The Case of Comrade Tulayev (New York Review Books Classics)

by Victor Serge

In Russia, he joined the Communist Party, fought in the siege of Petrograd during the Civil War, was commissioned to examine the archives of the tsarist secret police (and wrote a treatise on state oppression), headed the administrative staff of the Executive Committee of the Third — Communist — International and participated in its first three congresses, and, distressed by the mounting barbarity of governance in the newly consolidated Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, arranged to be sent abroad by the Comintern in 1922 as a propagandist and organizer. (In this time there were more than a few freelance, foreign members of the Comintern, which was, in effect, the Foreign, or World Revolution, Department of the Russian Communist Party.) After the failure of revolution in Berlin and subsequent time spent in Vienna, Serge returned in 1926 to the USSR now ruled by Stalin and officially joined the Left Opposition, Trotsky’s coalition, with which he had been allied since 1923: he was expelled from the Party in late 1927 and arrested soon after.

He was close to Trotsky, although they did not meet again after Trotsky’s banishment in 1929; Serge was to translate The Revolution Betrayed and other late writings and, in Mexico, where Trotsky had preceded him as a political refugee, collaborate with his widow on a biography. Antonio Gramsci and Georg Lukács were among Serge’s interlocutors, with whom he discussed, when they were all living in Vienna in 1924 and 1925, the despotic turn that the revolution had taken almost immediately, under Lenin. In The Case of Comrade Tulayev, whose epic subject is the Stalinist state’s murder of millions of the Party faithful as well as of most dissidents in the 1930s, Serge writes about a fate he himself most improbably, and just barely, escaped. Serge’s novels have been admired principally as testimony; polemic; inspired journalism; fictionalized history. It is easy to underestimate the literary accomplishment of a writer the bulk of whose work is not literary.

Is it because there were too many dualities in his life? He was a militant, a world-improver, to the end, which made him anathema to the right. (Even if, as he noted in his journal in February 1944, “Problems no longer have their former beautiful simplicity: it was convenient to live on antinomies like socialism or capitalism.”) But he was a knowledgeable enough anti-Communist to worry that the American and British governments had not grasped that Stalin’s goal after 1945 was to take over all of Europe (at the cost of a Third World War), and this, in the era of widespread pro-Soviet or anti-anti-Communist bias among intellectuals in Western Europe, made Serge a renegade, a reactionary, a warmonger. “All the right enemies,” the old motto proclaims: Serge had too many enemies. As an ex-, now anti-, Communist, he was never penitent enough. He deplores but he does not regret. He has not given up on the idea of radical social change because of the totalitarian outcome of the Russian Revolution.

Is it because the life was so steeped in historical drama as to overshadow the work? Indeed, some of his fervent supporters have asserted that Serge’s greatest literary work was his own tumultuous, danger-filled, ethically stalwart life. Something similar has been said of Oscar Wilde, who himself could not resist the masochistic quip, “I put all my genius into my life; I put only my talent into my works.” Wilde was mistaken, and so is this misguided compliment to Serge. As is the case with most major writers, Serge’s books are better, wiser, more important than the person who wrote

André Gide was being only a bit florid when he wrote in his journal in April 1932 that he would be willing to die for the Soviet Union: In the abominable distress of the present world, new Russia’s plan now seems to me salvation. There is nothing that does not persuade me of this! The miserable arguments of its enemies, far from convincing me, make my blood boil. And if my life were necessary to ensure the success of the USSR, I should give it at once … as have done, as will do, so many others, and without distinguishing myself from them.

Trotskyist comrades had been the most active campaigners for Serge’s freedom, and while in Brussels Serge gave his adherence to the Fourth International — as the league of Trotsky’s supporters called themselves — although he knew the movement did not advance a viable alternative to the Leninist doctrines and practice that had led to Stalinist tyranny. (For Trotsky, the crime was that the wrong people were being shot.) His departure for Paris in 1937 was followed by the open rift with Trotsky, who, from his new, Mexican exile, denounced Serge as a closet anarchist; out of respect and affection for Trotsky, Serge refused to return the attack. Unfazed by the obloquy of being perceived as a turncoat, a traitor to the left, he published more against-the-stream tracts and dossiers on the destiny of the revolution from Lenin to Stalin, and another novel, Midnight in the Century (1939), set five years earlier, mostly in a remote town resembling Orenburg to which persecuted members of the Left Opposition have been deported. It is the very first depiction in a novel of the Gulag — properly, GULAG, the acronym for that vast internal carceral empire whose official name in Russian translates as Chief Administration of Camps.

