seems endowed with a vast, unshakeable power.

Stalin and his telephone calls! Rumours would go round Moscow once or twice every year: ‘Stalin’s phoned Dovzhenko, the film director! Stalin’s phoned Ilya Ehrenburg!’ There was no need for Stalin to give direct orders – to ask that a prize be awarded to X, a flat be allocated to Y, or an Institute be set up for Z. Stalin was above such matters; they were dealt with by subordinates who divined Stalin’s will through his tone of voice and the look in his eyes.

If Stalin gave a man a quick smile, his life would be transformed overnight; he would suddenly rise up out of the outer darkness to be greeted with power, fame and showers of honours. Dozens of notables would bow down before him – Stalin had smiled at him, Stalin had joked with him on the phone. People repeated these conversations to one another in detail; every word of Stalin’s seemed astonishing. And the more banal his words, the more astonishing they seemed. It was as if Stalin was incapable of saying anything ordinary. Apparently he had phoned a famous sculptor and said, laughing: ‘Hello, you old drunkard!’ He had rung a famous writer, a very decent man, and asked about a comrade of his who had been arrested. Taken aback, the writer had mumbled something quite inaudible in reply. Stalin had then said: ‘You don’t know how to defend your friends.’

He had phoned up a newspaper for the young. The deputy editor had said: ‘Bubyekin speaking.’ ‘And who is Bubyekin?’ Stalin had asked. ‘You should know,’ Bubyekin had answered. He had then slammed down the receiver. Stalin had called back and said: ‘Comrade Bubyekin, this is Stalin speaking. Please explain who you are.’

After this, Bubyekin had apparently spent two weeks in hospital recovering from shock.

One word of his could annihilate thousands, tens of thousands, of people. A Marshal, a People’s Commissar, a member of the Central Committee, a secretary of an obkom – people who had been in command of armies and fronts, who had held sway over vast factories, entire regions, whole Republics – could be reduced to nothing by one angry word. They would become labour-c...

‘It’s a complete rout for all your detractors and persecutors,’ said Lyudmila. ‘Just think what must be going on now in the Institute and the Academy!’ ‘Yes, yes.’ ‘And the other women in the special store will say hello to you again, Mama, and smile at you,’ said Nadya. ‘That’s right,’ replied Lyudmila with a little laugh. Viktor had always detested bootlickers. Still, it pleased him to think how obsequiously Shishakov would smile at him now.

He told Nadya and Lyudmila a story they had all known even before the war. One night Stalin appeared in the metro, slightly drunk, sat down beside a young woman, and asked: ‘What can I do for you?’ ‘I’d love to look round the Kremlin,’ the woman replied.

What had made Viktor particularly indignant was the way even Lenin’s name had been eclipsed; Stalin’s military genius was often contrasted with Lenin’s more civic genius. There was a play of Aleksey Tolstoy’s where Lenin obligingly lit a match so Stalin could have a puff at his pipe. One artist had portrayed Stalin striding up the steps of the Smolny with Lenin darting along behind him like a bantam cock. And if Lenin and Stalin were portrayed together in public, then the children and old people would be gazing tenderly at Lenin while a procession of armed giants – workers and sailors festooned with machine-gun belts – marched towards Stalin.

Now, though, Viktor no longer felt angry or horrified. The greater Stalin’s power, the more deafening the hymns and trumpets, the thicker the clouds of incense at the feet of the living idol, the happier Viktor felt. It was getting dark and Viktor didn’t feel afraid. Stalin had spoken to him. Stalin had said: ‘I wish you success in your work.’

he even has the nerve to complain that his wife doesn’t bring him any parcels. What a husband!’ That was something he had mentioned to Bogoleev in their cell. Oh God! He remembered that Katsenelenbogen had once joked: ‘A certain Greek once said, “All things flow”; we say, “All people inform”.’

been undiscriminating in his associates: many of his friends had been victims of repression. His theoretical views were totally confused. He had slept with his friend’s wife. He had given cowardly, dishonest testimony about Hacken. Was it really him sitting here? Was all this really happening to him? It was a dream, a midsummer nightmare . . .

