Russ Roberts on Vasily Grossman’s Life and Fate

A bonus, guest-swapped episode: instead of interviewing Russ Roberts, Tyler Cowen joins him for a close two-hander reading of Vasily Grossman‘s 1959 novel Life and Fate, the KGB-suppressed epic of the Battle of Stalingrad that both had just finished reading, twice.

Key ideas

1. Modelled on War and Peace, and largely pulling it off. Cowen calls Grossman ‘the GOAT’ among Soviet authors; Life and Fate deliberately mirrors Tolstoy’s three-word, war-and-concept title, its central family, and its use of real historical figures (Hitler and Stalin appear as characters) — an audacious model that Cowen judges the novel actually earns, in scope if not always in polish.
2. A genuine disagreement over the book’s central theme. Roberts reads the novel as fundamentally about the resilience and freedom of the individual against the state, crystallised in Grossman’s own phrase ‘senseless kindness’. Cowen reads it as a qualified, patriotic argument that Communism — for all its horror — was preferable to fascism because it retained a degree of ‘negotiability’ fascism never offered its victims.
3. A rare, detailed literary account of the psychology of confession. Grossman’s Lubyanka interrogation scenes show prisoners coming to want to confess, even to charges they know are false, because they cannot bear to give up faith that the system itself still stands — a mechanism Roberts compares to Dostoevsky’s Grand Inquisitor.
4. A startlingly prescient chapter on artificial intelligence. Page 217, written by a Soviet novelist in the 1950s, describes a faultless-memory ‘electronic machine’ capable of chess, translation, and creating beings in man’s image; Cowen reads it as casting AI as fascism’s technological heir, closing on the line ‘Fascism annihilated tens of millions of people.’
5. Reading strategy as its own subject. Cowen used GPT-o1 throughout to look up unfamiliar characters (catching no hallucinations except on one minor character) and reread the book’s first two-thirds immediately after finishing it; Roberts read partly on Kindle, partly on paper during the Sabbath, and reports being unexpectedly ‘engrossed’ in a nearly suspense-free, 872-page novel.

Content

Grossman’s life and the novel’s near-destruction

Roberts opens with Grossman’s biography: born in 1905 in Berdychiv, then part of the Russian Empire and, from 1922, the Soviet Union, he rose to fame as a war correspondent covering the Battle of Stalingrad — though, both speakers stress, the novel is not really a war novel, only set around the time of the battle. His mother was killed in the 1941 Nazi massacre at Berdychiv, a town of roughly 50,000 people including about 40,000 Jews with 80 synagogues; she recurs, fictionalised, throughout the book. The KGB seized the manuscript, notes, and typewriter ribbons from Grossman’s home in 1961 and searched unsuccessfully for hidden copies, even digging up a friend’s garden. Grossman had secretly kept copies with friends; the novel was smuggled to Switzerland and published there in 1980, then in the Soviet Union in 1988. Grossman died in 1964, unaware the book had survived.

A universal novel measured against Tolstoy and Chekhov

Cowen calls the book one of the very few truly universal novels — spanning war, slavery, love, motherhood, rape, friendship, science, and politics — and ranks it comparable in scope and quality to Tolstoy’s War and Peace, sometimes called the greatest novel ever written. Roberts, who found the first hundred pages slow and the last several hundred unputdownable, describes the book’s structure as ‘polyphonic’ (a term he borrows from a description of Dostoevsky and Solzhenitsyn): eight to ten recurring main characters among roughly a hundred total, resurfacing often hundreds of pages apart, without a single central protagonist. Both credit Chekhov, more than Tolstoy, as the deeper model — individual chapters mirror Chekhov’s short-story form, woven into a larger narrative — and Grossman explicitly directs readers mid-novel to Chekhov’s story ‘The Bishop’, about a dying man’s fading social reputation and enduring bond with his mother, a clue both take as pointing to the novel’s own preoccupation with motherhood and transience.

Fascism versus Communism: negotiability as the moral hinge

Cowen’s central and most contested reading — offered, he says, against most published commentary including the standard Grossman biography — is that the novel is, in a qualified sense, patriotic: it argues Communism is preferable to fascism because it retains some capacity for negotiation that fascism structurally lacks. His evidence: the Nazi interrogation of Mostovskoy by Liss permits no real dialogue and ends in death, while the Soviet interrogation of Krymov by Katsenelenbogen — brutal, torturous, ‘weird’ and ‘sick’ — nonetheless ends with Krymov alive and having learned something; Viktor himself is saved from professional ruin by an inexplicable phone call from Stalin. Roberts agrees the book is patriotic and deeply autobiographical (the physicist Viktor Shtrum mirrors Grossman’s own marital struggles and crises of conscience) but resists treating the two systems as morally equivalent even in this qualified sense, stressing instead a different parallel: both sides field their own ideological enforcers mid-war — Communist Party commissars and the SS alike hunting for ‘heresy’ — a shared, self-defeating cost neither side escapes.

