One of the great novels of the twentieth century, and a book the Soviet state considered so dangerous that the KGB confiscated not only the manuscript but the typewriter ribbons. Vasily Grossman, a war correspondent who covered Stalingrad and was among the first journalists to reach Treblinka, built his novel on the deliberate model of War and Peace, following the extended Shaposhnikov family across the battle of Stalingrad and outward into every corner of the wartime Soviet Union. The scope is enormous: a physicist whose breakthrough is compromised by an antisemitic campaign, a commissar arguing doctrine in an encircled house, a boy walking into a gas chamber, a Soviet labor camp and a German one rendered with the same eye, Hitler and Stalin each appearing briefly and diminished. Grossman's central and most heretical claim is that Nazism and Stalinism are structurally the same phenomenon, a conclusion that made publication impossible in his lifetime; he died in 1964, and the book reached the West only after a microfilmed copy was smuggled out with help from Andrei Sakharov. Against the totalizing ideologies he sets what he calls senseless kindness, the small unsystematic acts of decency that no doctrine can account for and no state can fully extinguish. The Robert Chandler translation is the standard English text, and the novel's moral seriousness has few equals.