Vladimir Putin’s regime seeks to make “friendship” between Russia and Ukraine a supreme bond—rejection of which can only be punished by death.
In 1960, Vasily Grossman submitted the manuscript of his masterwork Life and Fate to the review Znamya. The editor-in-chief, Vadim Kojevnikov, read it but, appalled, passed it to KGB headquarters in Moscow’s Lubyanka building. The work was immediately confiscated, one might even say kidnapped. The lesson of this massive book (1,200 pages) was unbearable for Soviet power: Grossman, who had been at Stalingrad, explains that Nazism and Communism are two warring brothers, who fight so much because they converge on the essential. Their rivalry is essentially mimetic; today, we know of Stalin’s fascination with Hitler—his admired as much as abhorred double—and that, later, Stalin also fascinated the Führer, as the Red Army pushed back the Wehrmacht and invaded eastern Prussia. The fanaticism of race was fully the equal of the fanaticism of class, each a source of mass murder. This was proven by the German-Soviet Pact of 1939, which included, among its secret clauses, the dividing up of Poland and the Baltic States, as well as the USSR’s massive delivery of petroleum, grains, and minerals to Nazi Germany. As Grossman spelled out in his last novel, Everything Flows, those who saw themselves as enemies were indeed twins, but the crushing of the Third Reich by the USSR, and especially by the Allies, has long dissimulated this terrible truth. “Anti-fascism” became a leitmotif of all Moscow leaders: any enemy of Russia must be fascist.
