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Synopsis
When the Germans invaded Russia in 1941, Vasily Grossman became a special correspondent for the Red Star, the Soviet Army's newspaper, and reported from the frontlines of the war. A Writer at War depicts in vivid detail the crushing conditions on the Eastern Front, and the lives and deaths of soldiers and civilians alike. Witnessing some of the most savage fighting of the war, Grossman saw firsthand the repeated early defeats of the Red Army, the brutal street fighting in Stalingrad, the Battle of Kursk (the largest tank engagement in history), the defense of Moscow, the battles in Ukraine, the atrocities at Treblinka, and much more. Antony Beevor and Luba Vinogradova have taken Grossman's raw notebooks, and fashioned them into a gripping narrative providing one of the most even-handed descriptions --at once unflinching and sensitive -- we have ever had of what Grossman called "the ruthless truth of war."Review
VASILY GROSSMAN was born in 1905. In 1941 he became a war reporter for the Red Army newspaper Red Star and came to be regarded as a legendary war hero. Life and Fate, his masterpiece, was considered a threat to the totalitarian regime, and Grossman was told that there was no chance of the novel being published for another 200 years. Grossman died in 1964. ANTONY BEEVOR's books include Stalingrad and The Fall of Berlin 1945, which has been translated into 25 languages. DR. LUBA VINOGRADOVA is a researcher, translator, and freelance journalist. She has worked with Antony Beevor on his three most recent books.ONEBaptism of FireHitler's invasion of the Soviet Union began in the early hours of 22 June 1941. Stalin, refusing to believe that he could be tricked, had rejected more than eighty warnings. Although the Soviet dictator did not collapse until later, he was so disorientated on discovering the truth that the announcement on the wireless at midday was made by his foreign minister, Vyacheslav Molotov, in a wooden voice. The people of the Soviet Union proved rather more robust than their leaders. They queued to volunteer for the front.Vasily Grossman, bespectacled, overweight and leaning on a walking stick, was dejected when the recruiting station turned him down. He should not have been surprised, considering his unimpressive physical state. Grossman was only in his mid-thirties, yet the girls in the next-door apartment called him `uncle'.Over the next few weeks he tried to get any form of employment he could which was connected with the war. The Soviet authorities, meanwhile, gave little accurate information on what was happening at the front. Nothing was said of the German forces, more than three million strong, dividing the Red Army with armoured thrusts, then capturing hundreds of thousands of prisoners in encirclements. Only the names of towns mentioned in official bulletins revealed how rapidly the enemy was advancing.Grossman had put off urging his mother to abandon the town of Berdichev in the Ukraine. His second wife, Olga Mikhailovna Guber, convinced him that they had no room for her. Then, before Grossman realised fully what was happening, the German Sixth Army seized Berdichev on 7 July. The enemy had advanced over 350 kilometres in just over two weeks. Grossman's failure to save his mother burdened him for the rest of his life, even after he discovered that she had refused to leave because there was nobody else to look after a niece. Grossman was also extremely concerned about the fate of Ekaterina, or Katya, his daughter by his first wife. He did not know that she had been sent away from Berdichev for the summer.Desperate to be of some help to the war effort, Grossman badgered the Main Political Department of the Red Army, known by the acronym GLAVPUR, even though he was not a member of the Communist Party. His future editor, David Ortenberg, a commissar with the rank of general, recounted later how he came to work for Krasnaya Zvezda, the newspaper of the Soviet armed forces which was far more attentively read during the war than any other paper.I remember how Grossman turned up for the first time at the editorial office. This was in late July. I had dropped in at the Main Political Department and heard that Vasily Grossman had been asking them to send him to the front. All that I knew about this writer was that he had written the novel Stepan Kolchugin about the Donbass.`Vasily Grossman?' I said. `I've never met him, but I know Stepan Kolchugin. Please send him to Krasnaya Zvezda.'`Yes, but he has never served in the army. He knows nothing about it. Would he fit in at Krasnaya Zvezda?'`That's all right,' I said, trying to persuade them. `He knows about people's souls.'I did not leave them in peace until the People's Commissar signed the order to conscript Vasily Grossman into the Red Army and appoint him to our newspaper. There was one problem. He was given the rank of private, or, as Ilya Ehrenburg liked to joke about both himself and Grossman, `untrained private'. It was impossible to give him an officer's rank or that of a commissar because he was not a Party member. It was equally impossible to make him wear a private's uniform, as he would have had to spend half his time saluting his seniors. All that we could do was to give him the rank of quartermaster. Some of our writers, such as Lev Slavin, Boris Lapin and even, for some time, Konstantin Simonov, were in the same situation. Their green tabs used to cause them a lot of trouble, as the same tabs were worn by medics, and they were always being mistaken for them. Anyway, on 28 July 1941 I signed the order: `Quartermaster of the second rank Vasily Grossman is appointed a special correspondent of Krasnaya Zvezda with a salary of 1,200 roubles per month.'The next day Grossman reported at the editorial office. He told me that although this appointment was unexpected, he was happy about it. He returned a few days later fully equipped and in an officer's uniform. [His tunic was all wrinkled, his spectacles kept sliding down his nose, and his pistol hung on his unfastened belt like an axe.]