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

by Victor Serge

Men who were of high rank, but whom he did not know, questioned him with a mixture of deference and harsh insolence. “Did you check on the use made of the 344,000 rubles allocated for reconstructing the offices of the prison administration at Rybinsk?” Stupefied, Erchov answered: “No.” A smile which was perhaps sarcastic, perhaps pitying, creased the hollow cheeks of the high official whose round spectacles gave him the look of a deep-sea fish … And the session was over … At the next session: “When you signed the appointment of Camp Commandant Illenkov, did you know the past record of that enemy of the people?” — “Which Illenkov?” The name must have been submitted to him in a long list. “But this is ridiculous! Comrade, I …” — “Ridiculous?” said the other in a threatening voice. “On the contrary, it is most serious, it is a matter of a crime against the security of the State committed by a high official in the exercise of his office, and punishable, under Article … of the Penal Code, by death …” This one was aging — sandy hair, coppery flecks in his face, his eyes hidden behind gray lenses. “Then you claim that you did not know, defendant Erchov?” — “No.” — “As you please … But you are well aware that in our country confessing errors and crimes is always a better choice than resisting … I am not telling you anything new …”

… Was it four weeks, or five, or six, that passed? What connection did measurements of time based on the rotation of the earth in space have with the fermentation of a brain between the concrete walls of a secret prison in the age of the rebuilding of the world? Erchov underwent twenty-hour interrogations without flinching. Amid a mass of questions which apparently had no connection with one another, there were three which were asked again and again: “What did you do to prevent the arrest of your accomplice Kiril Rublev? What did you do to conceal the past of the Trotskyist Kondratiev on the eve of his mission to Spain? What messages did you give him for the Spanish Trotskyists?” Erchov explained that Kondratiev’s personal dossier had been sent to him by the Political Bureau at the very last moment; that the dossier contained nothing unusual; that he had seen Kondratiev only for ten minutes and only to advise him about trustworthy agents … “And who were these trustworthy agents?” When he returned to his cell after these interrogations, he slept like a stunned animal, but talked in his sleep, because the interrogation went on and on in his dreams.

I got up on the platform, like the others, without much idea of what I was going to say, I began like everyone else with empty phrases about the Party’s vigilance. A hundred asphyxiated faces looked up at me, openmouthed; they impressed me as slimy and dried up, asleep and vicious, distorted by colic. The Bureau dozed on, what I might say to denounce you interested no one, it was an old story that wouldn’t save me; and no one was thinking of anything but himself. And I found myself absolutely calm again, my friend, I had a tremendous desire to joke, I felt that my voice was clear and assured, I saw gelatinous faces moving feebly, I was beginning to make them uneasy. I calmly said unheard-of things, which froze the audience, the Bureau, the man from the Central Committee. (He was taking notes as fast as he could, he would have liked to sink into the ground.) I said that mistakes, under our overwhelming load of work, were inevitable, that I had known you for twelve years, that you were loyal, that you lived only for the Party and that everyone knew it, that we had very few men like you and a great many rats … The chill that rose around me might have come from the Great Ice Barrier. At the back of the room a strangled voice cried: ‘Shame!’ It woke the terror-stricken ghosts: ‘Shame!’ — ‘Shame on you,’ I said, stepping down from the platform, and I added: ‘You are fools if you think you’re any better off than I am!’ I walked the whole length of the room. They were all afraid I...

“Confess, brother. That or something else, anything they want you to. In the first place, you’ll sleep; in the second, you’ll have a slim chance … A very slim chance, almost no chance in my opinion, but there’s nothing left that anyone can do about it … Maximka, you are a stronger man than I am, but I have better political judgment, you must admit … That’s how it is, I assure you. They need just that, and they order it as they order a turbine destroyed … Neither the engineers nor the workers discuss the order, and no one worries about the lives it will cost … I had never even thought of it before … The last trials did not produce the political results that were expected of them, and the conviction now is that there must be a new demonstration and a new cleanup … You understand that they can’t leave any veterans anywhere … It is not up to us to decide if the Political Bureau is wrong or not …” “It is appallingly wrong,” said Erchov. “Keep your mouth shut on the subject.

Night had fallen, steps sounded in a distant corridor, mingled with the tapping of a typewriter. The scattered sounds, creeping into the silence, were poignant. Erchov was still rebellious: “Confess that I am complete traitor! That I was a party to a crime against which I have fought with all my strength! … Let me alone, you’re mad!” His comrade’s voice came to him from very far away. There were icy distances between them, in which dark planets revolved slowly … There was nothing between them except a mahogany table, empty tea glasses, an empty carafe of vodka, five feet of dusty carpet. “Better men than you and I have done it before us. Others will do it after us. No one can resist the machine. No one has the right, no one can resist the Party without going over to the enemy. Neither you nor I will ever go over to the enemy … And if you consider yourself innocent, you are absolutely wrong.

Popov has been to see me — you know, that blithering old fool … When his turn comes, I’ll be very happy, even in the next world … He said to me: ‘The Party demands much of you, the Party promises nothing to anyone. The Political Bureau will decide in accordance with political necessities. The Party can also shoot you without trial …’ Make up your mind, Maximka, I am as tired as you are.” “Impossible,” said Erchov. He covered his face with his hands and crumpled over. Perhaps he was crying. His breath came wheezily. There was a shattering interval. “It would be a pleasure to blow out my own brains,” Erchov muttered. “Of course,” said Ricciotti.

