Telling our own tales
On Vasily Grossman and the power of honest reporting
Newspapers in the Soviet Union, as with all industries, were highly centralised. There were, undoubtedly, benefits to this: because all costs were borne by the state, and because the planned economy meant there were (officially) no capital costs, newspaper distribution was never hampered by economic realities: newspapers in the Soviet Union therefore achieved nationwide distribution some two or three decades before those in the US, which developed a much more regionalised media ecosystem.
There were 7 ‘central’ newspapers, each of which was set up by the state as the official organ of a particular institution. The most important and famous was Pravda (Truth), the organ of the Central Committee, through which Soviet leaders often telegraphed changes in policies. There was also Izvestiya (News), published by the Presidium, Trud (Labour), published by the Soviet Labour Unions, two youth papers and one for Soviet Sports. During the Great Patriotic War, however, the most important was Krasnaya Zvezda, or Red Star. This was the newspaper of the Red Army, for which Vasily Grossman wrote.
From the Front Line is an appropriate title for this new collection of his war reporting: exempt from military service, Grossman nonetheless spent more than 1,000 days on the front line from the outbreak of war in 1941. The 49 articles are pooled into distinct phases of the war, beginning with the defence of Stalingrad, then the Russian counter-offensive, the gradual German retreats of 1943-44, Operation Bagration and then the fall of Berlin. The focus was not purely military: Grossman was one of the first journalists to write about Treblinka, interviewing former inmates and producing one of the earliest accounts of the extermination camp, as well as the wider ethnic cleansing on the Eastern Front.
It was this work that began to place him at odds with the Soviet establishment. Grossman, a Ukrainian Jew himself, counted his mother among the 20,000 to 30,000 Jews murdered by the advancing Germans in Berdychiv, his birthplace. Grossman’s focus on the specifically anti-Jewish nature of the atrocities (‘Stillness. Silence. A people has been murdered.’), and willingness to discuss the role of Ukrainian collaborators came up against his editors, who followed the official Soviet narrative that the atrocities were a crime all races bore equally, and that all Ukrainians had resisted heroically. The turning point came with the government’s suppression of The Black Book, the landmark collection of evidence on the Nazi extermination of Soviet Jewry that Grossman helped compile, in 1948.
Grossman became something of a war hero in his own right: his reports were read by millions, and soldiers reportedly carried copies until they were little more than tattered scraps. It is little surprise. His inclination, as the translator notes, ‘was to focus on individual soldiers and their life stories, whereas the authorities wanted more emphasis on ideology, the collective, and the higher command.’ With an ability to win the trust of those on the front line, Grossman brought to vivid life the snipers, generals, fighter pilots, peasants and everyday soldiers he encountered.
Without a doubt, his greatest attribute as a writer is the ability to communicate the truth. This is, in his age of Soviet censors, a more remarkable attribute than it sounds — although the translators have carefully selected or pieced together the versions of his work least touched by the censor’s knife, as well as carefully removing Soviet ‘clichés’. His prose is simple, workman-like, undazzling: ‘He uses the simplest language adequate to the task. Beneath the plain surface of his prose, however, lie unexpectedly original and profound observations.’
See, for example, his description of a Red Army soldier he meets in a farmstead, working for rye whilst returning to his family home on foot.
‘It is not surprising that our Red Army soldier should stand before our eyes day and night and that we should remember him forever: in a greatcoat ripped by shell splinters, in a tattered cap with earflaps, with a half-empty shoulder bag, with grenades tied to his tarpaulin belt. May he now live a happier and easier life, a life free from hunger and poverty. Who in the world could deserve this more? Let us all bow low before him. Who could deserve this more?’
Or this, written as the Germans are finally pushed out of Stalingrad:
‘The dead now sleep on long-fought-over heights, beside the ruins of factory workshops, in gullies and ravines. They sleep where they once fought. Standing beside trenches, bunkers, and the embrasure-marked stone walls of buildings that were never surrendered, these men’s graves are a majestic monument to their loyalty.’
‘Hallowed ground! How one wishes to hold in one’s memory this new city that has grown up amid the ruins, to take into oneself forever this city of triumphant people’s freedom—with its web of paths and tracks, with smoke now rising in the sunlight from the chimneys of its underground dwellings, with heavy mortars lifting up their muzzles between dugouts, with its hundreds of men in greatcoats, wadded jackets and caps with earflaps, all engaged in the sleepless business of war, carrying mortar bombs under their arms as if they were loaves of bread, cursing or singing under their breath, discussing last night’s grenade fighting, peeling potatoes beside a heavy gun that has already been aimed! All these men are so wonderfully ordinary in their everyday heroism. How can one preserve in memory the whole of this shifting panorama of the defense of Stalingrad, this living moment of a great today that tomorrow will become an eternal page of history?’
By speaking about the individual — but drawing out the collective — sacrifice Grossman is recording what one might variously call a national historical moment, a collective experience, a national psychology, or a testimony of a people. It is perhaps as much myth-making as it is journalism.
