Vassily Grossman and “the devils”

It is a paradox that people in contemporary Ukraine, where historians, and, in the past few years, the national leadership, have been taking great pains to tell the truth about the 1932-33 Holodomor, still know very little about Vassily Grossman’s novel Forever Flowing , the first work in Soviet literature to draw an unvarnished, terrible, and apocalyptic picture of the Ukrainian famine that claimed millions of lives during the years of Stalin’s “great turning point.” It was only in November 2007 that The Day published, at my request, a chapter from the novel, in which a woman who witnessed the Holodomor tells the former Soviet political prisoner Ivan Grigorevich about what she had lived through. Grossman’s novel Forever Flowing has never been published in Ukraine, although it is about us and the enduring “devilry” of communism, and was written by a native of Berdychiv.

With his novel Forever Flowing Vassily Grossman concluded his epic on the Second World War and human destinies in the conditions of Soviet totalitarianism. He needed to express what he had not said in his earlier novels, For a Just Cause and Life and Fate. It took Grossman eight years, from 1955 until 1963, when the writer’s life was drawing to an end, to write a hundred pages of text. The author did not expect his work to be published, which made him totally independent of his “inner editor.” The “bloody Torquemada” had died, and Khrushchev’s fragile thaw was still in effect, although it could very soon come to an end because the dead are prone to grasp the living by their feet. Grossman needed to shout himself out, appealing not so much to his contemporaries as to his descendants. Having gone through the Great Terror, he, like millions of his compatriots, wanted to understand what had happened, to reconsider the very nature and genesis of totalitarianism without hiding anything from himself, and to reach the very core of the truth.

Forever Flowing is divided into two distinctive parts: the plot and the author’s philosophical reflections, the latter being linked to some extent to those of the protagonist, ex-prisoner of the GULAG Ivan Grigorevich. It is in these final chapters that Grossman summarizes his basic views on freedom and slavery, doing this “in the clear,’ as Tolstoy did in the famous historical and philosophical digressions in his epic novel War and Peace.

Pivotal to the story is the moral conflict between two cousins, the academic Nikolai Andreevich and Ivan Grigorevich, who would have also been a scholar academic if not for the GULAG. Both of them have a different experience of freedom. They chose different ways in similar conditions, only to face each other and be tried by their own conscience 30 years later. The story of Nikolai Andreevich is one of comfortable choice: here Grossman is interested in the “ordinary” but well-educated man. Neither a rascal nor a fool, an average academic (actually, an academic functionary), a person capable of moral (although belated) self- evaluations, Nikolai Andreevich comes to the conclusion that, now that Stalin is gone, his entire life was a “great obedience,” an escape from himself, an attempt to balance on the precarious line of a compromise with his own conscience and sometimes even to step over this line, as he did when he signed a collective letter condemning the “killer doctors.”

In essence, this is a situation of deliberately chosen non-freedom slightly disguised by the complaisant and self-satisfied belief that conformity is a “normal” or forced/inevitable path.

Yet it is not Nikolai Andreevich who interests Grossman the most. The key figure in the novel is Ivan Grigorevich, who after 30 years spent in the GULAG labor camps, is returning to the world from which the Stalinist regime once snatched him. This is an individual who held out until the end, a paradoxical figure who managed to remain free in spite of captivity and not lose himself behind the barbed wire. According to Grossman, freedom is undying, “the light and strength of the prisoners” because the aspiration to freedom is indestructible and forms the essence of human nature. Life is freedom, whereas slavery is anti-life.

Grossman barely shows his hero’s life in the labor camp. The author does not disclose Ivan Grigorevich’s daily routine in the camp, so it is difficult for the reader to imagine the concrete story of this individual’s “downfall.” It is also not so easy to comprehend the phenomenon of his endurance as shown in the context of camp life. Grossman shows the result, focusing not on Ivan Grigorevich’s daily routine but on his reflections and analysis of what happened to him, his compatriots, and his country. It is a kind of individual historiography extrapolated and shown through the prism of one person’s destiny.

It was Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn who described the daily routine in labor camps in his novel One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, which Aleksandr Tvardovsky was able to publish in the 11th issue (1962) of the journal Novyi mir. In his novel Grossman writes about one lifetime, not one day, of his character Ivan Grigorevich.

To some extent, the GULAG was in the spotlight of literature by the mid- 1950s and early 1960s, and I would to call attention here to the Ukrainian writer Ivan Bahriany and his novels Tiger Hunters (1943) and The Garden of Gethsemane (1948-50). Solzhenitsyn’s novels appeared somewhat later, stunning both Soviet and then foreign readers.

A line in Forever Flowing says that the totalitarian socialist state “has freed people of the chimera called conscience.” Yet Grossman’s work proves that conscience, as an inner imperative voice, as “inconvenient” questions to oneself, can evaporate out of a single individual, but at the same time remain living in the human community as such. Ivan Grigorevich is the phenomenon of a free personality in conditions of external slavery.

