The Unlikely Journalist Who Looked Into the Heart of War
Vasily Grossman was one of the Soviet Union’s most dazzlingly clear-eyed observers of the Second World War, but it was his vision, ironically, that almost kept him from the front lines. At the time of Hitler’s invasion, Grossman—born Iosif Solomonovich Grossman in 1905 in Berdychiv, a predominantly Jewish town in the north of current-day Ukraine—was exempt from military service, on account of his being overweight, asthmatic, and near-sighted. Insistent on going to the front as a war correspondent, he approached Major General David Ortenberg, the editor of the Army newspaper Red Star. Ortenberg, an admirer of Grossman’s early novel “Stepan Kolchugin,” assigned him to the rank of quartermaster and put him under the tutelage of a retired colonel, who whipped Grossman into shape.
Red Star was an unusual publication. Both the military and the general public read it voraciously, desperate to understand the war tearing their young utopia apart. This afforded Grossman a surprising intimacy with his readers, many of whom were also his subjects; his dispatches, which have been newly collected in “From the Front Line” (New York Review Books), in a translation by Robert and Elizabeth Chandler, read more often as character studies than as reports on military strategy. But Red Star was also propaganda, which meant that its correspondents—including such towering literary figures as Andrei Platonov and Ilya Ehrenburg—were subject to stringent censorship, unable to denounce the Soviet war effort. “The world bows its head before the heroism of the Red Army,” Grossman wrote in one dispatch, neglecting to mention the rapes and brutality he had seen soldiers commit. Caught between instinctive honesty and political caution, Grossman perfected a style that relied less on rhetoric than on the power of witness.
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“From the Front Line” spans the majority of the war, following Grossman from Stalingrad to Treblinka and finally to Berlin, each stop deepening his unsentimental portrait of the Eastern Front. “The Soul of a Red Army Man,” a report from the Battle of Stalingrad, locates the spirit of the Soviet soldier in an antitank rifleman named Gromov—or, rather, in “the lack of kindness in his brownish-green eyes.” For Grossman, Gromov’s motives lie not, as one might expect, in a sense of comradeship or Soviet duty. “What had led him to the anti-tank company was not chance, but some internal law,” Grossman writes. What that law is, we’re never told, but we see Grossman searching for it again and again in Gromov’s gaze: “The frank challenge in his eyes, his unforgivingness towards human frailties, his snide observations about life’s imperfections, all made it clear that this was someone unusually strong, stubborn and uncompromising.” Grossman even sees a kind of kinship between Gromov and his weapon: “its qualities were those of his troubled soul and”—once again—“his hard, brownish-green eyes.”
In Grossman’s rendering, Gromov is hardly a model soldier. He’s a self-interested man who lights up only at the prospect of violence, and only at violence that falls under his immediate purview: no tanks, no dice. “German mortar bombs rent the air with snakelike hiss before exploding not far to their rear; shrapnel and clods of earth then drummed against the ground,” Grossman writes. “In short, this was what people call ‘hell.’ And in the midst of this hell, Gromov had lain down at the bottom of his slit trench, stretched out his legs and begun to doze.” Such moments display a boldly personal approach to conflict journalism, one in which a frank, nuanced depiction of daily life tells us more about war than any losses or gains on the battlefield.
Grossman’s eyes, of course, were far more sensitive than Gromov’s. In the sixty-one years since his death—and since the reissues of “Stalingrad” and “Life and Fate,” his two magisterial novels about the Second World War—Grossman’s work has accrued a totemic importance. Photographs of him on the front lines have become synonymous with a certain kind of Soviet dissident intellectualism: his wide greatcoat like armor, a plume of smoke rising above the snug fur shapka atop his head, his gaze hollow behind wire-rimmed glasses.
He’d always seemed blessed, perhaps even burdened, by a perception beyond his years. As a teen-ager, Grossman’s owlish demeanor earned him the schoolyard nickname Old Man. He initially trained as a chemist, working as a chemical engineer in the Donbas, and Gedda Surits, a geophysicist who married his childhood friend, noted that Grossman “seemed to hide his huge eyes behind thick glasses.” Surits wondered whether Grossman’s curious gaze flowed from his “attentive attitude to people,” which “made him at once observant, interested and yet, a bit of an outsider, as if he was watching us from a distance.”