`I am ready to depart for the front today,' he said.`Today?' I asked. `But can you fire that thing?' I pointed to the pistol hanging at his side.`No.'`And a rifle?'`No, I can't, either.'`So how can I allow you to go to the front? Anything can happen there. No, you will have to live at the editorial office for a couple of weeks.'Colonel Ivan Khitrov, our tactical expert and a former army officer, became Grossman's coach. He would take him to one of the shooting ranges of the Moscow garrison and teach him how to shoot.On 5 August, Ortenberg allowed Grossman to set off for the front. He arranged for him to be accompanied by Pavel Troyanovsky, a correspondent of great experience, and Oleg Knorring, a photographer. Grossman described their departure in some detail.We are leaving for the Central Front. Political Officer Troyanovsky, camera reporter Knorring, and I are going to Gomel. Troyanovsky, with his thin dark face and big nose, has received the medal `For Achievements in Battle'. He has seen a lot although he isn't old, in fact he is some ten years younger than me. I had at first thought that Troyanovsky was a real soldier, a born fighter, but it turned out that he had started his career in journalism not long ago as a correspondent of Pionerskaya Pravda [the Communist Youth Movement newspaper]. I was told that Knorring is a good photo-journalist. He is tall, a year younger than me. I am older than the other two, but alongside them I am a mere baby in matters of war. They take a perfectly justified pleasure in regaling me with the forthcoming horrors.We leave tomorrow by train. We will travel in a `soft' railway carriage all the way to Bryansk, and from there by whatever transport God sends our way. We were briefed before our departure by Brigade Commissar Ortenberg. He told us that an advance was about to take place. Our first meeting was at GLAVPUR. Ortenberg had a conversation with me and finally told me that he thought I was an author of children's books. This was a big surprise for me, I had no idea that I had written any books for children. When we were saying goodbye I said to him: `Goodbye, Comrade Boev.' He burst out laughing. `I am not Boev, I am Ortenberg.' Well, I paid him back. I had mistaken him for the chief of the publications department of GLAVPUR.I have been drinking all day, just as a recruit should. Papa turned up, as well as Kugel, Vadya, Zhenya and Veronichka. Veronichka was looking at me with very sad eyes, as if I were Gastello. I was very touched. The whole family sang songs and had sad conversations. The atmosphere was melancholy and concentrated. I lay alone that night, thinking. I had a lot of things, as well as people, to think about.The day of our departure is a lovely one, it's hot and rainy. Sunshine and rain alternate suddenly. Pavements and sidewalks are wet. Sometimes they shine and sometimes are slate grey. The air is filled with hot, stifling moisture. A beautiful girl, Marusya, has come to see Troyanovsky off. She works at the editorial offices [of Krasnaya Zvezda], but apparently she is seeing him off on her own initiative, not at the editor's request. Knorring and I are tactful. We avoid looking in their direction.Then the three of us [go to the platform]. I have so many memories of the Bryansky railway station. It's the station I arrived at when I first came to Moscow. Perhaps my departure from it today is my last. We drink lemonade and eat disgusting cakes in the cafeteria.Our train pulls out of the station. All the names of stations along the line are familiar. I passed them so many times as a student, going back to Mama, to Berdichev, for my holidays. For the first time in a long while I can catch up on sleep in this `soft' compartment, after all the air raids on Moscow.[After reaching Bryansk] we spend a night at the railway station. Every corner is filled with Red Army soldiers. Many of them are badly dressed, in rags. They have already been `there'. Abkhazians look the worst. Many of them are barefoot.We have to sit up all night. German aircraft appear above the station, the sky is humming, there are searchlights everywhere. We all rush to some wasteland as far as possible from the station. Fortunately, the Germans don't bomb us here, they only frighten us. In the morning we listen to a broadcast from Moscow. It is a press conference given by Lozovsky [the head of the Soviet Information Bureau]. Sound was bad, we were listening hungrily. He used a lot of proverbs as usual, but they didn't make our hearts feel any lighter.We go to the freight station to look for a train. They put us on a hospital train going to Unecha [midway between Bryansk and Gomel]. We board the train, but then suddenly there is panic. Everyone starts running, and firing. It turns out that a German aircraft is machine-gunning the railway station. I myself was caught up in this considerable commotion.After Unecha, we travelled in a freight car. The weather was wonderful, but my travel companions said this was bad, and I realised this