On Feb. 14, 1961, Vasily Grossman's novel “Life and Fate” was arrested. K.G.B. agents confiscated several copies of the manuscript in Grossman's Moscow apartment, as well as others in his friends' apartments and the editorial offices of two journals. Grossman himself, a famous war correspondent and author of other celebrated novels, was not arrested. But “Life and Fate” was not published in the Soviet Union until 1988 , 24 years after Grossman died at the age of 58, and even then only in an abridged version.
Presenting a vast panorama of World War II centered on the story of several individual heroes, “Life and Fate” has been compared to Tolstoy's “War and Peace.” It is not a literary masterpiece; Boris Pasternak regarded only “60 pages” in Grossman's earlier 600-page novel, “For the Right Cause” (which foreshadowed the first part of “Life and Fate”), as “genuine.” The Russian poet Polina Barskova, who has written about Grossman, reports that Anna Akhmatova apparently did not bother to read “For the Right Cause.”
But “Life and Fate” was a political bombshell. It was the first Soviet work to equate Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union, the two totalitarian regimes that confronted each other as enemies in the war. The pairing of late Stalinist anti-Semitism with Hitler's extermination of the Jews was devastating. Mikhail Suslov, the Kremlin's gray cardinal in charge of ideology, told Grossman: “Your book contains direct parallels between us and Hitlerism. … Your book speaks positively about religion, God, Catholicism. Your book defends Trotsky. Your book is filled with doubts about the legitimacy of our Soviet system. … Your book is incomparably more dangerous to us than ‘Doctor Zhivago.'” The official Soviet Writers Union informed Grossman that his novel might someday be considered publishable, but “perhaps not for 250 years.”
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