Vasily Grossman

Vasily Grossman (1905-1964) came to be regarded as a hero of the Second World War. Life and Fate, his novel about the siege of Stalingrad, was written in 1960 but was declared a threat to the Soviet government and was confiscated by the KGB. Twenty years later it was smuggled out of the Soviet Union on microfilm and published to wide acclaim in the West.