myself. There were black holes and craters from bombs everywhere along the railway. One could see trees broken by explosions. In the fields there were thousands of peasants, men and women, digging anti-tank ditches.We watch the sky nervously and decided to jump off the train if the worst came to the worst. It was moving quite slowly. The moment we arrived in Novozybkov there was an air raid. A bomb fell by the station forecourt. This train wasn't going any further. We lay on the green grass, waiting and enjoying the warmth and grass around us, but we still kept glancing up at the sky. What if a German [aircraft] turned up all of a sudden?We jump to our feet in the middle of the night. There is a hospital train going to Gomel. We take hold of the handrails when the train is already moving. We hang on the steps, knock at the door, pleading with them to let us at least on to the platform of the freight car. Suddenly a woman looks out and shouts: `Jump off this second! It is forbidden to travel on hospital trains!' The woman is a doctor whose calling is to relieve people's suffering. `Excuse us, but the train is moving at full speed, how are we to jump off?' There are five of us holding on to the handrails, we are all officers and all we are asking for is to be allowed to stand on the covered platform. She starts kicking us with her great boot, silently and with extraordinary force. She punches us on the hands with her fist, trying to make us let go of the handrails. Things are looking bad: if one lets go, that would be the end. Fortunately, it dawns on us that we aren't on a Moscow tram, and switch from the defensive to the attack. A few seconds later, the covered platform is ours, and the bitch with the rank of doctor is screaming in a frightened way and disappears very quickly. This is our first taste of fighting.We arrive in Gomel. The train stops very far from the railway station, so we have a painful walk along the track in the dark. One has to crawl under the carriages to cross railways. I bang my forehead on them and stumble; my damned suitcase turns out to be extremely heavy.Finally we reach the station building. It is completely destroyed. We utter `Ahs' and `Ohs' looking at the ruins. A railway worker who is passing reassures us by saying that the station had been demolished just before the invasion in order to build a bigger and better one.Gomel! What sadness there is in this quiet green town, in these sweet public gardens, in its old people sitting on the benches, in sweet girls walking along the streets. Children are playing in the piles of sand brought here to extinguish incendiary bombs ... Any minute a huge cloud may cover the sun, a storm may whip up sand and dust, and whirl them about. The Germans are less than fifty kilometres away.Gomel welcomes us with an air-raid warning. Locals say that the custom here is to sound the alarm when there are no German aircraft around and, on the contrary, to sound the all-clear as soon as bombing starts.Bombing of Gomel. A cow, howling bombs, fire, women ... The strong smell of perfume - from a pharmacy hit in the bombardment - blocked out the stench of burning, just for a moment.The picture of burning Gomel in the eyes of a wounded cow.The colours of smoke. Typesetters had to set their newspaper by the light of burning buildings.We stay the night with a tyro journalist. His articles aren't going to join a Golden Treasury of Literature. I've seen them in the Front newspaper. They are complete rubbish, with stories such as `Ivan Pupkin has killed five Germans with a spoon'.We went to meet the editor, regimental commissar Nosov, who kept us waiting for a good two hours. We had to sit in a dark corridor, and when finally we saw this tsar-like person and spoke with him for a couple minutes, I realised that this comrade was, to put it mildly, not particularly bright and that his conversation wasn't worth even a two-minute wait.The headquarters of the Central Front was the first port of call for Grossman, Troyanovsky and Knorring. The Central Front, commanded by General Andrei Yeremenko, had been set up hurriedly following the collapse of the Western Front at the end of June. The Western Front's unfortunate commander, General D.G. Pavlov, was made the chief scapegoat for Stalin's refusal to prepare for war. In characteristic Stalinist fashion, Pavlov, the commander of Soviet tank forces during the Spanish Civil War, was accused of treason and executed.The Palgrave Handbook of Holocaust Literature and Culture
The Palgrave Handbook of Holocaust Literature and Culture reflects current approaches to Holocaust literature that open up future thinking on Holocaust representation. The chapters consider diverse generational perspectives—survivor writing, second and third generation—and genres—memoirs, poetry, novels, graphic narratives, films, video-testimonies, and other forms of literary and cultural expression. In turn, these perspectives create interactions among generations, genres, temporalities, and cultural contexts. The volume also participates in the ongoing project of responding to and talking through moments of rupture and incompletion that represent an opportunity to contribute to the making of meaning through the continuation of narratives of the past. As such, the chapters in this volume pose options for reading Holocaust texts, offering openings for further discussion and exploration. The inquiring body of interpretive scholarship responding to the Shoah becomes itself a story, a narrative that materially extends our inquiry into that history.
