Vasily Grossman

His father had social-democratic convictions and joined the Mensheviks, and was active in the 1905 Revolution; he helped organise events in Sevastopol.

From 1910 to 1912, he lived with his mother in Geneva after his parents had separated.

After returning to Berdychiv in 1912, he moved to Kiev in 1914 where, while living with his father, he attended secondary school and later the Kiev Higher Institute of Soviet Education.

Young Vasily Grossman idealistically supported the hope of the Russian Revolution of 1917.

In January 1928, Grossman married Anna Petrovna Matsuk; their daughter, named Yekaterina after Grossman's mother, was born two years later.

When he had to move to Moscow, she refused to leave her job in Kiev, but in any case, she could not get a permit to stay in Moscow.

When he moved to Stalino, she certainly did not want to go; she had started having affairs.

Their daughter was sent to live with his mother in Berdychiv.

Grossman began writing short stories while studying chemical engineering at Moscow State University and later continued his literary activity while working running chemical tests at a coal-mining concern in Stalino in the Donbas, and later in a pencil factory.

One of his first short stories, "In the Town of Berdichev" (В городе Бердичеве), drew favourable attention and encouragement from Maxim Gorky and Mikhail Bulgakov.

In the 1930s he changed careers and began writing full-time, publishing a number of short stories and several novels.

At the outbreak of the Second World War, he was engaged as a war correspondent by the Red Army newspaper Krasnaya Zvezda; he wrote first-hand accounts of the battles of Moscow, Stalingrad, Kursk, and Berlin.

Grossman's eyewitness reports of a Nazi extermination camp, following the discovery of Treblinka, were among the earliest accounts of a Nazi death camp by a reporter.

There is some dispute over the extent of the state repression Grossman endured after the war.

While he was never arrested, his two major literary works (Life and Fate and Everything Flows (Grossman novel)) were censored by the Khrushchev government as unacceptably anti-Soviet.

In the mid-1930s Grossman left his job and committed himself fully to writing.

Grossman's first marriage ended in 1933, and in the summer of 1935 he began an affair with Olga Mikhailovna Guber, the wife of his friend, the writer Boris Guber.

Grossman and Olga began living together in October 1935, and they married in May 1936, a few days after Olga and Boris Guber divorced.

By 1936 he had published two collections of stories and the novel Glyukauf, and in 1937 was accepted into the privileged Union of Writers.

His novel Stepan Kol'chugin (published 1937-40) was nominated for a Stalin prize, but deleted from the list by Stalin himself for alleged Menshevik sympathies.

In 1937 during the Great Purge Boris Guber was arrested, and later Olga was also arrested for failing to denounce her previous husband as an "enemy of the people".

Grossman quickly had himself registered as the official guardian of Olga's two sons by Boris Guber, thus saving them from being sent to orphanages.

He then wrote to Nikolay Yezhov, the head of the NKVD, pointing out that Olga was now his wife, not Guber's, and that she should not be held responsible for a man from whom she had separated long before his arrest.

Grossman's friend, Semyon Lipkin, commented, "In 1937 only a very brave man would have dared to write a letter like this to the State's chief executioner."

Astonishingly, Olga Guber was released.

When Nazi Germany invaded the Soviet Union in 1941, Grossman's mother was trapped in Berdychiv by the invading German Army, and eventually murdered together with 20,000 to 30,000 other Jews who had not evacuated.

Grossman was exempt from military service, but volunteered for the front, where he spent more than 1,000 days.

He became a war correspondent for the popular Red Army newspaper Krasnaya Zvezda (Red Star).

As the war raged on, he covered its major events, including the Battle of Moscow, the Battle of Stalingrad, the Battle of Kursk and the Battle of Berlin.

In addition to war journalism, his novels (such as The People are Immortal (Народ бессмертен)) were published in newspapers and he came to be regarded as a legendary war hero.

The novel Stalingrad (1950), later renamed For a Just Cause (За правое дело), is based on his experiences during the siege.

Vasily Semyonovich Grossman (Васи́лий Семёнович Гро́ссман; 12 December (29 November, Julian calendar) 1905 – 14 September 1964) was a Soviet writer and journalist.

Born to a Jewish family in Ukraine, then part of the Russian Empire, Grossman trained as a chemical engineer at Moscow State University, earning the nickname Vasya-khimik ("Vasya the Chemist") because of his diligence as a student.

Upon graduation he took a job in Stalino (now Donetsk) in the Donets Basin.

At the time of Grossman's death from stomach cancer in 1964, these books remained unreleased.

The film Commissar (director Aleksandr Askoldov), made in 1967, suppressed by the KGB and released only in October 1990, is based on this four-page story.

Hidden copies were eventually smuggled out of the Soviet Union by a network of dissidents, including Andrei Sakharov and Vladimir Voinovich, and first published in the West in 1980, before appearing in the Soviet Union in 1988.

Born Iosif Solomonovich Grossman in Berdychiv, Ukraine, Russian Empire into an emancipated Jewish family, he did not receive a traditional Jewish education.

His father Semyon Osipovich Grossman was a chemical engineer, and his mother Yekaterina Savelievna was a teacher of French.

A Russian nanny turned his name Yossya into Russian Vasya (a diminutive of Vasily), which was accepted by the whole family.