It was Peter the Great who ended Russia's isolation at the beginning of the eighteenth century by moving the capital from Moscow to a newly created city on the Baltic, modestly named after himself and canonized, St.

But their activities were circumscribed, and they were kept in a kind of Western ghetto, the so-called Foreign Quarter of Moscow (the Nemetskaya sloboda). There was no place at all for Jews in the Third Rome, and the “Latin Heretics” were admitted only very cautiously by the ambitious Tsar Ivan the Terrible in the sixteenth century.

With their own patriarch living in Moscow, Russians considered their capital the only center of the true faith of Orthodoxy and indeed of all Christianity. The first Rome had fallen to the “Latin heretics.” The second Rome was Emperor Constantine's namesake on the Bosporus, now in the hands of the Muslim Turks. After the fall of Constantinople to the Turks in 1453, Moscow came to view itself as the queen of Christendom, a “Third Rome” shining as a beacon of hope to all other Christian countries, and particularly to the Orthodox Serbs in the Balkans under Turkish domination. In direct contrast, the Russian Orthodox church remained suspended, immobilized, in a medieval time warp. (Dick) Lloyd, author of Three Glorious Years 'Grossman is a sufficiently important Soviet cultural figure to deserve a biography, and through his the Garrards say a good deal about cultural politics, internal repression, and antisemitism in the Soviet Union.'- Foreign Affairs For anyone interested either in WWII or Soviet Communism, this book is a must.'-R.J. gives the reader a very clear insight into the horrors of the War on the Eastern Front. This meticulously researched biography by John and Carol Garrard uses archival and unpublished sources that only became available after the collapse of the Soviet Union. Only in 1980, with the posthumous publication in Switzerland of Life and Fate was his remarkable novel to gain an international reputation.

Declared a non-person, Grossman died in obscurity.

Though he finished the war as a decorated lieutenant colonel, his epic account of the battle of Stalingrad, Life and Fate, was suppressed by Soviet authorities, and never published in his lifetime. He was present during the street-fighting at Stalingrad, and his 1944 report 'The Hell of Treblinka, ' was the first eyewitness account of a Nazi death camp. 'A definitive treatment of one of the Soviet Union's most significant writers.'-The Russian Review Vasily Grossman (1905–64), one of the greatest authors of the twentieth century, served for over 1, 000 days with the Red Army as a war correspondent on the Eastern front.

Life and fate