Soviet-era Russian novelist Vasily Grossman (1905-64), whose major work, Life and Fate (1985),
was suppressed in his lifetime, kept notebooks when he worked as a journalist during World War II.
That was a forbidden and perilous practice in the Stalinist system, and Grossman's jottings about
warfare he witnessed constitute a rare record of the attitudes and conditions experienced by
the Red Army soldier. Beevor, whom readers will recognize from his battle histories, Stalingrad (1998)
and The Fall of Berlin, 1945 (2002), connects Grossman's terse sketches with commentary about the war's
course and Grossman's movements at the battlefront. Grossman wrote for the Red Army's official newspaper,
and his frank character observations of officers and men will affect those interested in the soul of
the WWII Soviet army, and in the genocide its advance revealed. In its wake, Grossman discovered what
happened to his mother, and his 1944 article about Treblinka was one of the first to describe a German
murder factory. This compilation captures Grossman's great sensibility to his merciless times.
This volume stands among the finest eyewitness accounts of Soviet Russia's war on the Eastern Front.

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