My book, Build or Die: How America Is Suffocating Its Cities and What to Do About It, will be published by Princeton University Press on December 8, 2026. Here’s what people are saying:
“Ned Resnikoff has written the authoritative guide to the big decisions that have shaped the American city in the twenty-first century, from housing to transportation to public safety. This is essential reading for those who wish to make the city all it can be.”—Henry Grabar, author of Paved Paradise: How Parking Explains the World
“This is a bracing diagnosis of the housing crisis from one of the best qualified housing journalists of our time.”—Jerusalem Demsas, editor-in-chief of The Argument
“Build or Die is destined to be a classic, a book that those who care about making our cities genuine engines of opportunity will continue to reach for in years to come.”—Steven Teles, professor of government and policy, Johns Hopkins University, and senior fellow, Niskanen Center
I’m currently about one-third of the way through Stalingrad, the first book in Vasily Grossman’s two-part epic about wartime Soviet society. For those who aren’t familiar, these two books—and the second one, Life and Fate, in particular—are sometimes held up as the twentieth century’s equivalent to War and Peace. Having read Life and Fate for the first time a few years back, my own take is that Grossman’s achievement actually surpasses Tolstoy’s.
As for why I read them out of order: Stalingrad was written and published during Stalin’s reign, and bears the scars of Soviet censorship. Life and Fate, though written around the same time, is brutally frank about life under Stalinism and consequently didn’t see publication until after Grossman’s death. Knowing something of that history, I always assumed Stalingrad was a lesser work, warped by the author’s obligation to depict Soviet-style totalitarianism in a positive light. (I think that assumption is somewhat common, which may help to explain why Life and Fate was translated into English more than a decade before Stalingrad.)
My assumption wasn’t entirely wrong. Characters who are well aware of Stalinism’s monstrous nature in Life and Fate utter regime-friendly platitudes in Stalingrad. The omniscient third-person narrator of Stalingrad does a fair amount of editorializing on the heroism of the Soviet people and the justness of their fight against Nazism, while remaining silent about the many crimes they suffered at the hands of their own rulers. And yet Stalingrad is not a work of propaganda. It is, at least as far as I can tell at this point, a masterpiece of world literature that even manages to sneak a few sly observations on totalitarian ideologies past the Soviet censors.
Take, for example, the book’s treatment of the academic Dmitry Petrovich Chepyzhin, mentor to one of the book’s central characters, fellow physicist Viktor Shtrum. Grossman describes Chepyzhin as “a scientist with a worldwide reputation” who is also something of a Russian peasant at heart. He has “the tan of someone who seldom sleeps beneath a roof” and “enjoyed hiking through forests [and] working with an axe or a spade.” He is perhaps the most thoroughly good and admirable man to be found among Grossman’s dozens of characters and thousands of pages. And this good stems from “a single guiding passion … his love for his native land.”
“From their early youth people like Chepyzhin are moved by a single powerful sentiment,” Grossman writes. “This feeling, this consciousness of a single aim, accompanies them to the end of their days.” On the other hand, he goes on:
There are people to whom this sense of an overriding aim seems a naive vestige of the past, something that just happens to have survived for no good reason. These, however, are people whose inner world is filled by the trivia of the day; enthralled by the bright colours of life’s surface, they are blind to the unity that lies beneath them. Such people often achieve small material successes, but they never win life’s real battles. They are like a general who fights without any real aim, without the inspiration of love for his people. He may capture a town, he may defeat a regiment or a division, but he cannot win the war.
Only in their last days and hours do such people realize that they have been deceived. Only then do they see the simple realities they had previously dismissed as irrelevant. But this does them little good. “Oh, if only I could begin life afresh!”—these words, pronounced bitterly as one draws up the balance sheet of one’s days, change nothing.
The simply wish for working people to live freely and happily and comfortably, for society to be ordered freely and justly—this simple desire determined the lives of many of the most revolutionary thinkers and fighters. And there were many other important Soviet figures—scientists, travellers, agriculturalists, engineers, teachers, doctors, builders and reclaimers of deserts—who were guided, until their last days, by an equally clear, childishly pure sense of purpose.
Just a couple of pages later, though, Grossman undercuts this description of Chepyzhin. In a flashback to before the war, Viktor is talking to his then-brother-in-law, the rigidly doctrinaire political commissar Krymov. “Yes, he’s an impressive figure,” Krymov says of Chepyzhin. “But when he leaves the world of physics and tries his hand at philosophizing, he ends up contradicting everything he knows as a physicist. He has no understanding of Marxist dialectics.”