See, for example, Alexandra Popoff's Vasily Grossman and the Soviet Century, forthcoming in 2019. ... Cited in Vasily Grossman , A Writer at War: A Soviet Journalist with the Red Army , 1941–1945 , eds. and trans."
Fortress Dark and Stern
The first history of the Soviet home front experience during World War II and of the civilians who bore the burden of total war and played a critical role in the global victory over fascism. After Hitler's invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941, German troops conquered the heartland of Soviet industry and agriculture and turned the occupied territories into mass killing fields. The country's survival hung in the balance. In Fortress Dark and Stern, Wendy Z. Goldman and Donald Filtzer tell the epic tale of the Soviet home front during World War II. Against the backdrop of the Red Army's early retreats and hard-fought advances after Stalingrad, they present the impact of total war behind the front lines in a chronicle of spirited defense efforts, draconian state directives, teeming black markets, official corruption, and selfless heroism. In one of the greatest wartime feats in history, Soviet workers rapidly evacuated factories, food, and people thousands of miles to the east. After long and dangerous journeys in unheated boxcars, they built a new industrial base beyond the reach of German bombers. As the Soviet state reached the height of its power, imposing military discipline and sending millions of people to work thousands of miles from home, ordinary people withstood starvation, epidemics, and horrific living conditions to supply the front and make the Allied victory possible This book examines the dark and painful war years from a new perspective, telling the stories of evacuees, refugees, teenaged and women workers, runaways from work, prisoners, and deportees. Based on a vast trove of new archival materials, Fortress Dark and Stern reveals a history of suffering, sacrifice, and ultimate triumph largely unknown to Western readers.
Grossman , Atina, “A Question of Silence: The Rape of German Women by Occupation Soldiers,” October, vol. 72 (Spring 1995), pp. 42–63. Grossman , Vasily , A Writer at War: A Soviet Journalist with the Red Army , 1941–1945 , ed. and trans. by ..."
American Carnival
The author examines the issues that have led to the decline of journalistic professionalism in recent years including intentional frauds and corruption, the effect of the Internet, and serious stories about unethical practices in journalism.
... Writer at War : Vasily Grossman with the Red Army , 1941–1945 , was an English-language translation of a collection of war correspondence and other writings by Vasily Grossman , a Russian journalist who covered the Soviet Red Army from ..."
Historical Dictionary of World War II
The Historical Dictionary of World War II: The War against Germany and Italy relates the history of this war through a chronology, an introductory essay, maps and photos, and an extensive bibliography. The dictionary section has more than 300 cross-referenced entries on the countries and geographical areas involved in the war, as well as the nations remaining neutral; wartime alliances and conferences; significant civilian and military leaders; and major ground, naval, and air operations. This book is an excellent access point for students, researchers, and anyone wanting to know more about World War II.
Grossman , Vasily . A Writer at War: A Soviet Journalist with the Red Army , 1941– 1945 . Edited and translated by Antony Beevor and Liba Vinogradova. New York: Pantheon, 2005. Harrison, Mark. Accounting for War: Soviet Production, ..."
Life in Stalin's Soviet Union
Life in Stalin's Soviet Union is a collaborative work in which some of the leading scholars in the field shed light on various aspects of daily life for Soviet citizens. Split into three parts which focus on 'Food, Health and Leisure', the 'Lived Experience' and 'Religion and Ideology', the book is comprised of chapters covering a range of important subjects, including: * Food * Health and Housing * Sex and Gender * Education * Religion (Christianity, Islam and Judaism) * Sport and Leisure * Festivals There is detailed analysis of urban and rural life, as well as explorations of life in the gulag, life as a peasant, life in the military and what it was like to be disabled in Stalin's Russia. The book also engages with the wider Soviet Union wherever possible to ensure the most in-depth discussion of life, in all its minutiae, under Stalin. This is a vitally important book for any student of Stalin's Russia keen to know more about the human history of this complex period of dictatorship.