Excerpted first in Partisan Review, Czeslaw Milosz’s masterly portraits of the mutilation of the writer’s honor, the writer’s conscience, under communism, The Captive Mind (1953), was discounted by much of the American literary public as a work of cold war propaganda by the hitherto unknown émigré Polish writer. Similar suspicions persisted into the 1970s: when Robert Conquest’s implacable, irrefutable chronicle of the state slaughters of the 1930s, The Great Terror, appeared in 1969, the book could be regarded in many quarters as controversial — its conclusions perhaps unhelpful, its implications downright reactionary. Those decades of turning a blind eye to what went on in Communist regimes, specifically the conviction that to criticize the Soviet Union was to give aid and comfort to Fascists and warmongers, seem almost incomprehensible now. In the early twenty-first century, we have moved on to other illusions — other lies that intelligent people with good intentions and humane politics tell themselves and their supporters in order not to give aid and comfort to their enemies.

Serge, modestly, says it only takes some clarity and independence to tell the truth. In Memoirs of a Revolutionary, he writes: I give myself credit for having seen clearly in a number of important situations. In itself, this is not so difficult to achieve, and yet it is rather unusual. To my mind, it is less a question of an exalted or shrewd intelligence, than of good sense, goodwill and a certain sort of courage to enable one to rise above both the pressures of one’s environment and the natural inclination to close one’s eyes to facts, a temptation that arises from our immediate interests and from the fear which problems inspire in us. A French essayist has said: “What is terrible when you seek the truth, is that you find it.” You find it, and then you are no longer free to follow the biases of your personal circle, or to accept fashionable clichés.

“I had the strong conviction of charting a new road for the novel,” Serge says in the Memoirs. One way in which Serge is not charting a new road is his view of women, reminiscent of the great Soviet films about revolutionary ideals, from Eisenstein to Alexei Gherman. In this entirely men-centered society of challenge — and ordeal, and sacrifice — women barely exist, at least not positively, except through being the love objects or wards of very busy men. For revolution, as Serge describes it, is itself a heroic, masculinist enterprise, invested with the values of virility: courage, daring, endurance, decisiveness, independence, ability to be brutal. An attractive woman, someone warm, cherishing, sturdy, often a victim, cannot have these manly characteristics; therefore she cannot be other than a revolutionary’s junior partner.

Serge’s polyphonic novel, with its many trajectories, has a much more complicated view of character, of the interweaving of politics and private life, and of the terrible procedures of Stalin’s inquisition. And it casts a much wider intellectual net. (An example: Rublev’s analysis of the revolutionary generation.) Of those arrested, all but one will eventually confess — Ryzhik, who remains defiant, prefers to go on a hunger strike and die — but only one resembles Koestler’s Rubashov: Erchov, who is persuaded to render one last service to the Party by admitting that he was part of the conspiracy to assassinate Tulayev. “Every Man Has His Own Way of Drowning” is the title of one of the chapters. The Case of Comrade Tulayev is a far less conventional novel than are Darkness at Noon and 1984, whose portraits of totalitarianism have proved so unforgettable — perhaps because those novels have a single protagonist and tell a single story.

The affectless antihero of Camus’s novel is a kind of victim, first of all in his unawareness of his actions. In contrast, Kostia is full of feeling, and his acte gratuit is both sincere and irrational: his awareness of the iniquity of the Soviet system acts through him. However, the unlimited violence of the system makes his act of violence impossible to avow. When, towards the end of the novel, Kostia, tormented by how much further injustice has been unleashed by his deed, sends a written confession, unsigned, to the chief prosecutor on the Tulayev case, he, Fleischman — only a few steps from being arrested himself — burns the letter, collects the ashes and crushes them under his thumb, and “with as much relief as gloomy sarcasm” says half aloud to himself: “The Tulayev case is closed.” Truth, including a true confession, has no place in the kind of tyranny that the revolution has become.

Serge’s master theme is revolution and death: to make a revolution one must be pitiless, one must accept the inevitability of killing the innocent as well as the guilty. There is no limit to the sacrifices that the revolution can demand. Sacrifice of others; sacrifice of oneself. For that hubris, the sacrificing of so many others in revolution’s cause, virtually guarantees that eventually the same pitiless violence will be turned on those who made the revolution. In Serge’s fiction, the revolutionary is, in the strictest, classical sense, a tragic figure — a hero who will do, who is obliged to do, what is wrong; and in so doing courts, and will endure, retribution, punishment.

Kostia walked aimlessly from the window to the door — suddenly he felt imprisoned. On the other side of the partition Romachkin coughed softly. “What a man!” Kostia thought, suddenly amused by the recollection of the bilious little fellow. He never went out, he was so neat and clean — a real petit bourgeois, living there alone with his geraniums, his gray-paper-bound books, his portraits of great men: Ibsen, who said that the solitary man is the strongest man; Mechnikov, who enlarged the boundaries of life; Darwin, who proved that animals of the same species do not eat each other; Knut Hamsun, because he spoke for the hungry and loved the forest.