Viktor weakly defends his mentor, but, according to Grossman, he “had known that Krymov was right.” And later on, as the Nazis are advancing on Moscow, he chides Chepyzhin for suggesting, in Viktor’s words, that “revolutionary struggle cannot … cannot raise human beings to a higher level—all it can do is reorder the various elements that make up a given society.” After the scolding, Chepyzhin replies, “Well, that’s certainly put me in my place.”
But who actually wins the argument? These exchanges no doubt survived the censor’s scrutiny because those who dismiss Chepyzhin for being insufficiently Marxist get the last word. But it’s hard to swallow those dismissals when the memory of his “childishly pure sense of purpose” lingers. One might even be tempted to read a little willfulness and irony into Chepyzhin’s remark that Viktor “put me in my place.” Viktor may have a better grasp of the dialectic, but he lacks Chepyzhin’s instinctive moral compass. (Viktor, it should be noted, is a chronically selfish and neurotic philanderer.)
It is unlikely that Grossman and Hannah Arendt were familiar with each other’s work, but they have strikingly similar things to say about personal morality and authoritarianism. Perhaps that’s less of a coincidence than it first appears; both Grossman and Arendt were Jewish intellectuals who got to see up close how other members of the intelligentsia adjusted to life under totalitarianism.
In her 1964 lecture, “Personal Responsibility Under Dictatorship,” Arendt set out to explain why, when the Third Reich took power, “it was precisely the members of respectable society, who had not been touched by the intellectual and moral upheaval in the early stages of the Nazi period, who were the first to yield.” Why were so many intellectuals and pillars of bourgeois society so quick to make their peace with the Nazi regime? And what distinguishes them from those Germans—many of them unexceptional in most respects—who maintained their principled anti-Nazism up until the very end?
The answer, Arendt suggests, is that the latter group engaged in thinking. By this she did not mean the intellectual activity of highly educated men like Viktor and Krymov. Instead, she simply meant “the disposition to live together explicitly with oneself, to have intercourse with oneself, that is, to be engaged in that silent dialogue between me and myself.”
Krymov knows theory, but he doesn’t think in the Arendtian sense; at least not until Life and Fate, when he comes to have his doubts about Stalinism. Chepyzhin, though, does think. To again quote Arendt, he is one of those who “asked themselves to what extent they would still be able to live in peace with themselves after having committed certain deeds; and they decided that it would be better to do nothing, not because the world would then be changed for the better, but simply because only on this condition could they go on living with themselves at all.” This type of reasoning may be crude and unsophisticated, but it is also the wellspring of moral character.
Another Stalingrad character who thinks is the biochemist Maximov. Viktor dislikes Maximov: “To Viktor, this man with pink cheeks and grey hair, with his rounded movements and quiet way of speaking, seemed timid, weak-willed and starry-eyed.” So he is surprised when Maximov, talking with his colleagues following a trip to Nazi-occupied Austria and Czechoslovakia, launches into an indignant tirade against the Third Reich:
It’s impossible to describe, you have to see it with your own eyes! Scientific thought is in fetters. People are afraid of their own shadows. They’re afraid of their fellow workers. Professors are afraid of their students. People’s thoughts, their inner lives, their families and friendships—everything is under fascist control. A man I once studied with—we sat at the same table and worked through eighteen organic chemistry syntheses together, we’ve known each other thirty years—this friend of mine begged me not to ask him any questions whatsoever. He’s the head of an important faculty, but he behaves like some petty criminal, afraid the police might collar him at any moment. “Don’t ask me anything at all,” he said. “It’s not only my colleagues I’m afraid of. I’m afraid of my own voice. I’m afraid of my own thoughts.” He was petrified I might quote something he’d said and that even if I didn’t mention his name—or his university or even his city—the Gestapo would be able to trace this back to him. You can learn more from simple people—from chambermaids and porters, from drivers and footmen. They think they’re anonymous and so they have less to fear from talking to a foreigner. But intellectuals and scientists have lost all capacity for freedom of thought—they’ve lost the right to call themselves human beings. In science, fascism now rules. Its theories are terrifying, and tomorrow these theories will become practice. They already have become practice. People talk seriously about sterilization and eugenics. One doctor told me that the mentally ill and tubercular are being murdered. People’s hearts and minds are going dark. Words like freedom, conscience, and compassion are being persecuted. People are being forbidden to speak them to children or to write them in private letters. That’s fascism for you—and may it be damned!
Next we hear from Maximov, “this fifty-four year old professor had given up his chair, joined a division of Moscow militia and gone to the front line, as a rank-and-file soldier.”
Nonetheless, when Grossman has Maximov rail against those who have “lost the right to call themselves human beings,” one cannot help but wonder whether he meant only to describe Nazi Germany. With the war behind him, maybe Grossman’s intended target was a little closer to home. Maybe it should hit a little close to home in 2026 America as well.