He knew the new type of Party official very well – those who had replaced the Old Bolsheviks liquidated or dismissed from their posts in 1937. They were people of a very different stamp. They read new books and they read them in a different way: they didn’t read them, they ‘mugged them up’. They loved and valued material comforts: revolutionary asceticism was alien to them, or, at the very least, not central to their character. They knew no foreign languages, were infatuated with their own Russian-ness – and spoke Russian ungrammatically. Some of them were by no means stupid,

Even the mere list of people he had associated with was quite terrifying: Nikolay Ivanovich Bukharin, Grigory Yevseevich Zinoviev, Lomov, Shatskin, Pyatnitsky, Lominadze, Ryutin, Shlyapnikov with the red hair; he’d been to the Institute to see Lev Borisovich Deborin in the ‘Academy’; Lashevich, Yan Gamarnik, Luppol; he’d been to the Institute to see Ryazanov when he was an old man; he’d twice stayed with his old friend Ekhe when he was in Siberia; and then in their day he’d seen Skrypnik in Kiev, Stanislav Kossior in Kharkhov, and Ruth Fischer; and yes . . . Well, thank God the investigator hadn’t mentioned the most important thing of all: Trotsky himself had thought well of him . . . He was rotten all the way through. Why though? And were they any more guilty than he was? But he hadn’t signed any confessions. Just wait, Nikolay, you will! Just like they did! Probably the real horrors are kept till later. They keep you for three days without sleep and then start beating you up. None of this seems much like Socialism, does it? Why does my Party need to destroy me? We were the ones who made the Revolution – not Malenkov, Zhdanov and Shcherbakov. We were merciless towards the enemies of the Revolution. Why has the Revolution been so merciless towards us? Perhaps for that very reason.

Soon Krymov was back at the desk, listening to the investigator’s wise exhortations. ‘We can sit like this for a week, a month, a whole year . . . Let me put things very simply for you. You may not be guilty but you can still sign what I tell you to. Then you won’t be beaten up any more. Is that clear? You may be sentenced by the Special Commission but you won’t be beaten up again – and that’s quite something! Do you think I enjoy seeing you being beaten up? And we’ll let you sleep. Do you understand?’

Keitel and Jodl had called Hitler the divine Führer. Goebbels had declared that Hitler’s tragedy was that the war offered him no opponent worthy of his own genius. Zeitzler, on the other hand, had told him how Hitler had once asked him to straighten the line of the front on the grounds that its curves offended his aesthetic sensibilities. And what about his mad, neurotic refusal to advance on Moscow? And the sudden

But clarity can be very terrifying. He could have refused to obey the order. Hitler would have had him executed, but he would have saved the lives of his men. Yes, he had seen many people look at him with reproach. He could have saved his army! But he was afraid of Hitler, afraid for his own skin! Chalb, the chief of the SD at Headquarters, had flown to Berlin the other day. He had made some confused remark to the effect that the Führer had revealed himself to be too great even for the German people. Yes . . . Yes . . . Of course . . . Demagogy, nothing but demagogy .

By then Hitler, Roosevelt and Churchill were looking for new crisis points in the war. Stalin was tapping the table with his finger and asking the Chief of the General Staff if arrangements had been completed to transfer the troops from Stalingrad to other Fronts. The capital of the world war, full as it was of generals, experts in street-fighting, strategic maps, armaments and

well-kept communication trenches, had ceased to exist. Or rather, it had begun a new existence, similar to that of present-day Athens or Rome. Historians, museum guides, teachers and eternally bored schoolchildren, though not yet visible, had become its new masters.

The woman could no longer see anything at all except the face of the German with the handkerchief round his mouth. Not understanding what was happening to her, governed by a power she had just now seemed to control, she felt in the pocket of her jacket for a piece of bread that had been given to her the evening before by a soldier. She held it out to the German officer and said: ‘There, have something to eat.’ Afterwards, she was unable to understand what had happened to her, why she had done this. Her life was to be full of moments of humiliation, helplessness and anger, full of petty cruelties that made her lie awake at night, full of brooding resentment. There was the time she quarrelled with her neighbour who had accused her of stealing a bottle of oil; the time the chairman of the district soviet, not interested in her complaints about life in a communal flat, had her thrown out of his office; the time when her son began manoeuvring to get her out of the room they shared, when his pregnant wife called her an old whore . . . At one such moment, lying on her bed, full of bitterness, she was to remember that winter morning outside the cellar and think: ‘I was a fool then, and I’m still a fool now.’

And then there was fear – fear of ruining his life once again, fear of living in fear. Could he really oppose himself to the collective again? Go back to his former solitude? It was time he took the world seriously. He had obtained things he had never even dreamed of. He could work in complete freedom; he was treated with solicitous attentiveness. And he hadn’t had to beg for any of this; he hadn’t repented. He had been victorious. What more could he ask for? Stalin had telephoned him. ‘Comrades, this is a very serious matter. I need to think about it. Allow me to put off my decision until tomorrow.’