“No, Kostia, I wasn’t reading. I was thinking.” The faded wall, the portraits of the four great men, the glass of tea, and Romachkin sitting there thinking with his coat buttoned. “What,” Kostia wondered, “does he do with his hands?” Romachkin never put his elbows on the table; when he spoke, his hands usually lay spread flat on his knees; he walked with his hands behind his back; he sometimes folded his arms over his chest, timidly raising his shoulders. His shoulders suggested the humble patience of a beast of burden. “What were you thinking about, Romachkin?” “Injustice.”

The doctor whom Romachkin consulted at the neuropsychiatric clinic at Khamovniki said: “Reflexes excellent, nothing to worry about, citizen. Sex life?” “Not much, only occasionally,” Romachkin answered, blushing. “I recommend intercourse twice a month,” said the doctor dryly. “As to the idea of justice, don’t let it worry you. It is a positive social idea resulting from the sublimation of the primitive ego and the suppression of individualistic instincts; it is called upon to play a great role in the period of transition to Socialism … Macha, call in the next patient. Your number, citizen?” The next patient was already in the room, his number in his fingers — fingers of paper, shaken by an inner storm.

All the nights of his life were alike, equally empty. After leaving the office, he wandered from co-operative to co-operative with a crowd of idlers like himself. The shelves in the shops were full of boxes, but, to avoid any misunderstanding, the clerks had put labels on them: Empty Boxes. Nevertheless, graphs showed the rising curve of weekly sales.

Suddenly heated voices filled the darkness. Romachkin stopped. A brutal masculine voice was lost in uproar, a woman’s voice rose, rapid and vehement, heaping insults on the traitors, saboteurs, beasts in human guise, foreign agents, vermin. The insults spewed into the darkness from a forgotten loud-speaker in an empty office. It was frightful — that voice without a face, in the darkness of the office, in the solitude, under the unmoving orange light at the end of the street. Romachkin felt terribly cold. The woman’s voice clamored: “In the name of the four thousand women workers …” Romachkin’s brain passively echoed: In the name of the four thousand women workers in this factory … And four thousand women of all ages — seductive women, women prematurely old (why?), pretty women, women whom he would never know, women of whom he dared not dream — were present in him for an incalculable instant, and they all cried: “We demand the death penalty for these vile dogs! No pity!” (“Can you mean it, women?” Romachkin answered severely. “No pity? All of us need pity so much, you and I and all of us …”) “To the firing squad with them!”

A loud-speaker in the room showered the hands with the cry of the meetings: “Shoot them, shoot them, shoot them!” Who? It didn’t matter. Why? Because terror and suffering were everywhere mingled with an inexplicable triumph tirelessly proclaimed by the newspapers.

Before he went to sleep, he read the paper carefully. The face of the Chief filled a third of the front page, as it did two or three times a week, surrounded by a seven-column speech: Our economic successes … Prodigious, they were. We are the chosen people, the most fortunate of peoples, envied by a West destined to crises, unemployment, class struggle, war; our welfare increases daily, wages, as the result of Socialist emulation by our shock brigades, show a rise of 12 per cent over the past year; it is time to stabilize them, since production has shown an increase of only 11 per cent. Woe to the skeptics, to those of little faith, to those who nourish the venomous serpent of Opposition in their secret hearts! — It was set forth in angular periods, numbered 1, 2, 3, 4, 5; numbered too were the five conditions (all now fulfilled) for the realization of Socialism; numbered too the six commandments of Labor; numbered too the four grounds for historic certainty … Romachkin could not believe his senses, he turned a sharp eye on the 12 per cent increase in wages. This increase in nominal wages was accompanied by a reduction at least three times as great in real wages, as a result of the depreciation of paper money and the rise in prices…. But in this connection the Chief, in his peroration, made a mocking allusion to the dishonest specialists of the Commissariat of Finance, who would receive exemplary punishment. “Continued applause. The audience rise and acclaim the orator for...

“No, really,” Romachkin said, “I can’t, it’s too expensive. Besides …” He had said that he was a hunter, a member of the official hunter’s association, and consequently had a permit … Akhim’s face changed, Akhim’s voice changed, he went for the singing tea-kettle, poured tea into their glasses, sat down opposite Romachkin on a low stool, and drank the amber beverage with relish; doubtless he was getting ready to say something important, perhaps his final price, nine hundred? Romachkin could no more get together nine hundred than twelve hundred. It was devastating. After a long silence he heard Akhim’s caressing voice mingling with the distant boom of an explosion: “If it is to kill somebody, I have something better …” “Better?” Romachkin asked, gasping for breath … On the table, between their glasses, lay a Colt revolver with a short barrel and a black cylinder — a forbidden weapon, the mere presence of which was a crime — a fine clean Colt, calling the hand, fortifying the will. “Four hundred, my friend.”

