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

by Victor Serge

Ryzhik: erstwhile worker in the Hendrikson Pipe and Tube Works, St. Petersburg, member of the Party since 1906, deported to the Lena in 1914, returned from Siberia in April 1917; had several conversations with Lenin immediately after the conference of April ’17; member of the Petrograd Committee during the Civil War; defended the Workers’ Opposition before the Petrograd Committee in ’20, but did not vote for it. Commissar of a division during the march on Warsaw, worked at that time with Smilga, of the C.C., Rakovsky, head of the government of Ukrainia, Tukhachevsky, commandant of the army, three enemies of the people too tardily punished in 1937 … expelled from the Party in ’27, arrested in ’28, deported to Minusinsk, Siberia, in July ’29, condemned by the secret collegium of Security to three years of penal internment, sent to the isolator of Tobolsk, there became the leader of the so-called “Intransigents” tendency, which published a manuscript magazine entitled The Leninist (four issues attached). In 1932, the secret collegium gave him an additional sentence of two years (upon decision of the Political Bureau), to which he answered: “Ten years if it amuses you, for I very much doubt if you will remain in power more than six months with your blind starvation policy.”