It would be impossible, of course, to replicate such stirring passages in reportage about modern Britain: there is no subject grand enough. Regardless, there is much to emulate in Grossman’s work for those of us who seek to tell the story of our own country in our own time, and to build political change in line with that testimony.
When British media deigns to do reportage (which it does rarely on account of the high expenses and low subscriber rewards involved, not to mention the difficulty of doing it well) from its own country, we are invariably treated — subjected may be a better word — to ‘dispatches’, lost meanderings from journalists who barely seem to understand the country they are reporting on. Invariably unable to drive, they hop on a train to wherever the discourse directs: Clacton, Makerfield, Gorton and Denton, Runcorn and Helsby.
Reform is an almost entirely provincial phenomenon. If journalists had any connection to these kinds of places, they abandoned them when they went to university and never looked back. As a result, none have an instinctive understanding of the everyday concerns or realities of life in the vast majority of Britain. It’s a meme that Fraser Nelson doesn’t understand the world outside Richmond-Upon-Thames, but it’s equally true to say the average Spectator hack has no idea what the inner banlieues of Bradford look like, either.
Could this be why the right has — until the arrival of Dominic Cummings, and then Reform — struggled to sell its message to a huge number of people who were naturally sympathetic to their cause? Previously firm Labour voters had been drifting away from the party since 1997; it took the Leave campaign, which largely eschewed traditional right-wing messaging, tactics and thinking, to win them over.
There is, of course, an implicit snobbishness. These journalists have no instinctive connection to their subjects, much less love for them (which is what made Grossman’s prose so moving). Even right-wing journalists have a strangely detached relationship with their own base. Their engagement with provincial voters occurs entirely within the context of intra-metropolitan disputes: the point of reporting Linda from Lincolnshire’s comment that ‘we’ve got to sink the boats’ is not to understand the subject but to highlight how ‘out-of-touch’ their Westminster opponents really are. By definition, one cannot understand the inarticulate simply by echoing a selection of their own words, and in taking this approach the right fails at what Grossman succeeded in doing — painting an honest and compelling picture of his countrymen and their times.
This compares entirely negatively to what PoliticsJoe does so well, which is finding articulate provincial left-wingers prepared to repeat conventional left-wing shibboleths for voxpops, which are then presented as evidence that the ‘normal’ Briton is entirely in favour of mass migration. Like Grossman’s editors, they work around inconvenient facts in order to build a narrative around what the country believes. It is only by dint of the extremism of their politics that their attempts are so ridiculous as to be unbelievable.
Well-done right-wing reportage in modern Britain could run counter to this, giving voice to ‘normal’ people whose communities have been blighted by mass migration, who have been laid off thanks to Labour’s tax plans, or, say, slightly less sympathetically, even those whose bucolic villages are suddenly surrounded by solar panels, etc. Present the voters as they are: by and large rightfully outraged at their circumstances and the places they live. They are not rubes there simply to opine on SW1 narratives with charming naivety for Westminster hacks, nor are they completely politically unaware. However, they have a limited idea of the impact public policies have on their lives: it is the job of good reportage to link the two together in narrative form.
One of the reasons the Boriswave and migrant hotels have been such a — sadly — useful development for the right is that the effects of migration have spread into the provinces, and are now unavoidable realities for people to face in their everyday lives. My sleepy home town, hidden away in the folds of the map, now has two Kurdish barbers and a mobile phone vape shop. I should not expect my neighbours to know that they are part of a nationwide problem, nor should I expect them to know the details: it is up to me to tell them, because I know and they do not. It is incumbent on the aware to explain.
This last point is particularly important given the geographical nature of many of Britain’s problems. Migration was by and large contained within areas where the original population moved out until the Boriswave, when the sheer weight of arrivals (and the fact many came from source nations that made self-ghettoisation unlikely) forced the problem out. Demographic change, along with the rape gangs, is an example of a problem that had until recently been understood but abstract, the impact too localised to feed through into the national narrative. There are examples of similar problems, less far along in their development, that might be brought to life through reportage. Consider Michael Murphy’s recent piece on Oldham, which offered excellent insight into the effects of a newly independent Muslim vote. As the editor of this magazine put it in a recent conversation: ‘measured, honest reporting that shines a light on phenomena that one would not have any understanding of living in most of the country.’
Sympathetic, attentive reportage from writers who — like Grossman are willing to develop a deeper connection to the people and places they report on, who understand their rhythms and can describe them without condescension — has a fundamental advantage over hackneyed attempts to use excerpts from the hinterlands to support a ham-fistedly imposed narrative: it rings true. Our great advantage is that our political ambitions do not require mangled reinterpretations of the public’s sentiments to justify themselves: they reflect the honest expression of the national mood. We need not seek a particular angle from which to take our snapshot of the country to support a predetermined conclusion.
Grossman’s great talent was not in telling the average Red Army soldier what they believed, nor in telling the centre what they said of themselves. It was in showing both who the people really were, what they were fighting for, and what they were building — the truth that existed outside of the stories any faction tried to impose upon it. That truth today is ours, and we should not shy away from telling it.
This article was written by A.E. Longhousman, a Pimlico Journal contributor. Have a pitch? Send it to submissions@pimlicojournal.co.uk.
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