Kostia checked the timecards for absences, went down into the tunnel with messages, helped the organizer of the Young Communists in his various educational, disciplinary, and secret-service duties. A short, dark, bobbed-haired, energetic eighteen-year-old girl with rouged lips and small acid eyes passed. He waved to her. “So your little pal Maria hasn’t showed up for two days? I’ll have to take it up with the Y.C. office.” The girl stopped short and pulled up her skirt with a masculine gesture. A miner’s lamp hung from her leather apron. With her hair hidden under a thick kerchief, she looked as if she were wearing a helmet. She spoke passionately, slowly, in a low voice: “You won’t see Maria again. Dead. Threw herself in the Moskva yesterday. She’s in the morgue this minute. Go take a look at her if you feel like it. You made her do it — you and the Bureau. And I’m not afraid to tell you so.” The edge of her shovel gleamed evilly over her shoulder. She pushed her way into the gaping elevator.

Why had he not waited until Tulayev had entered the house, before driving off? Why, instead of going in immediately, had Tulayev walked a few paces down the sidewalk? Why? The entire mystery of the crime seemed to center in these two unknowns. No one was aware that Tulayev had hoped to spend a few minutes with the wife of an absent friend; that a bottle of vodka and two dimpled arms, a milky body, warm under a house dress, were waiting for him … But the fatal bullet had not been shot from the chauffeur’s pistol; and the fatal weapon remained undiscoverable. Interrogated for sixty consecutive hours by inquisitors who themselves became exhausted and relayed each other every four hours, the chauffeur sank to the verge of insanity without changing his declarations, except insofar as he finally lost the power of speech,

After thirty-four hours of questioning, he was no longer a man but a lay figure of suffering flesh and shapeless clothes. They dosed him with strong coffee, brandy, as many cigarettes as he wanted. They gave him an injection. His fingers dropped the cigarettes, his lips forgot to drink when a glass was held to them; every hour two men from the special detachment dragged him to the washroom, held his head under the faucet, doused him with ice-cold water. He scarcely moved, limp in their hands even under the icy water, and the men thought that he took advantage of these moments of respite to sleep while they held him up; handling that human rag demoralized them after a few hours, and they had to be replaced. They held him in his chair to keep him from falling onto the floor. Suddenly the examining judge hammered the butt of his revolver on the table and roared: “Open your eyes, prisoner. I forbade you to sleep! Answer! After you fired, what did you do?”

“The plot?” the Chief asked, Erchov saw that his face had the concentrated look, the hard lines, of his cold rages. “I am inclined to accept the view that the assassination of Comrade Tulayev was the act of an isolated individual …” “Very efficient, your isolated individual! Remarkably well organized!” Erchov felt the sarcasm in the back of his neck, the place where the executioner’s bullet lodges. Could Gordeyev have sunk so low as to carry on a secret investigation of his own and then conceal the results? It would have been almost impossible. In any case, there was nothing to answer … The silence which followed annoyed the Chief. “Let us accept your view provisionally. By the decision of the Political Bureau, the case will not be closed until the criminals have been punished …” “Exactly what I was about to propose,” said the High Commissar, playing up. “Do you propose any sanctions?” “I have them here.” The sanctions filled several typewritten sheets. Twenty-five names. The Chief glanced over them. “You are losing your mind, Erchov,” he said angrily. “This doesn’t sound like you! Ten years for the chauffeur! When it was his duty not to leave the person entrusted to him until he had seen him safely home?” To the other proposals he said nothing.

Tonight she held out her beautiful bare arms to him: “Why so late, darling? What is it?” “Nothing,” Erchov said with a forced smile. At that moment he became clearly aware that, on the contrary, there was something, something enormous; it was here, and it would be wherever he went — an infinite threat to himself and to this woman. Perhaps she was too beautiful, perhaps too privileged, perhaps … Footsteps measured the hall — the night guard going to check on the service entrance. “Nothing. Two of my personal guards have been changed. It annoys me.” “But you’re the master, darling.” She stood there before him very straight, her peignoir half open over her breasts. She finished filing a lacquered fingernail. Erchov knit his brow and stared dully at a fine firm breast, tipped with a lavender nipple. Still frowning, he met her untroubled eyes, beautiful as a field of flowers. She went on: “… Don’t you do as you please?” Really, he must be very tired, or such a trifling phrase could never have produced such a strange effect on him … When he heard her casual words, Erchov became aware that actually he was master of nothing, that his will determined nothing, that any attempt he made to fight would fail. “Only lunatics do as they please,” he thought. Aloud he answered with a bitter smile: “Only lunatics imagine that they do as they please.”

