I've read Grossman's Stalingrad and Life and Fate and now this. Their trajectory follows a gradual souring on Stalin and totalitarianism until we reach the end of Everything Flows, Grossman's last book, which is a desperate cry for freedom and "humanity" (an underdeveloped concept here).

The chapter on Stalin and the secret freedom he's trying to crush inside him is fab. Grossman's rooting of Soviet totalitarianism in the Russian slav(e) mentality -- the "Asianic despot" of the Russian soul -- embarrasses, but one also has to be sympathetic, given what he'd lived through. But his association of freedom with the west -- given the roots of western democracy and capitalism in transatlantic slavery -- scuttles nearly the whole last essay. It may be, in fact, that democracy is the special case to be explained, and that despotism is the trend of all plots and political orders. What's striking though is Stalin's role as, essentially, continuing the worst excesses of the Tsars, but hypocritically.

The chapters on the camps and on the Ukranian famine are essential reading, as essential as anything in Life and Fate.

Wondering whether this is read at all in Putin's Russia.