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

by Victor Serge

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...