Vasily Grossman

Soviet writer Vasily Grossman was born in 1905, the year of the first Russian Revolution, in Berdichev, a town in what is now Ukraine, which then formed part of the Russian Empire. After the 1917 October Revolution and the civil war Grossman moved to Moscow in 1923, where he studied to become an engineer.

Though never a party member, he witnessed first hand the major political and literary debates and struggles of the 1920s, in which Leon Trotsky’s Left Opposition opposed the nationalist betrayal of the October Revolution by the Soviet bureaucracy. 

Grossman survived the Great Terror of 1937-1938, and during World War II he became one of the most popular war correspondents with the Red Army. Grossman was the first journalist to cover the Nazi genocide of Eastern European Jewry.

All of Grossman’s writings during and after the war were subject to significant censorship, including during Nikita Khrushchev’s Thaw (mid-1950s to mid-1960s).