When Erchov came out of the little back room, walking between the tall, thin officer and the short, fat one, the outer room was empty. The men who had seen him come in wearing the stars of power on collar and sleeves did not see him walk out disgraced. “Whoever organized this deserves to be complimented,” thought the ex-High Commissar. He did not know whether the idea had come to him from force of habit, or whether he was thinking ironically. The station was deserted. Black rails against the snow, empty space. The special train was gone — carrying away Valia, carrying away the past. A hundred yards away another car waited — an even more special car. Toward it Erchov strode, between the two silent officers.

“We lie in wait for luck, Comrade Andronnikova, for our friends and for ourselves … We are living in the jungle of the transition period, eh?” “Living in it is a dangerous art,” thought the white-haired woman, but she merely smiled, more with her eyes than with her lips. Did this singular man — scholarly, keen-minded, passionately fond of music — really believe in the “twofold period of transition, from Capitalism to Socialism and from Socialism to Communism,” about which he had published a book in the days when the Party still allowed him to write? Citizenness Andronnikova, sixty, ex-princess, daughter of a great liberal (and monarchist) politician, sister of a general massacred by his soldiers in 1916, widow of a collector of pictures the only loves of whose life had been Matisse and Picasso, deprived of the ballot because of her social origins, lived by a private cult whose saint was Wladimir Soloviev. The philosophy of mystical wisdom, if it did not help her to understand the species of men called “Bolsheviks” — men strangely stubborn, hard, limited, dangerous, yet some of whom had souls of unequaled richness — helped her to regard them with an indulgence in which, of late, there was an admixture of secret compassion. If the worst were not also to be loved, what place would there be for Christian charity here below? If the worst were not sometimes very near to the best, would they really be the worst? Andronnikova thought: “They certainly believe what they write … And ...

He passed the ironwork gateway of No. 25 Tverskoy Boulevard, “Writers’ House.” On the façade of the little building a medallion displayed the noble profile of Alexander Herzen. Out of the basement windows wafted the odors of the “Writers’ Restaurant” — or rather of the scribblers’ trough. “I sowed dragons,” said Marx, “and reaped fleas.” This country is forever sowing dragons, and in times of stress it produces them, strong with wings and claws, furnished with magnificent brains, but their posterity dies out in fleas, trained fleas, stinking fleas, fleas, fleas! In this house was born Alexander Herzen, the most generous man in the Russia of his time, and therefore driven to live in exile; and because he had perhaps exchanged messages with him, a man of the high intelligence of Chernyshevski was manhandled by the police for twenty years. Now in this house the scribblers filled their bellies by writing, in verse or prose, and in the name of the Revolution, the stupidities and infamies which despotism ordered them to write. Fleas, fleas.

Shooting them is little, Is too little, is nothing! Poison carrion, profligates, Imperialist vermin, Who soil our proud Socialist bullets! All in double rhymes. There were a hundred lines of it. At four rubles a line, it came to a skilled workman’s wages for a month, a ditchdigger’s for three months. The author of it, dressed in a sport suit made of good brown German cloth, displayed a rubicund face in editorial offices.

You knocked at a friend’s door, and the maid looked at you in terror when she opened it. “I don’t know anything about it, he is not here, he will not be back, I have been told to go to the country … No, I don’t know anything, no …” She was afraid to say another word, afraid of you as if danger were at your heels. You telephoned to a friend — from a public booth, by way of precaution — and the voice of an unknown man asked, “Who is calling?” very clearly, and you understood that a spy had been posted there and you answered mockingly, though you felt disturbed, “The State Bank, on business,” and then you got away as fast as you could because you knew that the booth would be searched within ten minutes.

It was Wladek who returned to serious matters: “You know, my nerves are all to pieces, I admit — but I am not as afraid as I might be. Come what may, my death will fertilize Socialist soil, if it is Socialist soil …” “State Capitalism,” said Philippov. Rublev: “… We must cultivate consciousness. There is sure progress under this barbarism, progress under this retrogression. Look at our masses, our youth, all the new factories, the Dnieprostroi, Magnitogorsk, Kirovsk … We are all dead men under a reprieve, but the face of the earth has been changed, the migrating birds must wonder where they are when they see what were deserts covered with factories. And what a new proletariat! Ten million men at work, with machines, instead of three and a half million in 1927. What will that effort not accomplish for the world in half a century!” “… When nothing of us will remain, not even our smallest bones,” Wladek chanted, perhaps without irony.