Prison camps robbed this person of 30 years, but failed to rob him of his “living soul.” Ivan’s strength lies in his integrity. He could not have pretended to himself, so people like him posed a threat to the regime. To some he was “unconventional,” to others — “mad” (freethinking was often officially interpreted in Russia as “madness” — examples abound). Grossman attaches great importance to his protagonist’s opinion, and it is through this plane (the hero’s summing-up and, closely tied to this, the author’s analysis of all that has happened to freedom in Russia) that the novel’s central nerve runs.

Grossman spoke quite a few “forbidden words.” One of the “inconvenient” subjects in his novel is the casuistic nature of the Soviet nationalities policy, which was in fact aimed at asserting Russian chauvinism and “state-sponsored nationalism.” In this sense, Soviet practices differed very little from those of imperial Russia. Grossman places emphasis on what was especially painful to him — the grimaces of official anti-Semitism lightly disguised as the struggle against “rootless cosmopolitanism” and “kowtowing to the West.”

But Grossman did not fail to notice another terrible grimace of Stalinist “internationalist humanism.” A native of Ukraine, he was also aware of Ukrainian slavery in the totalitarian USSR. He was one of the first, if not the first, Soviet man of letters who depicted the horror of the 1932-33 Holodomor, which the Ukrainian parliament finally recognized as an act of genocide a short while ago. In Forever Flowing, a widow, at whose house Ivan Grigorevich stays after returning from exile, tells him about the famine that took place in Ukraine. She is an eyewitness of those events: she was sent as an activist to the countryside to help the collectivization effort. Long before our much-politicized debates on the Ukrainian tragedy of the early 1930s, Grossman had revealed the true cause of the Holodomor — “Moscow’s malice towards Ukraine.” The common perception was that “private property is deep-seated in the mentality of a khokhol” (derogatory Russian term for a Ukrainian — Ed.); hence, the suspicious attitude to Ukrainians as such because their private-property mentality only hindered “socialist construction.”

The pages of Forever Flowing tell the ghastly truth about the Holodomor. Dead villages, where there is nobody left to reap the wheat. A harvest without peasants: the wheat was mowed by Red Army soldiers, who lived in tents right in the fields because they were not allowed to enter the extinct villages. Villagers from the Russian region of Orel are resettled in Ukraine, where they are to occupy the dead peasants’ houses, but the ever-present stench of corpses forces the resettlers to go back to their country. There are kilometers-long bread lines in Kyiv, where everybody is afraid of falling and not getting up again. So, all the debilitated people cling to one another and sway from side to side. Even today, after the revelations of thousands of tragic facts, one cannot help being stunned by the story of Vasyl Trokhymovych Karpenko, his wife, and their little son Hrytsko whom his parents try in vain to save with their last crumbs of bread at the cost of their own lives: all of them are mercilessly killed by a regime that had promised them the kingdom of freedom.

Ukrainian villagers, whom the communists had robbed of everything down to the last seed of grain, wailed in anticipation of death. “The whole village was wailing,” the widow recalls. “It was not coming from the brain or the heart — it was as if leaves were rustling in the wind or straw was creaking. You had to be made of stone to hear that wailing and still eat your bread ration. Just imagine: you go out to the field with your ration and hear the wailing. You go further: everything is quieting down, it seems. But then you hear it again: a neighboring village is wailing. The whole earth and the people on it seem to be wailing. But who will hear them? There is no God.” (Ukrainian literature was also “wailing” during the time of the “great turning point.” This is the subject of a separate study evidence for which may be found in the works of Mykola Khvylovy, Mykola Kulish, Mykola Zerov, Yurii Yanovsky, and many other writers.)

Let us remember the widow’s words about “Moscow’s malice towards Ukraine.” These are the key words that could go a long way towards explaining things to current diehard ideological followers of Stalin and his party if only they wanted to understand anything at all.

In Grossman’s novel, the subject of the Holodomor is closely intertwined with that of the Holocaust, which was by far the greatest surprise in Khrushchev-era literature. The Stalinist murder by famine is a topic that was raised long before Grossman by such writers as Ulas Samchuk in his novel Maria and Vasyl Barka in his novel The Yellow Prince. But only Grossman dared to draw a parallel between the two great tragedies of the Ukrainians and the Jews.

The final part of Forever Flowing is a treatise on freedom and slavery. The last seven chapters are so important that one can only interpret them in the broader context of Russian 19th and 20th-century philosophical and sociopolitical thought, starting perhaps with the well-known debate between the “Slavophiles” and the “Westernizers.” I do not know if Grossman was familiar with Nikolai Berdiaev’s The Origin of Russian Communism (1937), but in many of his reflections he was following in this Russian philosopher’s footsteps. The novel sometimes even seems to be “quoting” Berdiaev, especially in the passages dealing with the personality of Lenin and the supremacy of politics over economics, which is typical of the state that was founded by Lenin and built by Stalin.

Naturally, I do not think that Grossman was repeating Berdiaev. On the contrary, he has his own logic and arguments. For instance, he considers the subjective factors of Russian communism as ones that are closely linked to the Russian national mentality as such and to the movement and logic of the history of Russian statehood. At this point Grossman enters into a very bitter polemic with those who pondered such questions before him. Willy-nilly, he broaches the complex issue of the “mysterious Russian soul,” which had worried many, including Gogol and Dostoevsky (to whom Berdiaev referred).