The Leningrad Blockade, 1941–1944: A New Documentary History from the Soviet Archives. ... New York: Harcourt, 1967 Grossman , Vasily . Life and Fate. ... A Writer at War: A Soviet Journalist with the Red Army , 1941–1945 ."
A History of Russia and Its Empire
This concise text provides an introduction to Russian and Soviet history from the crowning of Mikhail Romanov in 1613 through Putin’s current term. Through a clear chronological narrative, Boterbloem traces the political, military, economic, social, religious, and cultural developments that led Russia from an exotic backwater to superpower stature.
The Soviet regime continued to deny the clause's existence until the very last months of the Soviet Union's existence. ... Grossman , Vasily . Life and Fate. ... A Writer at War: A Soviet Journalist with the Red Army , 1941–1945 ."
Api’s Berlin Diaries
“This is not a book I will forget any time soon.” ―Story Circle Book Reviews Moving and provocative, Api’s Berlin Diaries offers a personal perspective on the fall of Berlin 1945 and the far-reaching aftershocks of the Third Reich. After her mother’s death, Robinson was thrilled to find her beloved grandfather’s war diaries—only to discover that he had been a Nazi. The award-winning memoir shows Api, a doctor in Berlin, desperately trying to help the wounded in cellars without water or light. He himself was reduced to anxiety and despair, the daily diary his main refuge. As Robinson retraces Api’s steps half a century later, she tries to come up with answers to why he joined the Nazi party while also remembering the happiest years of her childhood with him. For readers of today this moving memoir provides a timely reminder that we all need to reckon with our countries’ pasts. “This is a must read for anyone interested in the German experience during WWII..” —Ariana Neumann, author of When Time Stopped
Grossman , Vasily . A Writer at War: A Soviet Journalist with the Red Army , 1941–1945 . New York: Vintage Books, 2005. Isherwood, Christopher. The Berlin Stories. New York: New Directions, 1963. Italiaander, Rolf, et al., eds."
Traitor
Amanda McCrina's Traitor is a tightly woven YA thrill ride exploring political conflict, deep-seated prejudice, and the terror of living in a world where betrayal is a matter of life or death. “Alive with detail and vivid with insight, Traitor is an effortlessly immersive account of a shocking and little-known moment in the turbulent history of Poland and Ukraine—and ironically, a piercing and bittersweet story of unflinching loyalty. I think Tolya has left my heart a little damaged forever.” —Elizabeth Wein, #1 New York Times–bestselling author of Code Name Verity and The Enigma Game Poland, 1944. After the Soviet liberation of Lwów from Germany, the city remains a battleground between resistance fighters and insurgent armies, its loyalties torn between Poland and Ukraine. Seventeen-year-old Tolya Korolenko is half Ukrainian, half Polish, and he joined the Soviet Red Army to keep himself alive and fed. When he not-quite-accidentally shoots his unit's political officer in the street, he's rescued by a squad of Ukrainian freedom fighters. They might have saved him, but Tolya doesn't trust them. He especially doesn't trust Solovey, the squad's war-scarred young leader, who has plenty of secrets of his own. Then a betrayal sends them both on the run. And in a city where loyalty comes second to self-preservation, a traitor can be an enemy or a savior—or sometimes both. This title has common core connections.
For general information on the common soldier's day-to-day experience in the Red Army , I've referred to Vasily Grossman ( A Writer at War: A Soviet Journalist with the Red Army , 1941–1945 ) and Catherine Merridale (Ivan's War: Life and ..."
The Silent Unseen
A mesmerizing historical novel of suspense and intrigue about a teenage girl who risks everything to save her missing brother. Poland, July 1944. Sixteen-year-old Maria is making her way home after years of forced labor in Nazi Germany, only to find her village destroyed and her parents killed in a war between the Polish Resistance and Ukrainian nationalists. To Maria’s shock, the local Resistance unit is commanded by her older brother, Tomek—who she thought was dead. He is now a “Silent Unseen,” a special-operations agent with an audacious plan to resist a new and even more dangerous enemy sweeping in from the East. When Tomek disappears, Maria is determined to find him, but the only person who might be able to help is a young Ukrainian prisoner and the last person Maria trusts—even as she feels a growing connection to him that she can’t resist. Tightly woven, relentlessly intense, The Silent Unseen depicts an explosive entanglement of loyalty, lies, and love during wartime, from Amanda McCrina, the acclaimed author of Traitor, a debut hailed by Elizabeth Wein as “Alive with detail and vivid with insight . . . a piercing and bittersweet story.”
