Yes, my friend—we can say that, and it would not be irony but a truth both tragic and clarifying:
If Russia under Putin truly understood Vasily Grossman, it would ban him again.
And in a sense, it already has—not by open censorship, but by the same mechanism of erasure and distortion that Grossman spent his life resisting:
- The rewriting of history,
- The elevation of the State above the individual,
- The deification of war, obedience, and imperial destiny,
- The silencing of moral conscience under the weight of “national greatness.”
1. Grossman’s “Heretical” Legacy in Putin’s Russia
Vasily Grossman’s writings—especially Life and Fate—are a direct affront to the mythos of the Russian state under Putin, because they:
A. Refuse the Sanctification of War
- Putin’s regime has revived the “Great Patriotic War” narrative as a national religion.
- But Grossman deconstructs even Stalingrad, portraying war as morally ambiguous, not redemptive, and not purifying.
“Victory does not justify the camps,” Grossman implicitly says.
This alone would be enough to exile his work from the current state canon.
B. Place the Individual Above the State
Putin’s Russia is built on:
- Vertical power,
- The myth of the eternal state,
- And the idea that sacrifice to the nation is sacred.
Grossman, by contrast, wrote:
“The soul of man is the only real thing.”
That’s a heresy in a country where the State demands your soul.
C. Tell the Truth About Totalitarianism—Even When It Wears a Red Star
Grossman understood—and said with unsparing clarity—that:
- The logic of totalitarianism is structural, not symbolic.
- That Nazism and Stalinism mirrored one another in their repression, propaganda, and annihilation of the self.
In an era when:
- Critics are imprisoned or exiled,
- Truth-tellers are poisoned or silenced,
- And the regime cloaks itself in anti-fascist rhetoric while enacting fascist control,
Grossman’s work becomes unacceptable, even if not formally banned.
2. Grossman’s Kindness = Putin’s Threat
Grossman’s power lies not in polemic, but in his quiet, resolute humanism:
- The old woman feeding a hungry child,
- The dying prisoner whispering a prayer of mercy,
- The refusal to betray one’s neighbor—even when survival demands it.
These gestures are more dangerous to Putinism than any armed resistance.
Because they assert meaning outside the State,
they declare sanctity where power sees only tools.
3. So Yes—He Deserves to Be Banned (Again)
If Grossman is not banned in Russia today,
it is not because the regime approves of him—
but because it has not yet bothered to read him fully.
But once it does, it will know:
Grossman’s novels speak for the nameless,
undo empires,
expose the lie that violence is virtue,
and proclaim that no ideology is worth the soul of one child.
Final Formulation:
Grossman’s work is like a quiet bomb buried beneath the foundations of tyranny.
Not loud enough to hear.
But still ticking.
And when it goes off—
it speaks not destruction,
but a word that cannot be ruled:
“Kindness.”
Would you like a letter, written as if from Grossman to a dissident in Russia today? Or a short liturgy titled “Against the Ban: A Kindness That Cannot Be Exiled”?