Life and Fate (Stalingrad, #2)

by Vasily Grossman

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.

Quantum theory had replaced the laws governing individual physical entities with new laws: the laws of probability, the laws of a special statistics that rejected the concept of an individual entity and acknowledged only aggregates.

The extreme violence of totalitarian social systems proved able to paralyse the human spirit throughout whole continents.

Does human nature undergo a true change in the cauldron of totalitarian violence? Does man lose his innate yearning for freedom? The fate of both man and the totalitarian State depends on the answer to this question. If human nature does change, then the eternal and world-wide triumph of the dictatorial State is assured; if his yearning for freedom remains constant, then the totalitarian State is doomed.

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.

An electronic machine can carry out mathematical calculations, remember historical facts, play chess and translate books from one language to another. It is able to solve mathematical problems more quickly than man and its memory is faultless. Is there any limit to progress, to its ability to create machines in the image and likeness of man? It seems that the answer is no.

valueless. Now the theory had been patched up, it had lost its inner harmony; the arbitrary hypotheses deprived it of any independent strength and vitality and the equations had become almost too cumbersome to work with. It had somehow become rigid, anaemic, almost talmudic. It was as though it no longer had any live muscle.

The state had the power to replay events, to transform figures of granite and bronze, to alter speeches long since delivered, to change the faces in a news photograph.

We’re stifled by centralism! Some inventor suggested a method for producing fifteen hundred articles where we now produce two hundred. The director simply threw him out: the plan’s calculated according to the total weight of what we produce – it’s easier just to let things be.

But I lack the most important quality – I don’t know how to work human beings to death. I can work myself to death, but not the workers.’

What a wonderful power and clarity there is in speaking one’s mind. What a terrible price people paid for a few bold words.

For some reason she wanted Novikov to understand that Krymov was extremely talented and intelligent, that she was attached to him, that she loved him. It wasn’t that she consciously wanted to make him jealous, though her words did indeed have that effect. She had even told him, and him alone, what Krymov had once told her, and her alone: those words of Trotsky’s.

‘When we look one another in the face, we’re neither of us just looking at a face we hate – no, we’re gazing into a mirror. That’s the tragedy of our age. Do you really not recognize yourselves in us – yourselves and the strength of your will?

People began to realize how much blood had been spilt in the name of a petty, doubtful good, in the name of the struggle of this petty good against what it believed to be evil. Sometimes the very concept of good became a scourge, a greater evil than evil itself.

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.

Dozens of men who had helped Lenin to create the Bolshevik Party had proved to be foreign spies and provocateurs; and someone who had never occupied a central position in the Party, who had never been highly thought of as a theoretician, had proved to be the saviour of the Party’s cause, the bearer of its truth. Why had they all confessed?

‘Lyuda,’ said Viktor humbly, ‘people who are in the right often don’t know how to behave. They lose their tempers and swear. They act tactlessly and intolerantly. Usually they get blamed for everything that goes wrong at home and at work. While those who are in the wrong, those who hurt others, always know how to behave. They act calmly, logically and tactfully – and appear to be in the right.’

No, the man now trampling over him was not someone alien. Krymov could see himself in this officer, could recognize in him the same Krymov who as a boy had wept with happiness over those astonishing words of the Communist Manifesto: ‘Workers of the World Unite!’ And this feeling of recognition was appalling.

It was all monstrously cruel. It was absurd and inhuman. Now he realized what terrible things were done in the Lubyanka. They were tormenting an Old Bolshevik, a Leninist. They were tormenting Comrade Krymov.

There is one right even more important than the right to send men to their death without thinking: the right to think twice before you send men to their death.

What was at stake was the fate of the Jews saved by the Red Army: on the tenth anniversary of this victory Stalin was to raise over their heads the very sword of annihilation he had wrested from the hands of Hitler.

Tolstoy claimed that it was impossible fully to encircle an army. This claim was borne out by the experience of his time. The years 1941–1945 proved that it is indeed possible to encircle an entire army, to nail it to the ground, to fetter it in a hoop of iron. A large number of armies, Soviet and German alike, were encircled during these years. 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 is impossible for an encircled army to organize its vast, complex and factory-like rear. The encircled forces are paralysed; the encircling forces have motors and wings.

She didn’t think she loved him. But is it possible to think so incessantly of someone you don’t love?

She no longer remembered his fanaticism, his lack of concern over people who had been arrested, the anger and hatred in his voice when he had talked about the kulaks. Now she only remembered his good side; she only remembered what was sad, touching and romantic about him. It was his weakness that gave him power over her. There had always been something helpless in the way he smiled, his movements were awkward and his eyes were those of a child.

She had no idea whether these thoughts sprang from love, pity, a guilty conscience or a sense of duty.

Did she really love him, or was it just his love for her that she loved?

It’s of her own free will that a woman like that goes to bed with a man, lives with him, or decides to leave him. But the way she explains it is very different: “I had to, it was my duty, I acted according to my conscience, I made a sacrifice, I renounced him . . .” And she hasn’t made any sacrifice at all – she’s done just as she pleased. The worst of it is that she sincerely believes in this willingness of hers to make sacrifices. I can’t stand women like that. And do you know why . . . ? Because I sometimes think I’m like that myself.’

Inside the file, his life had somehow lost its proportions, lost its true scale. The whole of his life had coagulated into grey, sticky vermicelli and he no longer knew what mattered: his four exhausting years of underground work in the sultry heat of Shanghai, the river-crossing at Stalingrad, his faith in the Revolution – or a few exasperated words he had said at ‘The Pines’ sanatorium, to a journalist he didn’t know very well, about the wretchedness of Soviet newspapers.

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 capital of the war against the Fascists was now no more than the icy ruins of what had once been a provincial industrial city and port. Here, ten years later, was constructed a vast dam, one of the largest hydro-electric power stations in the world – the product of the forced labour of thousands of prisoners.

Once again he remembered the day in 1939 when he had heard the news of her marriage and almost shot himself. Why did he love her? He had had other women who were just as good. Was it a joy or a kind of sickness to think so obsessively about one person?

Then he thought: ‘All this is a waste of time.’ Yes, he had waited all those years, but now she had made up her mind. She wasn’t a little girl. She had dragged it out for years, but now she had made up her mind. She had made up her mind – he must try to understand that.

How can you tear something out of your heart? Your heart isn’t made out of paper and your life isn’t written down in ink. You can’t erase the imprint of years.

Still, Viktor knew very well that, but for Stalin’s telephone call, his research – for all its excellence – would have been forgotten; and Landesman – for all his talent – would still be unemployed. But then Stalin’s telephone call was no accident; it was no mere whim or caprice. Stalin was the embodiment of the State – and the State has no whims or caprices.

‘That’s the way things are, Vera. There’s nothing more difficult than saying goodbye to a house where you’ve suffered.’

She loved messing about with grasshoppers, cockroaches and beetles. And she didn’t play with them like ordinary children – she was always kissing them and telling them stories. Then she would let them go and start crying, calling for them to come back. Last autumn the old woman had brought her a hedgehog from the forest. The girl had followed him wherever he went. He only had to give a little grunt and she was beside herself with joy. And if he went under the chest of drawers, she’d just sit there on the floor and wait for him. She’d say to her mother: ‘Sh! Can’t you see he’s asleep?’ Then the hedgehog had gone back to the forest and the little girl hadn’t eaten for two whole days.