Companion work with Grossman's Life and Fate (wonderful in its own right).
This book was written much more circumspectly than Life and Fate - it was sufficiently congenial to Soviet censors such that it was published in 1952. This one gets a little tiresome from time to time - collective farm enthusiasts, anxious to fight, etc. - yet it doesn't ignore the issue of occasionally corrupt leaders.
The bit about the political instructors in the army - perhaps the most blatant propagandizing - was a bit surprising, my take (based on limited knowledge) was that these folks were annoying, interfered with military decisions. No mention of shooting deserters.
As I was occasionally finding myself annoyed with the propagandizing . . . it occurred to me that great literature so often has this aspect, more or less, and can be great nonetheless - Old Testament stories, Aeneid, Koran, any history written by a victor or someone wanting to make a point. In some ways I suppose it helps illustrate the world in which the writer was functioning.
Main point: in the end the book is full of well-written stories of all walks of Russian life experiencing WWII and, in particular, the Stalingrad battle and its context - by an author who clearly had been there - deeply knowledgeable.
Per the "introduction," the character Krymov is Grossman's voice; he articulates pro-Communist positions; sometimes sounding like Rubin in The First Circle.
War and Peace analogies were intentional - key character visits the Tolstoy homestead.
Many great characters, including a peasant in first part of the book - Vavilov - he learns soldiering as an older draftee. Early stages of the war reminiscent of that summer of 1914 (through Novikov's eyes). Krymov tells other stories of 1941 - caught in Kiev encirclement, escapes with 200; returning to the front in 1942. Description of the first saturation bombing run over Stalingrad was excellent.
I also much liked the stories of folks holding out in the tractor factory.
Stalingrad situation was entirely epic.
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