Stalingrad, by Vasily Grossman (the spelling of his name in English) has been translated from the Russian into English by Robert and Elizabeth Chandler. It has a curious publication history. Grossman, who was reputed to be Stalin's favourite journalist, published an early version of the novel in 1952. But in the Kruschchev period it was censored as unacceptably un-Soviet. It was not published in English until 2019.
It has been praised as "one of the great novels of the twentieth century", along with its companion novel, Life and Fate, in which many of the same characters appear. Stalingrad tells the story of how the Wehrmacht attacked Stalingrad and encircled it, but failed to take it. An epitome of Russian novels, it is 900 pages long and the list of characters is five pages long.
The novel is was written within the canons of Stalinist realism, although this did not save it from being denounced as "spittle in the face of the Russian people" when the political climate changed. In the early 50s, with the hysteria of the "Jewish doctors' plot", it did not help that Grossman was Jewish. The novel has a deep humanity, although it is not psychologically very penetrating. Even German characters are represented sympathetically -- mostly doing the best they could in ghastly circumstances.
However, the author is a committed Communist writing under Stalin. From time to time, he breaks out into praise of the indomitable Soviet people, fortified by their faith in Communism. “The boundless river of the Soviet people’s anger and grief had not been left to drain into the sand. The will of the people, the will of the Party and state had transformed it into a river of iron and steel,” he writes. It fails to record the atrocities of the NKVD.
Once upon a time, this might have been viewed suspiciously as Marxist -- now it sounds quaint, almost laughable. It is fossilized Stalinism. For anyone with good formation, it is quite harmless.