The psychology of confession

Roberts, drawing on extensive prior reading of Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag Archipelago, singles out Grossman’s Lubyanka interrogation scenes as capturing something he had not encountered with this intensity: prisoners who, even under torture, come to want to confess — even to charges they know are false — because they cannot relinquish faith that the system itself still stands. He draws a Dostoevskian analogy to the Grand Inquisitor: the officers of a church may be flawed and have long since lost the original doctrine, but adherents confess falsely rather than abandon belief that the church — here, a ‘secular church’ of Communism — still stands. Cowen adds a complementary mechanism: interrogated characters like Krymov partly come to believe they really are guilty of something, since minor past actions loom disproportionately large under pressure, an indirect echo, he suggests, of a quasi-Christian exploitation of original sin. Both read the novel as, more broadly, a study of passivity as the default condition sustaining even very bad social and military order — in the camps, in an army chain of command, everywhere.

Motherhood, senseless kindness, and the meaning of the title

Cowen reads Vera’s giving birth as symbolically marking the turn of the Battle of Stalingrad itself — life becoming possible again is what allows the Soviets to start winning — while Viktor separately receives an imagined letter from his dying mother, closely modelled on the real, unsent letters Grossman wrote to his own mother nine and twenty years after her death. Roberts identifies the title itself as pointed: not Life and Death or Freedom and Fate, because for Grossman life essentially means freedom — the struggle of individuals caught in the machinery of the state to preserve their humanity. He reads aloud Grossman’s own passage on ‘senseless kindness’: small, unwitnessed, unsystematic acts of kindness — illustrated by a Russian woman’s inexplicable kindness to a captured German soldier — that the text calls eternal and sets explicitly against organised evil. Both agree this is a strong candidate for the novel’s central theme (Roberts cites a Twitter commentator, Tanner Greer, independently making the same claim). Cowen closes the thread by noting the final chapter names no characters at all — a deliberate anti-climax, he argues, in which individual identity dissolves into the longer run of history, leaving only ‘the life and fate of humanity’ as such; Roberts, who had expected something more dramatic, endorses the reading.

The AI chapter as an early warning about technology and fascism

Page 217 — written by Grossman, probably in the 1950s — contains a full chapter on artificial intelligence: an ‘electronic machine’ with faultless memory, capable of mathematical calculation, chess, and translation, and the question of whether there is any limit to a machine’s ability to create beings ‘in the image and likeness of man’. Both note the Soviet regime’s own genuine, now largely forgotten strategic obsession with AI through the 1960s. Cowen reads the chapter as thematically load-bearing rather than a digression: its closing line, ‘Fascism annihilated tens of millions of people,’ follows a passage imagining the machine growing so vast it might crowd humans off the Earth’s surface — Cowen takes this as Grossman casting artificial intelligence as fascism’s potential successor, ‘like an early Eliezer’ (a nod to AI-safety writer Eliezer Yudkowsky). Roberts connects the same passage to Adam Smith’s ‘man of system’ from The Theory of Moral Sentiments — the danger of anyone who wants to impose a single abstract design on the human ‘chessboard’ — and separately flags Grossman’s comparison of fascism to quantum mechanics and cutting-edge physics as evidence that scientific metaphor shapes culture and politics well beyond the laboratory.

Jewish identity, anti-fanaticism, and reading an 872-page novel

Cowen raises whether the book is best read as Soviet, Jewish, Ukrainian, or Russian. Roberts argues it is not, strictly, a ‘Jewish novel’ — Grossman’s Jewishness was not always central to his self-conception, though the Holocaust and Stalin’s later antisemitic ‘Doctors’ Plot’ forced a confrontation with it — but that in its polyphonic, fate-obsessed structure it is, in a certain sense, the ‘ultimate Russian novel’. Cowen counters that the Book of Job’s logic of arbitrary tragedy reads to him as distinctly Jewish in origin, whatever language the book was composed in. Both read Grossman, via his model Chekhov, as deliberately anti-fanatical against a Russian literary tradition — Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Solzhenitsyn — both regard as fundamentally fanatical in temperament, and each locates a personal, parallel de-intensification of youthful conviction (libertarian, for Cowen; libertarian and religious, for Roberts) as they have aged. On method, both are candid about how demanding the novel is to read: Cowen used GPT-o1 throughout to look up unfamiliar characters, catching no hallucinations except a total, repeated failure on one minor character, Vera, and reread the book’s first two-thirds immediately after finishing it — a practice he recommends generally rather than treating as a failure of first-time attention. Roberts read partly on Kindle, heavily highlighted, and partly on paper during the Jewish Sabbath, and reports being unexpectedly ‘engrossed’ despite the book’s near-total absence of narrative suspense.

See also

• Russ Roberts — speaker
• Tyler Cowen — host
• Life and Fate — the novel at the centre of this conversation
• Vasily Grossman — the novel’s author
• Totalitarianism — the wiki’s existing Nazi/Communist comparison, built from Liulevicius’s and Kotkin’s historical accounts; this episode adds a literary account of the same comparison and a specific new mechanism (Cowen’s ‘negotiability’)