Behind the Regional Secretary’s comfortable armchair hung a large portrait in oils of the General Secretary, supplied for eight hundred rubles by the Universal Stores in the capital — a slick and shining portrait, in which the Chief’s green tunic seemed to be cut out of heavy painted cardboard and his half-smile miscarried into absolute nullity. When the office was completely furnished, Makeyev entered it with suppressed delight. “Wonderful, that portrait of the Chief. That’s real proletarian art!” he said expansively. But what was lacking in the room? What was this strange, irritating, improper, inconceivable blank? He turned on his heel, vaguely displeased, and the people around him — the architect, the secretary of the city Committee, the commandant of the building, the chief clerk, his private stenographer — all felt the same discomfort. “And Lenin?” he said at last; then added, with almost thunderous reproach: “You have forgotten Lenin, comrades! Ha, ha, ha!” His laughter rang out insolently amid the general confusion. The secretary of the city Committee was the first to regain his self-possession: “Not at all, Comrade Makeyev, not at all. We hurried to get things finished this morning and there wasn’t time to put in the bookcase — there’s where it will stand — with Ilich’s Complete Works, in the Institute edition, and the little bust that goes on top of it, just like in my place.” “That’s better,” said Makeyev, his eyes still gleaming with mockery. And, before dismis...

Tulayev discerned Makeyev’s value. Basically the two men were much alike, though Tulayev was better educated, more adaptable, and more blasé about exercising power (as chief clerk to a substantial Volga merchant, he had taken courses at a commercial school). Tulayev was embarked on a bigger career. He once plunged Makeyev into unbearable embarrassment by reporting to a meeting that the last May Day procession at Kurgansk had included no less than 137 large or small portraits of Comrade Makeyev, Regional Secretary, and then going on to mention the official opening of a Makeyev Day Nursery in a Kazak village which had soon after emigrated in a body to newer pastures … Crushed by the laughter, Makeyev rose and stood looking into the sea of hilarious faces, his eyes full of tears, his voice half choked, demanding the floor … He did not get it, for a member of the Political Bureau came in, wearing an elegantly tailored workman’s blouse, and the whole assembly rose for the ritual seven-to-eight-minute ovation. After the meeting Tulayev sought out Makeyev: “That was a pretty good trouncing I gave you, eh, brother? But don’t let a little thing like that make you angry. If you get the chance, come back at me as hard as you like. Have a drink?” Those were the good old times of rough-and-ready brotherhood.

In accordance with messages from the C.C., Makeyev visited the villages, broadcast promises and threats, had himself photographed surrounded by muzhiks, women, and children, got up several parades of enthusiastic farmers who were turning over all their wheat to the state. The carts entered the city in procession, laden with sacks and accompanied by red flags, transparencies proclaiming a single-hearted devotion to the Party, portraits of the Chief and portraits of Comrade Makeyev, carried like banners by the village lads and girls. There was a fine holiday feeling about these manifestations.

The evening of the same day he stayed in his office late into the night, conferring with the President of the Executive of the Soviet and an envoy extraordinary from the C.C. The situation was becoming serious: insufficient reserves, insufficient receipts, the certainty of a reduction in cropping, an illicit rise in market prices, a wave of speculation. The envoy extraordinary announced draconian measures to be applied “with an iron hand.” “Certainly,” said Makeyev, afraid to understand. So began the black years. First expropriated, then deported, some seven per cent of the farmers left the region in cattle cars amid the cries, tears, and curses of urchins and disheveled women and old men mad with rage. Fields lay fallow, cattle disappeared, people ate the oil cake intended for the stock, there was no more sugar or gasoline, leather or shoes, cloth or clothes, everywhere there was hunger on impenetrable white faces, everywhere pilfering, collusion, sickness; in vain did Security decimate the bureaus of animal husbandry, agriculture, transport, food control, sugar production, distribution … The C.C. recommended raising rabbits.

Makeyev fought a losing battle with Tulayev for two weeks. Accused by his powerful antagonist of tending toward the “Right opportunist deviation,” he saw himself on the brink of the abyss. Figures and several sentences from his memorandum, quoted to denounce “the incoherencies of the Political Bureau’s agrarian policy” and the “fatal blindness of certain functionaries,” appeared in a document probably drawn up by Bukharin and delivered to the Control Commission by an informer. Makeyev, seeing that he was lost, abjured instantly and passionately. The Politburo and the Orgburo (Organization Bureau) decided to maintain him in his position since he had renounced his errors and was devoting himself to the new purge of kolkhozes with exemplary energy.

Although, when they had been in power, he had known and admired a number of the defendants in the great trials, he accepted their end with a sort of zeal. Incapable of comprehending anything but the baldest arguments, he was not troubled by the enormity of the accusations. (We have no time for subtleties!) And what was more natural than to use lies to overwhelm an enemy who must be put out of the way? The demands of mass psychology in a backward country must be met. Called

Well satisfied, he became more important than ever. His plain fur coat, his plain fur cap contrasted with the careful attire of the technicians and made him look all the more the provincial builder. “We who are clearing virgin soil …” He slipped little phrases like that into the conversation, and they did not ring false. Of the few old friends whom he tried to find the second day, none could be reached. One was ill in a suburban hospital, too far from town; telephoning to two others, he received only evasive answers. On the second occasion, Makeyev got angry. “Makeyev speaking, I tell you. Makeyev of the C.C., do you understand? I want to know where Foma is; I have a right to be told, I imagine …” The man at the other end of the wire answered, in a doubtful voice: “He has been arrested …” Arrested? Foma, Bolshevik of 1904, loyal to the general line, former member of the Central Control Commission, member of Security’s special college? Makeyev gasped for breath, a spasm passed over his face, for a moment he felt stunned. What was happening now?

