Vasily Grossman

Russian Soviet writer and journalist (1905-1964)

Fame57.4
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Writers rank#164

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Fame57.4
Momentum1.7
Writers rank#164
Wikipedia21K

Lived 1905–1964, aged 59

WritersWriter / Author

Wikipedia
43 languages
Cross-language footprint
Era
1905–1964
Aged 59
Awards
7
recognised works

Summary

Updated 2026-06-09

A Soviet war correspondent who witnessed Stalingrad and was among the first to report from Treblinka, then wrote novels so dangerous the KGB confiscated the manuscripts themselves — not just the printed copies, but the carbon paper and typewriter ribbons.

Biography

About

Born to a Jewish family in Ukraine in 1905, Grossman trained as a chemical engineer at Moscow State University, earning the nickname "Vasya the Chemist" for his diligence, then worked in the Donets Basin before shifting to writing full-time in the 1930s. When war came, the Red Army newspaper Krasnaya Zvezda sent him to the front, where he covered Moscow, Stalingrad, Kursk, and Berlin, and filed some of the earliest eyewitness accounts from a Nazi death camp after Treblinka's discovery. After the war, his two major novels — Life and Fate and Everything Flows — were suppressed by Khrushchev's go…

Voice

In their own words

Sourced, dated quotes from Vasily Grossman

Vasily Grossman

said1959

The more difficult a man's life had been before the camp, the more furiously he lied. This lie had no practical purpose; it served simply to glorify freedom.

— Chapter 2, page 5

Vasily Grossman

said1959

National Socialism had created a new type of political criminals: criminals who had not committed a crime.

— Chapter 2, page 5

Vasily Grossman

saidundated

We are restoring the Leninist norms of democracy. But Leninist norms are not the same as the bourgeois norms of democracy.

Vasily Grossman

saidundated

You believe that we have violated the principle of freedom in your case. Yes, this is so if one understands freedom in the bourgeois sense of the term.

Vasily Grossman

saidundated