There is an irrestible desire to compare this 800 plus page novel of Russia at Stalingrad with Leo Tolstoy's much longer novel of Russia and Napoleon at Moscow in 1811, and in some respects they are alike. Both  are superb. Both express the Russian love of homeland. Both extol the Russian defeat of an invader. And both bring the Russia of the past up close.

But there are dirrerences - substantial diffeences. Tolstoy was a portrait painter in words writing two generations after the fact. Grossman was there at the time and he's damn good - a photographer in words. Tolstoy was a romantic; Grossman is an unblinking realist and there's nothing "sweet" about what he tells you, about the upside down Orwellian morality of the Stalinist state, where evil is good, where good is rewarded by evil, where bad things happen again and again to good people for no reason other than the fact that they somehow have innocently run afoul in some small deail of the machinery of the Party. For example there's Colonel Pyotr Novitov who is an exemplary officer commanding a tank corps in the Stalingrad encirclement. He's been through the retreat across Russia in 1941 and now, staffed again with a fine division, he's on the move to regain the Caucasus; And he's in love with Yvengenia Shapsonikov who was formerly married to Nikolay Krymov a commissarin the Red Army. She has given him every reason to believe she loves him too and will come to him in the field. But Krymov, who has served the Party faithfully and without stint over the years, is set up, horribly beaten by the NKVD in Lubyanka Pison in Moscow, forced to confess to a politcal crime and sentemced to a labor camp. Yvengenia stands Novikov up and goes back to Krymov. Then Novikov is suspended from his command at the instance of the Commissar in his division (a politican named Getmanov) because he paused to rest his men for ten hours after advancing in battle without pause for everal days (Getmanov wanted the division to be first into the Caucasus) and recalled to Moscow for political punishment of the Krymov type. I cite this example - one of many similiar stories - to typify the tone of this book - unremitting, steady black gloom. Nothing good happens to anybody - ever. Sons are killed, mothers sent to the gas chamber, families riven by distance and over the whole deadful scene, hovering like a deadly miasma of death, is the Stalinist state, cruel, dishonest, cynical and fundamentally the personification of evil, just as bad as the Nazis - maybe worse because it had purported to represent the common man.

So should you read this book? Absolutely. While it would help to understand how the spelling of Russian names apparently changes with gender and while you ned to have a chart of the characters better than the one in the back of the book (I finally made one for my use) and while you really need some knowledge of Russian history post 1916 - the revolution, collectivization, famine, the Purge of 1937 etc.-  you can go it alone to see how morally obscene Communism really was - particularly under Stalin. And you need to. This is an angry book written without sunlight by an angry man writing about death and the evil of the Stalinist state in the cold gray dead winter of 1943 at Stalingrad. Tolstoy leaves you thinking of Mozrt, Grossman writes a dirge - but he's good. Very very good. Read it and compare!
There is an irrestible desire to compare this 800 plus page novel of Russia at Stalingrad with Leo Tolstoy's much longer novel of Russia and Napoleon at Moscow in 1811, and in some respects they are alike. Both  are superb. Both express the Russian love of homeland. Both extol the Russian defeat of an invader. And both bring the Russia of the past up close. But there are dirrerences - substantial diffeences. Tolstoy was a portrait painter in words writing two generations after the fact. Grossman was there at the time and he's damn good - a photographer in words. Tolstoy was a romantic; Grossman is an unblinking realist and there's nothing "sweet" about what he tells you, about the upside down Orwellian morality of the Stalinist state, where evil is good, where good is rewarded by evil, where bad things happen again and again to good people for no reason other than the fact that they somehow have innocently run afoul in some small deail of the machinery of the Party. For example there's Colonel Pyotr Novitov who is an exemplary officer commanding a tank corps in the Stalingrad encirclement. He's been through the retreat across Russia in 1941 and now, staffed again with a fine division, he's on the move to regain the Caucasus; And he's in love with Yvengenia Shapsonikov who was formerly married to Nikolay Krymov a commissarin the Red Army. She has given him every reason to believe she loves him too and will come to him in the field. But Krymov, who has served the Party faithfully and without stint over the years, is set up, horribly beaten by the NKVD in Lubyanka Pison in Moscow, forced to confess to a politcal crime and sentemced to a labor camp. Yvengenia stands Novikov up and goes back to Krymov. Then Novikov is suspended from his command at the instance of the Commissar in his division (a politican named Getmanov) because he paused to rest his men for ten hours after advancing in battle without pause for everal days (Getmanov wanted the division to be first into the Caucasus) and recalled to Moscow for political punishment of the Krymov type. I cite this example - one of many similiar stories - to typify the tone of this book - unremitting, steady black gloom. Nothing good happens to anybody - ever. Sons are killed, mothers sent to the gas chamber, families riven by distance and over the whole deadful scene, hovering like a deadly miasma of death, is the Stalinist state, cruel, dishonest, cynical and fundamentally the personification of evil, just as bad as the Nazis - maybe worse because it had purported to represent the common man. So should you read this book? Absolutely. While it would help to understand how the spelling of Russian names apparently changes with gender and while you ned to have a chart of the characters better than the one in the back of the book (I finally made one for my use) and while you really need some knowledge of Russian history post 1916 - the revolution, collectivization, famine, the Purge of 1937 etc. -  you can go it alone to see how morally obscene Communism really was - particularly under Stalin. And you need to. This is an angry book written without sunlight by an angry man writing about death and the evil of the Stalinist state in the cold gray dead winter of 1943 at Stalingrad. Tolstoy leaves you thinking of Mozrt, Grossman writes a dirge - but he's good. Very very good. Read it and compare!