The first English-language translation of Vasily Grossman’s Stalingrad is no minor event. With the memory of World War II increasingly serving as a key battleground for Europe’s resurgent far right, the Soviet author’s long-dismissed prequel to Life and Fate has a clearly political charge.

The stakes of this fight over memory were clearly brought into relief by a vote in the European Parliament last month. Ignoring the voluminous academic scholarship on the subject, the Brussels parliament passed a motion which blamed the Nazi-Soviet pact of 1939–41 for starting the war and crudely equated communism with fascism.

The reactions from a previous generation of anti-fascists were exasperated, but little-publicized in mainstream media. Luciana Castellina wrote in Il Manifesto that the motion’s language “could have come from the neofascist CasaPound;” by promoting a “despicable distortion of history . . . [and] through its resounding botching of the historical record — it calls into question the prestige of the parliamentary institution that promulgated it.”