In Life and Fate, Grossman argues that Nazism and Stalinism are not opposing ideologies. Instead, he frames them as two manifestations of the same totalitarian impulse. The novel contends that both systems are fundamentally inhuman because they rely on the systematic eradication of individual identity, freedom, and empathy to maintain the absolute power of the state. This process of dehumanization is achieved through overt violence and through the insidious machinery of ideology and bureaucracy, which reduces complex human lives to simplistic, politically useful categories.

The novel’s philosophical core is the explicit equation of the two regimes, most clearly articulated in a German concentration camp. There, the SS officer Liss tells the imprisoned Mostovskoy that their two systems are essentially identical. “When we look one another in the face,” Liss insists, “we’re neither of us just looking at a face we hate—no, we’re gazing into a mirror” (395). Liss argues that both are one-party states that have rejected individual liberty in the name of a higher cause, be it the nation or the Revolution. He points to their shared methods: the use of terror, the liquidation of internal enemies, and the elevation of a single, all-powerful leader. Grossman uses this dialogue to frame the central conflict as more than a battle between fascism and communism, suggesting that it is a struggle between the totalitarian State and the individual.

This ideological premise is carried out through a vast bureaucratic apparatus that systematically strips people of their humanity. In the German camp, prisoners are categorized by colored stripes sewn onto their jackets, a system designed to “erase the peculiarities and individuality of life” until life itself suffocates (19). The Soviet state mirrors this process through its own methods of classification. When the physicist Viktor Shtrum is forced to fill out an exhaustive state questionnaire, his and his family’s complex lives are reduced to politically charged labels like “[s]ocial origin.” Personal history, virtue, and individuality become irrelevant; all that matters is one’s official category. In both systems, the unique human being is replaced by a state-defined abstraction, making them easier to control, manipulate, or destroy.

The novel further argues that this inhuman logic inevitably leads a totalitarian state to turn on its own most fervent believers. The commissar Nikolay Krymov, a man who has dedicated his entire life to the Revolution, is arrested and brutally interrogated in the Lubyanka prison. There, his interrogators systematically dismantle his revolutionary past, recasting his lifelong service as a history of espionage and treason. His identity is annihilated by the state he served. Grossman portrays this as the new age flaying “the hide […] off the still living body of the Revolution so that a new age could slip into it” (841). This demonstrates that, in a system demanding total submission, no amount of loyalty can protect an individual from the state’s insatiable need for enemies. By drawing these parallels, the novel posits that the true war is between the inhumanity of totalitarianism and the sanctity of individual life.