Recent BooksNovember/December 2019 213Vasily Grossman and the Soviet Century
BY ALEXANDRA POPOFF. Yale
University Press, 2019, 424 pp.Vasily Grossman was a humanist
bearing witness to an inhuman age. The
Russian writer’s dispatches from the
Battle o Stalingrad described Red
Army soldiers as freedom Äghters facing
down the fascist menace, and they
cemented his literary fame. In 1944,
Grossman was among the Ärst to report
on the Nazis’ Treblinka death camp.
After the war, Grossman extended his
lens to depict Stalin’s regime as a foe o
humanity, as well. He went further
still, taking aim at all the parties to the
Cold War that were amassing weapons
o mass destruction. Unfortunately,
Grossman’s universal concerns take a
back seat in Popo’s biography, which
presents the writer as a Western-style
dissident in conÁict with the Soviet
state. Her account Áattens Grossman’s
complex humanism, in which progres-
sive nineteenth-century traditions
mixed with the pathos o the Soviet
revolution and—later in his life—west-
ernizing impulses. Drawing a straight
line from the Stalinist past to the
present, Popo claims that Russia under
Vladimir Putin is once more sidelining
Grossman. But she makes no mention
o a serialized production o his novel
Life and Fate that aired on ocial
Russian television in 2012 and garnered
prizes and rave reviews. This book is a
missed opportunity to more fully
engage with a writer whose abiding moral
concerns reached far beyond the Soviet
Union and remain vital after the pass-
ing o the communist state.
È¢ ̈¤£ ̈¤§§¤¶The Russian Job: The Forgotten Story of How
America Saved the Soviet Union From Ruin
BY DOUGLAS SMITH. Farrar, Straus
and Giroux, 2019, 320 pp.
By the early 1920s, the Bolsheviks had
won an outright victory over their class
enemies within Russia. But the devasta-
tion caused by the four years o civil war
eventually forced them to turn for help
to their class enemies abroad. Smith tells
the story o how the American Relie
Administration rescued Soviet Russia
when it was struck by the worst famine
Europe had ever known. Based on rich
archival materials, his book focuses on
a group o young Americans who set
o for Russia, lured by the exotic and
the unknown, and found themselves in
the middle o a horriÄc tragedy. A¬
members and the Soviets they hired
operated in a vast territory where whole
villages were dying o hunger, corpses
were being left unburied along the
roads, and reports o cannibalism were
not uncommon. Rare photos included in
the book lend Smith’s account an eerie
vividness. During the two years the
¬¬ spent there, it saved millions o
lives in some 28,000 towns and villages
by providing food, medical supplies,
and disinfectants, as well as restoring
hospitals, purifying water, and organizing
mass inoculations. The ¬¬’s head,
Herbert Hoover, believed that by
rescuing Soviet Russia from hunger, the
U.S. government could also rescue it
from communism. He left deeply
disappointed. But to the young Ameri-
cans who staed the ¬¬, the experience
delivered an existential intensity that,
once back home, they longed for but
could never quite Änd again.