On the second day after the Red Army invaded Germany, we saw eight hundred Soviet children walking eastwards on the ... — Vasily Grossman , A Writer at War: A Soviet Journalist with the Red Army , 1941–1945 HISTORICAL NOTE By late July ..."
Ethics in the Conflicts of Modernity
MacIntyre explores the philosophical, political, and moral issues encountered in understanding what the virtues require in contemporary social contexts.
What the military made of him was a journalist , a war correspondent for Krasnaya zvezda, Red Star, ... 4 For Grossman's wartime writings, see A Writer at War : Vasily Grossman with the Red Army 1941–1945 , ed. and trans."
Eight Days in May
'Superb' David Aaronovitch, The Times 'A punchy account that is a proper page-turner' Financial Times 'The last days of the Third Reich have often been told, but seldom with the verve, perception and elegance of Volker Ullrich's rich narrative' Richard Overy, author of The Bombing War 1 May 1945. The world did not know it yet, but the final week of the Third Reich's existence had begun. Hitler was dead, but the war had still not ended. Everything had both ground to a halt and yet remained agonizingly uncertain. Volker Ullrich's remarkable book takes the reader into a world torn between hope and terror, violence and peace. Ullrich describes how each day unfolds, with Germany now under a new Führer, Admiral Dönitz, based improbably in the small Baltic town of Flensburg. With Hitler dead, Berlin in ruins and the war undoubtedly lost, the process by which the fighting would end remained horrifyingly unclear. Many major Nazis were still on the loose, wild rumours continued to circulate about a last stand in the Alps and the Western allies falling out with the Soviet Union. All over Europe, millions of soldiers, prisoners, slave labourers and countless exhausted, grief-stricken and often homeless families watched and waited for the war's end. Eight Days in May is the story of people, in Erich Kästner's striking phrase, stuck in 'the gap between no longer and not yet'. 'A fast-paced, brilliant recounting of the turbulent last days of the Third Reich, with all the energy and chaos of a Jackson Pollock canvas' Helmut Walser Smith, author of Germany: A Nation in its Time
Vasily Grossman , A Writer at War: A Soviet Journalist with the Red Army 1941–1945 , ed. and trans. Antony Beevor and Luba Vinogradova (New York: Random House, 2010), 340. 44 48 39 Keiderling, ed., Gruppe Ulbricht, 349."
Sherman's Ghosts
This “thought-provoking” military history considers the influence of General Sherman’s Civil War tactics on American conflicts through the twentieth century (The New York Times). “To know what war is, one should follow our tracks,” Gen. William T. Sherman once wrote to his wife, describing the devastation left by his armies in Georgia. Sherman’s Ghosts is an investigation of those tracks, as well as those left across the globe by the American military in the 150 years since Sherman’s infamous “March to the Sea.” Sherman’s Ghosts opens with an epic retelling of General Sherman’s fateful decision to terrorize the South’s civilian population in order to break the back of the Confederacy. Acclaimed journalist and historian Matthew Carr exposes how this strategy, which Sherman called “indirect warfare,” became the central preoccupation of war planners in the twentieth century and beyond. He offers a lucid assessment of the impact Sherman’s slash-and-burn policies have had on subsequent wars and military conflicts, including World War II and in the Philippines, Korea, Vietnam, and even Iraq and Afghanistan. In riveting accounts of military campaigns and in the words of American soldiers and strategists, Carr finds ample evidence of Sherman’s long shadow. Sherman’s Ghosts is a rare reframing of how we understand our violent history and a call to action for those who hope to change it.
Vasily Grossman , A Writer at War: A Soviet Journalist with the Red Army , 1941–1945 (New York: Vintage, 2007). 18. Andrew S. Coopersmith, Fighting Words: An Illustrated History of Newspaper Accounts of the Civil War (New York: The New ..."
Genocide
Since the 1980s the study of genocide has exploded, both historically and geographically, to encompass earlier epochs, other continents, and new cases. The concept of genocide has proved its worth, but that expansion has also compounded the tensions between a rigid legal concept and the manifold realities researchers have discovered. The legal and political benefits that accompany genocide status have also reduced complex discussions of historical events to a simplistic binary – is it genocide or not? – a situation often influenced by powerful political pressures. Genocide addresses these tensions and tests the limits of the concept in cases ranging from the role of sexual violence during the Holocaust to state-induced mass starvation in Kazakh and Ukrainian history, while considering what the Armenian, Rwandan, and Burundi experiences reveal about the uses and pitfalls of reading history and conducting politics through the lens of genocide. Contributors examine the pressures that great powers have exerted in shaping the concept; the reaction Raphaël Lemkin, originator of the word “genocide,” had to the United Nations’ final resolution on the subject; France’s long-held choice not to use the concept of genocide in its courtrooms; the role of transformative social projects and use of genocide memory in politics; and the relation of genocide to mass violence targeting specific groups. Throughout, this comprehensive text offers innovative solutions to address the limitations of the genocide concept, while preserving its usefulness as an analytical framework.