At the Prat airfield a podgy colonel, wearing glasses, complimented Mr. Laytis in unctuous tones, led him to a handsome car which displayed a few elegant shot scratches, and said to the driver: “Vaya, amigo.” Ivan Kondratiev, emissary of a strong and victorious revolution, felt that he was entering a very sickly one. “The situation?” “Fair. I mean, not entirely desperate … We are counting heavily on you. A Greek ship under British colors sunk last night off the Balearic Islands: munitions, bombings, artillery fire, the usual confusion … No importa. Rumors of concentrations in the Ebro region. Es todo.” “Internal affairs? The Anarchists? The Trotskyists?” “The Anarchists are ready to listen to reason — probably on the way out …” “Since they will listen to reason,” Kondratiev said mildly. “The Trotskyists are practically all in prison …” “Very good. But you took a long time about it,” said Kondratiev severely, and something in him became tense.

Not one of these governmental dignitaries would have been worthy of a minor job in secret service, not even those who were Party members: they talked too much. A Communist minister, using a transparent pseudonym, wrote a newspaper article accusing a Socialist colleague of being sold to the London bankers … At a café the old Socialist commented on his skulking colleague’s prose. His ponderous triple chin, his heavy jowls, and even his dark eyelids shook with laughter: “Sold, yo! And the blind dupes have the gall to say so when they are sold to Moscow themselves — and paid with Spanish money, by the way!” The remark struck home. Yuvanov concluded his report: “They are all incapable. The masses are magnificent, nevertheless.” He sighed: “But what trouble they cause!”

By candlelight, during a power breakdown caused by a night bombing of the port, he received the first of the visitors whom Yuvanov had wanted to strike from the list, a Socialist lieutenant colonel, a lawyer before the Civil War, of bourgeois background — a tall, thin young man with a yellow face which his smile etched into ugly lines. He spoke intelligently, and his remarks were full of unequivocal reproaches. “I have brought you a detailed report, my dear comrade.” (In the heat of conversation, he sometimes let fall a perfidious “my dear friend.”) “In the Sierra we never had more than twelve cartridges per man … The Aragon front was not defended; it could have been made impregnable in two weeks; I sent out twenty-seven letters on the subject, six of them to your compatriots … Air arm entirely insufficient. In short, we are losing the war — make no mistake about that, my dear friend.” “What do you mean?” interrupted Kondratiev, chilled by the precise statement.

Think of it: a man with yellow eyes stole the Central Committee keys, walked in and sat down at old Ilich’s desk, picked up the telephone, and said: ‘Proletarians, it’s Me.’ And the same radio which the day before repeated: ‘Proletarians of all countries, unite,’ began shouting: ‘Listen to us, obey us, we can do anything, we are the Revolution …’ Perhaps he believes it, but in that case he is half insane, probably he only half believes it, because mediocrities reconcile their conviction with the situations in which they find themselves. Behind him, like a swarm of rats, rise the profiteers, the right-thinking cowards, the frightened, the new ‘ins,’ the careerists, the would-be careerists, the camp followers, those who praise the strong, those who are sold beforehand to any and every power, the old gang that seeks out power because power is the good old way of taking your neighbor’s work and the fruits of his work, his wife if she’s pretty, his house if it’s comfortable.

We’ll swallow defeat, we’ll swallow anything, they think, if only it will stop. They no longer know what the Republic is fighting for. They’re not wrong. What Republic? For whom? They don’t know that history never runs out of ideas, that the worst is always yet to come … They think they have nothing more to lose … And there is a direct relation between starvation to the present degree and the darkening of people’s minds; when bellies are empty the little spiritual flame flickers and goes out

Jaime left an unspoken anxiety behind him in the weedy garden where the crickets raised their faint metallic chirping. At thirty-five, Stefan Stern had survived the collapse of several worlds: the bankruptcy of a proletariat reduced to impotence in Germany, Thermidor in Russia, the fall of Socialist Vienna under Catholic cannon, the dislocation of the Internationals, emigrations, demoralizations, assassinations, Moscow trials … After us, if we vanish without having had time to accomplish our task or merely to bear witness, working-class consciousness will be blanked out for a period of time that no one can calculate … A man ends by concentrating a certain unique clarity in himself, a certain irreplaceable experience.