Much of Grossman’s writing evinces this insider-outsider quality, which was informed by his being, as a Jew from Ukraine, a twofold minority in the U.S.S.R. Born into a secular Russian-speaking home, Grossman received no formal Jewish education, and spoke neither Yiddish nor Hebrew. (He did speak Ukrainian, the language in which he sometimes addressed his father as bat’ko.) As an adult, however, he developed a belief system oriented around something the narrator of “Life and Fate” calls “senseless kindness.” It resembles the Jewish teaching which has come to be known as tikkun olam—the tenet of healing the world. Grossman’s narrator describes it as “the private kindness of one individual towards another; a petty, thoughtless kindness; an unwitnessed kindness.”
The kindness of Grossman’s prose is, on one level, a riposte to the harsh censorship of Stalin’s propaganda machine. And yet it finds its most potent expression not in tone but in attention, that quality which, “taken to its highest degree,” Simone Weil called “the same thing as prayer.” Steering clear of overt criticisms, Grossman’s reporting paints a war epic in miniatures, selecting subjects with an eye toward mystery, uncertainty, and the compromised character of men whom he was encouraged to cast as uncomplicated heroes. “When you read memoirs by French, British, or American combatants, they all say that in war they become different people,” Grossman writes in one report. “That is not what I have seen here.” Grossman’s soldiers might not be tidy paragons of bravery, but they’re portrayed with an unwavering, compassionate regard.
Reporting on the Holocaust tested Grossman’s attention to character, replacing the gray zone of Soviet morality with irrefutable villains and victims. The centerpiece of “From the Front Line” is “The Hell of Treblinka,” a forty-five page report, from 1944, that was supposedly circulated at the Nuremberg trials. Grossman arrived at Treblinka—which consisted of separate labor and extermination camps—not long after the Germans had killed nearly all the remaining prisoners and withdrawn. In his dispatch, he describes the leadership of the labor camp: “We know the names of the SS men in the camp; we know their characters and idiosyncrasies. We know that the head of the camp was a Dutch German named van Eupen, an insatiable murderer and sexual pervert with a passion for good horses and fast riding. We know about a huge young man named Stumpfe who broke out into uncontrollable laughter every time he murdered a prisoner or when one was executed in his presence.” While Grossman doesn’t linger on these men in the same way he does his compatriots, he still seems convinced that the texture of their inner lives—even the nature of their hobbies—tell us something crucial about the horrors they enacted.
Grossman is at his most stylistically innovative when writing about the fate of Ukraine’s Jews, where, for him, words alone fall short. In “Ukraine Without Jews,” Grossman, whose mother was killed in a Nazi massacre at Berdychiv, writes, “Remember Sabbaths in Ukraine.” He goes on, repeating himself rhythmically, like a cantor leading prayer at shul: “Remember elders walking in prayer shawls beneath poplar trees on quiet spring evenings . . . remember Jewish children running about dusty streets, their curly hair and dark eyes shining beside the pale hair and eyes of Ukrainian children the same age.” His prayer rises and crests: “Remember how all these children mingled like flowers scattered generously over the caressing Ukrainian soil.” Even here, in the ghostly absence of people, it is their memory, and not the violence that killed them, that most concerns Grossman.
After the Second World War ended, it became harder and harder for Grossman to stick to the Soviet party line. His novels, which fictionalized what he had observed on the front, were more overtly critical of Stalin and the war effort. But he was not entirely immune to the hypocrisies inherent in Russian representations of the conflict. He applauds the teamwork of Ukrainians and Georgians fighting together for a united Soviet cause, though they were all under de-facto Russian occupation at the time. (Russia still occupies a fifth of both countries.) On the Soviet advance into Poland, Grossman stresses “the degree of trust and friendship the Polish people feel towards the Red Army.” The Poles, many of whom still view the Soviets as villains on par with Nazi occupiers, famously felt no such feelings.
Still, in 2026, it’s impossible to read Grossman’s reportage and not sense the shadow of Vladimir Putin’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine. “From the Front Line” maps a topography once again in ruins: so many of the Ukrainian cities from which Grossman reported have been bombed, in recent years, beyond recognition. In “Ukraine Without Jews,” Grossman warns, “we cannot live like this any longer, since not only Europe but all humanity now stands on the edge of the abyss.” His reporting makes clear that this duty is as pressing today as it was then—that the crimes of the future can be averted only by the clarity that witness provides. It was a duty Grossman honored through the Nazi occupation and into the darkest years of Stalinist oppression, long after the fog of war had lifted. ♦