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

by Victor Serge

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.