The amazing confessions of Bukharin and Rykov, of Kamenev and Zinoviev, the trials of the Trotskyists, of the Right Opposition and the Left Opposition, the fate of Bubnov, Muralov and Shlyapnikov – all these things no longer seemed quite so hard to understand. The hide was being flayed off the still living body of the Revolution so that a new age could slip into it; as for the red, bloody meat, the steaming innards – they were being thrown onto the scrapheap. The new age needed only the hide of the Revolution – and this was being flayed off people who were still alive. Those who then slipped into it spoke the language of the Revolution and mimicked its gestures, but their brains, lungs, livers and eyes were utterly different. Stalin! The great Stalin! Perhaps this man with the iron will had less will than any of them. He was a slave of his time and circumstances, a dutiful, submissive servant of the present day, flinging open the doors before the new age.

Yezhov why he had carried punitive measures to such extremes; Yezhov, confused, had replied that he had been obeying Stalin’s own orders. Stalin had turned to the delegates around him and said, ‘And he’s a Party member.’ He talked about the horror Yagoda had felt . .

He told of how, in 1937, they had executed people sentenced without right of correspondence every night. The chimneys of the Moscow crematoria had sent up clouds of smoke into the night, and the members of the Communist youth organization enlisted to help with the executions and subsequent disposal of the bodies had gone mad.

He began by telling Krymov about the extraordinary fate of Frankel, an engineer who had been a successful businessman during the NEP period.1 At the very beginning of NEP, he had built a car-factory in Odessa. In the mid-twenties he had been arrested and sent to Solovki. From there, he had sent Stalin the outlines of a project that, in the words of the old Chekist, ‘bore the mark of true genius’. In considerable detail, with full economic and scientific substantiation, he had laid out the most efficient manner of exploiting the vast mass of prisoners in order to construct roads, dams, hydroelectric power stations and artificial reservoirs. The imprisoned ‘Nepman’ became a lieutenant-general in the MGB – the boss appreciated the importance of his ideas.

Katsenelenbogen had himself supervised the work of a camp design office; he was convinced that, in the camps, scientists and engineers were capable of solving the most complicated problems of contemporary science or technology. All that was necessary was to provide intelligent supervision and decent living conditions. The old saying about there being no science without freedom was simply nonsense. ‘When the levels become equal,’ he said, ‘when we can place an equals sign between life on either side of the wire, repression will become unnecessary and we shall cease to issue arrest warrants. Prisons and solitary-confinement blocks will be razed to the ground. Any anomalies will be handled by the Culture and Education Section. Mahomed and the mountain will go to meet each other.

‘The abolition of the camps will be a triumph of humanitarianism, but this will in no way mean the resurgence of the chaotic, primeval, cave-man principle of personal freedom. On the contrary, that will have become completely redundant.’ After a long silence he added that after hundreds of years this system might do away with itself too, and, in doing so, give birth to democracy and personal freedom. ‘There is nothing eternal under the moon,’ he said, ‘but I’d rather not be alive then myself.’

Katsenelenbogen nodded good-humouredly. ‘Yes, I believe in God. I’m an ignorant, credulous old man. Every age creates the deity in its own image. The security organs are wise and powerful; they are what holds sway over twentieth-century man. Once this power was held by earthquakes, forest-fires, thunder and lightning – and they too were worshipped. And if I’ve been put inside – well, so have you. It was time to replace you too. Only the future will show which of us is right.’

As for those who had been killed or executed, they were still alive in her memory. She could remember their smiles, their jokes, their laughter, their sad lost eyes, their hopes and despairs. Mitya had embraced her and said: ‘It doesn’t matter, Mama. Please don’t worry yourself about me. There are good people even in camp.’ And there was young Sonya Levinton with her dark hair and the down over her upper lip. She was declaiming poems with a fierce gaiety. There was Anya Shtrum, as pale and sad as ever, as intelligent and full of mockery. And young Tolya, stuffing down his macaroni cheese

they all knew only too well that at times like these no man can forge his own happiness and that fate alone has the power to pardon and chastise, to raise up to glory and to plunge into need, to reduce a man to labour-camp dust, nevertheless neither fate, nor history, nor the anger of the State, nor the glory or infamy of battle has any power to affect those who call themselves human beings. No, whatever life holds in store – hard-won glory, poverty and despair, or death in a labour camp – they will live as human beings and die as human beings, the same as those who have already perished; and in this alone lies man’s eternal and bitter victory over all the grandiose and inhuman forces that ever have been or will be . . .