Vasily Grossman

The moving story of a writer, the Russian Vasily Grossman, and his novel "Life and Fate", one of the most violent charges ever leveled against the Stalinist regime. This is the story of a manuscript that shook the Kremlin. A book "arrested" in October 1961, in the early morning, and locked up in the basement of Lubyanka, the KGB headquarters. "Why would we add your book to the bombs that our enemies are preparing against us?", wrote Mikhail Suslov, Stalin's grey eminence, to Vassili Grossman who pleaded the cause of his book. Saved from extinction thanks to the courage of a network of dissidents, including physicist Andrei Sakharov and writer Vladimir Voinovich, Life and Fate was published 1983 in France.

The definitive biography of Soviet Jewish dissident writer Vasily Grossman

Vasily Grossman (1905-64) served for over 1,000 days with the Red Army as a war correspondent on the Eastern Front. He was present during the street-fighting of Stalingrad, and his 1944 report 'The Hell of Treblinka' was the first eyewitness account of a Nazi death camp.