... “The Battle of Kursk,” in Vasily Grossman , A Writer at War : Vasily Grossman with the Red Army 1941–1945 , ... See for example Ilya Ehrenburg and Vasily Grossman , The Complete Black Book of Russian Jewry, edited by David 19 Patterson ..."
A World at War, 1911-1949
In A World At War, 1911-1949, scholars of the cultural history of warfare, inspired by the work of Professor John Horne, break down the traditional barriers between the historiographies of the First and Second World Wars.
34 Vasily Grossman , A Writer at War : Vasily Grossman with the Red Army 1941–1945 (London, 2006), 237. 35 Edele, Stalin's Defectors, 101; Merridale, “Culture, Ideology and Combat”, 318. 36 Grossman , A Writer at War , 219."
Dying for the Truth
The role of war correspondents is crucial to democracy and the publics discovery of the truth. Without them, the temptation to manipulate events with propaganda would be irresistible to politicians of all hues. It starts by examining how journalists have plied their trade over the years most particularly from the Crimean War onwards. Their impact on the conduct of war has been profound and the author, an experienced journalist, explains in his frank and readable manner how this influence has shaped the actions of politicians and military commanders. By the same token the media is a potentially valuable tool to those in authority and this two-way relationship is examined. Technical developments and 24 hour news have inevitably changed the nature of war reporting and their political masters ignore this at their peril and the author examines the key milestones on this road. Using his own and others experiences in recent conflicts, be they Korea, Falklands, Balkans, Iraq or Afghanistan, the author opens the readers eyes to an aspect of warfare that is all too often overlooked but can be crucial to the outcome. The publics attitude to the day-to-day conduct of war is becoming ever more significant and this fascinating book examines why.
See Vasily Grossman , A Writer at War : Vasily Grossman with the Red Army 1941-1945 , edited and translated by Antony Beevor and Luba Vinogradova, (Pimlico, London, 2006). 19. Khaldei took perhaps the best-known picture from the Russian ..."
Memories of Resistance and the Holocaust on Film
This book investigates cinematic representations of the murder of European Jews and civilian opposition to Nazi occupation from the war up until the twenty-first century. The study exposes a chronology of the conflict’s memorialization whose geo-political alignments are demarcated by vectors of time and space—or ‘chronotopes’, using Mikhail Bakhtin’s term. Camino shows such chronotopes to be first defined by the main allies; the USA, USSR and UK; and then subsequently expanding from the geographical and political centres of the occupation; France, the USSR and Poland. Films from Western and Eastern Europe and the USA are treated as primary and secondary sources of the conflict. These sources contribute to a sentient or emotional history that privileges affect and construct what Michel Foucault labels biopolitics. These cinematic narratives, which are often based on memoirs of resistance fighters like Joseph Kessel or Holocaust survivors such as Primo Levi and Wanda Jakubowska, evoke the past in what Marianne Hirsch has described as ‘post-memory’.
A selection of Grossman's articles written for Red Star has been edited and translated by Anthony Beevor and Luba Vinogradova in A Writer at War: a Soviet Journalist with the Red Army , 1941-1945 (New York: Vintage Books, 2013)."
