Vasily Grossman, Russian journalist and author (d. 1964)
Vasily Semyonovich Grossman (Russian: Васи́лий Семёнович Гро́ссман; Ukrainian: Василь Семенович Гроссман; 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. 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.
While Grossman was never arrested by the Soviet authorities, his two major literary works (Life and Fate and Everything Flows) were censored by the Krushchev regime as unacceptably anti-Soviet. In "Vasily Grossman: Myths and Counter-Myths and Grossman", by Grossman scholar Yury Bit-Yunan and Grossman translator, Robert Chandler say that, between 1962 and 1964, Grossman was publishing new works, and older works, including For a Just Cause were being republished; disagreeing with Semyon Lipkin who claimed that Grossman became in effect a nonperson. The KGB raided Grossman's flat after he had completed Life and Fate, seizing manuscripts, notes and even the typewriter ribbon on which the text had been written. It has been said that Grossman was told by the Communist Party's chief ideologist Mikhail Suslov that the book could not be published for two or three hundred years; however Bit-Yunan and Chandler say that there is, in fact no evidence in the papers of Grossman, or Suslov, for this. At the time of Grossman's death from stomach cancer in 1964 these books remained unreleased. 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.