But worse was to come. In 1960, Grossman's great novel of Russia during the Hitler war, Life and Fate, was confiscated in typescript by the KGB. This was done at the height of the Khrushchev 'thaw', when a new political tolerance was supposedly in the air. Grossman's crime had been to draw parallels between Nazism and Soviet Communism. The Hitler and Stalin regimes (as Trotsky had pointed out as long ago as 1936) were totalitarian twins that bore a 'deadly similarity'. Grossman had been dead for 24 years when, in 1988, Life and Fate was finally published in the Soviet Union. An Armenian Sketchbook displays all the humanity and candour of Grossman's Red Star journalism, but with a difference. Grossman was in the early stages of cancer when he wrote the book in 1962 and the prose has acquired a death-haunted tone. In Soviet Armenia the Moscow authorities had hoped that Grossman would meet new people, consume lots of cognac and life-giving pomegranates and, most important, forget about the censorship inflicted on Life and Fate.
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