“Annie, listen to me. I am afraid of becoming a coward when I think of all that I know, all that I understand, and that they don’t know, don’t understand …” Lacking time to think, he put nothing clearly … “Listen, Annie. There are not more than fifty men on earth who understand Einstein: If they were shot on the same night, it would be all over for a century or two — or three, how do we know? A whole vision of the universe would vanish into nothingness … Think of it: Bolshevism raised millions of men above themselves, in Europe, in Asia, for ten years. Now that the Russians have been shot, nobody can any longer see from inside what was the thing by which all those men lived, the thing which constituted their strength and their greatness; they will become indecipherable and, after them, the world will fall below them …” Annie

Because we, we who began the conquest, are at our last gasp, are empty, we have gone mad with suspicion, gone mad with power, we are madmen capable of shooting ourselves down in the end — and that is what we are doing. Too few minds able to think clearly, among the horde of Asiatics and Europeans whom a glorious calamity led to accomplish the first Socialist revolution. Lenin saw it from the very beginning, Lenin resisted so high and dark a destiny with all his power. In school language, you would have to put it that the working classes of the old world have not yet reached maturity, whereas the crisis of the regime has begun; what has happened is that the classes which are attempting to go against the stream of history are the most intelligent — ignobly intelligent — are the best educated, those which put the most highly developed practical consciousness in the service of the most profound lack of consciousness and of the greatest egotism

An American tourist, a woman who was almost beautiful and completely mad, though her self-control was an impenetrable weapon, declared: “I know nothing about politics, I hate Trotsky, I am a Terrorist. Since childhood I have dreamed of being a Terrorist. I came to Moscow to become Comrade Tulayev’s mistress and kill him. He was so jealous; he adored me. I should like to die for the U.S.S.R. I believe that the love of the people must be spurred by overwhelming emotions … I killed Comrade Tulayev, whom I loved more than my life, to avert the danger that threatened the Chief … I can’t sleep for remorse — look at my eyes. I acted from love … I am happy to have accomplished my mission on earth … If I were free, I’d like to write my reminiscences for the papers … Shoot me! Shoot me!”

A young doctor assigned to the investigation spent hours with the madwoman, stroking her hands and knees while he made her repeat: “I am innocent, I am innocent …” She repeated it perhaps two hundred times, gave a beatific smile, and said softly: “How sweet you are … I’ve known for a long time that you love me … But it was I, I, I who killed Comrade Tulayev … He loved me as you do.” The same evening the young doctor made his report to Fleischman. A sort of bewilderment clouded his eyes and troubled his speech. “Are you quite sure,” he asked at the end of the interview, with a strange seriousness, “that she has no connection with the case?” Fleischman angrily crushed out his cigarette. “Go take a shower, my boy — right away!” The young doctor was sent to rest his nerves in the forests of northern Pechora.

“You didn’t finish your sentence, I believe?” “On the contrary.” Among the students grouped at the edge of the sidewalk, an amazingly blond and beautiful girl was explaining something, gesturing vividly with both hands; at that distance her fingers seemed to hold the light, and she threw her head back a little to laugh more freely. Distant as a star, inaccessible and real as a star, her head did not feel Fleischman’s dull eyes staring at it. The Deputy High Commissar for Security, the Prosecutor of the Supreme Tribunal, the Investigatress appointed to the most serious cases, waited for Fleischman to express his opinion. Aware of their expectation, he resumed firmly: “The preliminary investigation must be closed.” Turning until he almost faced them, he looked at the three, one after the other, giving each a pleasant nod, as if he had just said something most important — three repugnant, corrupt faces, composed of some horrible gelatinous substance … And I am ugly too, my complexion is greenish, I have a bestial jowl and puffy eyelids … We ought to be put out of the way … And now you are in a fine fix, my dear comrades, because that is all I intend to say.

Gordeyev mentally translated the discourse from the agitator’s terms in which it was delivered into more intelligible ones, because somewhere in it, like a weasel crouched in a thicket, lay the Chief’s directive. “In short: we have lived at the heart of an immense and infinitely ramified plot, which we have succeeded in liquidating. Three fourths of the leaders of the previous periods of the revolution had ended by becoming corrupt; they had sold themselves to the enemy, or if not, it was the same thing, in the objective meaning of the word. Causes: the inner contradictions of the regime, the desire for power, pressure from surrounding capitalism, intrigues of foreign agents, the demoniac activity of Judas-Trotsky. The high foresight, the truly inspired foresight of the Chief has made it possible for us to thwart the machinations of innumerable enemies of the people who frequently held in their hands the levers which control the State. Henceforth no one must be considered above suspicion except for the entirely new men whom history and the genius of the Chief have summoned up for the salvation of the country … In three years, the battle for public security has been won, the conspiracy has been reduced to impotence; but in the prisons, in the concentration camps, in the street, men yet survive who are our last internal enemies, and the most dangerous because they are the last, even if they have done nothing, even if they are innocent according to formal law. Their defeat ha...