s Putin’s Russia glorifies its Soviet past, Grossman’s urgent, questioning voice needs to be heard again.
In Moscow on 23 July 1962, the writer Vasily Grossman had a three-hour audience with the Kremlin’s “grey cardinal”, Mikhail Suslov. For 30 years Suslov was the Soviet Communist Party’s chieftain in charge of ideology, one of the most powerful positions in the USSR – the guardian of Bolshevik orthodoxy.
Meticulously and in great detail he explained to the author why his novel Life and Fate could not be published – “not now and, if ever, not for 250 years”. He told Grossman that …read more
Source: New Statesman
