Vasily Semyonovich Grossman (Russian: Васи́лий Семёнович Гро́ссман; 12 December (29 November, Julian calendar) 1905 – 14 September 1964) was a Soviet writer and journalist.

Born to a Jewish family in Ukraine, then part of the Russian Empire, Grossman trained as a chemical engineer at Moscow State University, earning the nickname Vasya-khimik ("Vasya the Chemist") because of his diligence as a student.

While he was never arrested, his two major literary works (Life and Fate and Everything Flows [de]) were censored by Nikita Khrushchev's government as unacceptably anti-Soviet.

His father Semyon Osipovich Grossman was a chemical engineer, and his mother Yekaterina Savelievna was a teacher of French.

[1] One of his first short stories, "In the Town of Berdichev" (В городе Бердичеве), drew favourable attention and encouragement from Maxim Gorky and Mikhail Bulgakov.

The film Commissar (director Aleksandr Askoldov), made in 1967, suppressed by the KGB and released only in 1988, is based on this four-page story.

Grossman quickly had himself registered as the official guardian of Olga's two sons by Boris Guber, thus saving them from being sent to orphanages.

He then wrote to Nikolay Yezhov, the head of the NKVD, pointing out that Olga was now his wife, not Guber's, and that she should not be held responsible for a man from whom she had separated long before his arrest.

Grossman's friend, Semyon Lipkin, commented, "In 1937 only a very brave man would have dared to write a letter like this to the State's chief executioner."

[5] A new English translation, with added material from Grossman's politically risky early drafts, was published in 2019 under the original title, Stalingrad.

[10] Of Josef Hirtreiter, the SS man who served at the reception zone of the Treblinka extermination camp during the arrival of transports, Grossman wrote:[10] This creature specialized in the killing of children.

Evidently endowed with unusual strength, it would suddenly snatch a child out of the crowd, swing him or her about like a cudgel and then either smash their head against the ground or simply tear them in half.

[10]Grossman's description of a physically unlikely method of killing a living human through tearing-by-hand originated from the 1944 memoir of the Treblinka revolt survivor Jankiel Wiernik, where the phrase to "tear the child in half" appeared for the first time.

[12] Grossman participated in the compiling of the Black Book, a project of the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee to document the crimes of the Holocaust.

First the censors ordered changes in the text to conceal the specifically anti-Jewish character of the atrocities and to downplay the role of Ukrainians who worked with the Nazis as police.

After he submitted for publication his magnum opus, the novel Life and Fate (Жизнь и судьба, 1959), the KGB raided his flat.

However, Life and Fate and his last major novel, Everything Flows (Все течет, 1961) were considered a threat to the Soviet power and remained unpublished.

Two dissident researchers, professors and writers Efim Etkind and Shimon Markish, retyped the text from the microfilm, with some mistakes and misreadings due to the bad quality.

Robert Chandler wrote in his introduction to the Harvill edition that its leading character, Viktor Shtrum, "is a portrait of the author himself," reflecting in particular his anguish at the murder of his mother at the Berdichev Ghetto.