Writing History in the Soviet Union
The history of the Soviet Union has been charted in several studies over the decades. These depictions while combining accuracy, elegance, readability and imaginativeness, have failed to draw attention to the political and academic environment within which these histories were composed. Writing History in the Soviet Union: Making the Past Work is aimed at understanding this environment. The book seeks to identify the significant hallmarks of the production of Soviet history by Soviet as well as Western historians. It traces how the Russian Revolution of 1917 triggered a shift in official policy towards historians and the publication of history textbooks for schools. In 1985, the Soviet past was again summoned for polemical revision as part and parcel of an attitude of openness (glasnost') and in this, literary figures joined their energies to those of historians. The Communist regime sought to equate the history of the country with that of the Communist Party itself in 1938 and 1962 and this imposed a blanket of conformity on history writing in the Soviet Union. The book also surveys the rich abundance of writing the Russian Revolution generated as well as the divergent approaches to the history of the period. The conditions for research in Soviet archives are described as an aspect of official monitoring of history writing. Another instance of this is the manner by which history textbooks have, through the years, been withdrawn from schools and others officially nursed into circulation. This intervention, occasioned in the present circumstance by statements by President Putin himself, in the manner in which history is taught in Russian schools, continues to this day. In other words, over the years, the regime has always worked to make the past work. Please note: Taylor & Francis does not sell or distribute the Hardback in India, Pakistan, Nepal, Bhutan, Bangladesh & Sri Lanka
Army soldiers during the war . ... Written during the war by an enormously admired journalist , these episodes convey a flavour of raw immediacy that is ... 70 AWriter at War : Vasily Grossman with the Red Army , 1941-1945 , edited and ..."
Berlin: Life and Death in the City at the Center of the World
Sinclair McKay's portrait of Berlin from 1919 forward explores the city's broad human history, from the end of the Great War to the Blockade, rise of the Wall, and beyond. Sinclair McKay's Berlin begins by taking readers back to 1919 when the city emerged from the shadows of the Great War to become an extraordinary by-word for modernity—in art, cinema, architecture, industry, science, and politics. He traces the city’s history through the rise of Hitler and the Battle for Berlin which ended in the final conquest of the city in 1945. It was a key moment in modern world history, but beyond the global repercussions lay thousands of individual stories of agony. From the countless women who endured nightmare ordeals at the hands of the Soviet soldiers to the teenage boys fitted with steel helmets too big for their heads and guns too big for their hands, McKay thrusts readers into the human cataclysm that tore down the modernity of the streets and reduced what was once the most sophisticated city on earth to ruins. Amid the destruction, a collective instinct was also at work—a determination to restore not just the rhythms of urban life, but also its fierce creativity. In Berlin today, there is a growing and urgent recognition that the testimonies of the ordinary citizens from 1919 forward should be given more prominence. That the housewives, office clerks, factory workers, and exuberant teenagers who witnessed these years of terrifying—and for some, initially exhilarating—transformation should be heard. Today, the exciting, youthful Berlin we see is patterned with echoes that lean back into that terrible vortex. In this new history of Berlin, Sinclair McKay erases the lines between the generations of Berliners, making their voices heard again to create a compelling, living portrait of life in this city that lay at the center of the world.
From A Writer at War : Vasily Grossman with the Red Army , 1941–1945 by Vasily Grossman , ed. and trans. ... From an illuminating monograph: 'Entering the Nuclear Arms Race: The Soviet Decision to Build the Atomic Bomb, 1939–45' by David ..."
Stalingrad
The turning point of World War II came at Stalingrad. Hitler's soldiers stormed the city in September 1942 in a bid to complete the conquest of Europe. Yet Stalingrad never fell. After months of bitter fighting, 100,000 surviving Germans, huddled in the ruined city, surrendered to Soviet troops. During the battle and shortly after its conclusion, scores of Red Army commanders and soldiers, party officials and workers spoke with a team of historians who visited from Moscow to record their conversations. The tapestry of their voices provides groundbreaking insights into the thoughts and feelings of Soviet citizens during wartime. Legendary sniper Vasily Zaytsev recounted the horrors he witnessed at Stalingrad: "You see young girls, children hanging from trees in the park.[ . . .] That has a tremendous impact." Nurse Vera Gurova attended hundreds of wounded soldiers in a makeshift hospital every day, but she couldn't forget one young amputee who begged her to avenge his suffering. "Every soldier and officer in Stalingrad was itching to kill as many Germans as possible," said Major Nikolai Aksyonov. These testimonials were so harrowing and candid that the Kremlin forbade their publication, and they were forgotten by modern history -- until now. Revealed here in English for the first time, they humanize the Soviet defenders and allow Jochen Hellbeck, in Stalingrad, to present a definitive new portrait of the most fateful battle of World War II.
Vasily S. Grossman , Gody voiny [The War Years] (Moscow, 1989), p. 5. A Soviet writer and journalist , Grossman (1905–1964) reported to the front voluntarily in summer 1941. As a war correspondent he reported for the newspaper Red Star ..."
Major 20th-century Writers
A Selection of Sketches from Contemporary Authors ... It is as though the horse itself were an emotional state . ... In 1961 she wrote “ Tulips ” without consulting the thesaurus , “ and at top speed , as one might write an urgent ..."
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