The KGB seized Vasily Grossman's novel and every draft in 1961, and the FSB gave the papers to a state archive in 2013, not to his heirs

Vasily Grossman was a Soviet war correspondent and novelist. On 14 February 1961 the KGB seized the manuscripts, first drafts and typed copies of his novel Life and Fate, to avoid another Pasternak affair. Grossman had hidden two copies with friends, Viacheslav Loboda and Semen Lipkin. He died in 1964 without seeing the book in print. After his death the two custodians were also detained. In 1974 Lipkin, with Vladimir Voinovich's help, got the novel to the West. Voinovich, and Andrei Sakharov with Elena Bonner, each made a microfilm of it. In 1980 L'Age d'Homme in Lausanne published an incomplete edition. In 1988 the Soviet magazine Oktiabr published a censored edition, and a revised edition based on the two hidden copies followed in 1989. In 2013 the FSB's deputy director, Sergei Smirnov, handed the papers seized in 1961 to Culture Minister Vladimir Medinsky for the state archives. The FSB said it had found more than 11,000 leaves in its files, including handwritten corrections and drafts. They are held in the Grossman Fund at the Russian State Archive of Literature and Art in Moscow.