Inasmuch as the nature of national history reflects the peculiarities of national mentality, Grossman focused on the peculiarities of the Russian soul. He knew only too well what he was saying. As is known, Dostoevsky devised the well-known formula of the “universal responsiveness” of the Russians. But the paradox is that in practice this “universal responsiveness” was just a nice wrapping for imperialistic attitudes. No wonder Alexander Pushkin, the poet who celebrated freedom, glorified Russia’s bloody military conquest of the Crimea and the suppression of the Polish uprising in 1830. In 1863, when Poland was again being “curbed” (this time by General Muravev’s troops), Russia saw an outbreak of “patriotic syphilis,” to quote Alexander Herzen, which embraced almost the entire “universally responsive” Russian intelligentsia. In his political writings Dostoevsky sometimes used phrases that have been repeated in our day by none other than Vladimir Zhirinovsky. So Grossman had good reason to be skeptical about the allegedly mystical and mysterious Russian soul.

In Forever Flowing the writer says that there is no mystery, and “the Russian soul is a thousand-year-old slave” whose nature has been shaped by lack of freedom. Grossman’s key formula is that Russian communism continued the tradition of Russian state-sponsored despotism. In this sense, Lenin proved to be a loyal successor of Ivan the Terrible and Peter I. But this conclusion is not the end of Grossman’s idea. He formulates a paradoxical law of “the relationship between Russian development and the growth of slavery.” According to Grossman, slavery and serfdom are so embedded in the “Russian soul” that the “development of non-freedom” became a condition for state development. According to the freedom/non- freedom criterion, Russia is dramatically opposed to the West because “the development of the West was nourished by the growth of freedom.”

One can argue this point with Grossman by recalling that the idea of violence as “the midwife of history” was born in the West. In The Communist Manifesto (1848) Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels declared that humanity will become happy and free from the power of capital by the “dictatorship of the proletariat,” which would eliminate the much-hated private property. It is this principle that the Bolsheviks put into practice in 1917. The Communist Manifesto gives a detailed description of the proletariat’s ascent to power. The scenario called for “a more or less covert civil war” that would grow into “an overt revolution.” So the idea of freedom, which Grossman calls “foreign,” demanded, in accordance with Marxist tenets, the violence and dictatorship to which Ivan Grigorevich falls victim. Clearly, the origins of Russian communism would have been more amply exposed if the postmortem of the “Russian soul” had been complemented by an analysis of the doctrinal causes of the experiment whose scope and consequences affected the entire 20th century.

As recent history has shown, totalitarianism of the communist variety proved surprisingly tenacious, more than once revealing its spine-chilling faces (e.g., in Cambodia or China). At issue here may be the temptation of totalitarianism and the illusion of easiness and speed with which one can supposedly put an end to a social evil in one fell swoop — “with a single leap over the swamp,” as a character in Dostoevsky’s novel The Devils dreams. This is the essence in my opinion: simple recipes and hopes for “a single leap” and a blitzkrieg, even at the cost of total violence and heavy bloodshed. But the greatest horror is that this scenario, which was devised by “the devils,” coincided in some essential points with the moods and desires of the masses that were ready to rush breakneck towards illusions, only to pay for them shortly with millions of lives. This occurred in Germany under the Fuehrer, as it did in Lenin and Stalin’s Russia. Although some people prefer to hush this up, neither Lenin, Stalin, Mao Zedong, nor Pol Pot would have succeeded if there had not been this “reciprocal movement,” this instinctive readiness of a part of society for that “leap over the swamp.”

Meanwhile, the relationship between Stalinism and Leninism was simply not a question for Grossman. Stalin completed what Lenin had begun by raising “the Leninist flag” over Russia. Grossman also regards Nazism as the “Siamese twin” of Russian communism. What they share in common is that in both cases freedom was sacrificed to force, and “a synthesis of slavery and socialism” laid the background for the so-called “people’s state.” In other words, it is about a totalitarian political system that had absolutely no desire to reckon with elementary human rights, including the right to live. Man was suppressed by the state and became merely “a cog in the machine.”

Grossman completes the analysis of what happened to Russian communism by resolutely rejecting the possibility of communism as such. His main argument is that communism (or Stalinist “barrack-room socialism”) is incompatible with freedom. The writer does not agree with Engels, who believed that freedom is the recognition of necessity. On the contrary: freedom is the overcoming of necessity, it is an opportunity for an individual to reject predetermined and imposed circumstances. In Grossman’s view, freedom is even greater than “human rights”: it is a synonym for life. It is life-giving oxygen. And as long as people live, they will require this oxygen and resist slavery with their very existence. They will never forgo freedom, and Grossman saw this as a historic verdict on communism as a utopia that required violence. Freedom is immortal and cannot be killed: this was the hope and faith of Vassily Grossman, a person who succeeded in becoming free.

Volodymyr Panchenko is a professor at the National University of Kyiv Mohyla Academy.