Rublev knew the minutes of the meetings of the Political Bureau, he quoted the most forbidden passages from them (passages probably now destroyed); he showed the General Secretary daily encroaching upon all powers; he followed the intrigue in the lobbies of the Central Committee; against it as a background, the figure of the Chief began to appear, still hesitantly, between resignation, arrest, the violent scene at the end of which two equally pale members of the P.B. faced each other among the overturned chairs and one said: “I will kill myself so that my corpse will denounce you! But as for you, the muzhiks will rip your guts out one day, and more power to them — but the country, the Revolution …” And the other, his face closed as the grave, murmured: “Calm yourself, Nicolas Ivanovich. If you will accept my resignation I tender it …” It was not accepted, there were no more successors. When he had written page after page, written freely, as he had not written for more than ten years, Kiril Rublev would walk up and down his cell, smoking. “Well, Dora, what do you think of it?” Dora invisibly turned over the written sheets. “Good,” she said. “Firm and clear. Yourself. Go on, Kiril.” Then he returned to that other necessary meditation, his meditation on the poppy field.

Through Prosecutor Rachevsky, the Acting High Commissar for Security, Gordeyev, and Popov (delegated by the Central Committee to supervise “judicial inquiries into the most serious cases”), the Bureaus received an order to add to the dossier of the Erchov-Makeyev-Rublev case (assassination of Comrade Tulayev) that of an influential Trotskyist (which meant a genuine Trotskyist), whatever his attitude might be. Rachevsky, contrary to Fleischman’s opinion, held that to make the case more convincing to foreigners, one of the accused might this time be allowed to deny all guilt. The Prosecutor undertook to confound him by testimony which could easily be worked up. Popov casually added that the verdict might take into consideration the doubt raised by his denials, it would produce a good effect, if the Political Bureau considered it worth while. Zvyeryeva volunteered to bring together the secondary testimony which would overwhelm the denials of the as yet unknown defendant. “We have such a mass of material,” she said, “and the conspiracy had so many ramifications, that no resistance is possible. The guilt of these counterrevolutionary vermin is collective …” A search of the files brought to light a number of dossiers, only one of which perfectly suited the end in view: Ryzhik’s.

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.”

“Well,” said Pakhomov, “our journey together is over. I have orders to turn you over to the Security post. The railroad is only about sixty miles from here. I wish you luck, brother. Don’t hold a grudge against me.” Ryzhik pretended an interest in the street, in order not to hear the last words. They clasped hands. “Good-by, Comrade Pakhomov, I wish you understanding, dangerous though it be …” In the Security office two young fellows in uniform were playing dominoes on a dirty table. The unlighted stove sent out a wretched chill. One of the two glanced at the papers which Pakhomov had brought. “State criminal,” he said to his companion, and both of them looked at Ryzhik hostilely. Ryzhik felt the white hair on his temples bristle, an aggressive smile uncovered his purplish gums, and he said: “You can read, I suppose. That means: Old Bolshevik, faithful to Lenin’s work.” “An old story. Plenty of enemies of the people have used the same camouflage. Come, citizen.” Without another word, they led him to a small dark room at the end of the hall, closed the door on him, and padlocked it.

Now he was in a third-class compartment, surrounded by a noncommissioned officer and several soldiers in heavy boots. It was pleasant to see people again. But people hardly noticed him — “You see so many prisoners.” This one might be a great criminal, since he was so heavily escorted, yet he didn’t look it, could he be a believer, a priest, a man under persecution? A peasant woman with a child in her arms asked the noncom for permission to give the prisoner some milk and a few eggs, because he looked ill — “in a Christian spirit, citizen.” — “It is strictly forbidden, citizen,” said the soldier. “Go along, citizen, or I’ll have you put off the train …” — “Thank you a thousand times, citizen,” said Ryzhik to the peasant woman, in a strong deep voice which made every head in the corridor turn. The noncom, blushing crimson, intervened: “Citizen, you are strictly forbidden to speak to anyone …” “To hell with that,” Ryzhik said quietly. “Shut up!” One of the soldiers, who was lying in the upper berth, dropped a blanket over him. A great pushing and tussling followed, and when Ryzhik got rid of the blanket he saw that the corridor had been cleared. Three soldiers blocked the compartment doorway. They were looking at him with rage and terror. Across from him, the noncom intently watched his every movement, ready to fling himself on him to gag him, to manacle him (even to kill him?) — anything to prevent him from uttering another word. “Idiot,” said Ryzhik, looking straight at him...

Makarenko wrapped himself in his blanket. His long fingers played with the air. “Our meeting is absolutely extraordinary … An inconceivable piece of negligence on the part of the services, a fantastic success commanded by the stars … the stars which are no longer in their courses. We are living through an apocalypse of Socialism, Comrade Ryzhik … Why are you alive, why am I — I ask you! Why? Magnificent! Staggering! I wish I might live for a century so that I could understand …” “I understand,” said Ryzhik. “The Left theses, of course … I am a Marxist too. But shut your eyes for a minute, listen to the earth, listen to your nerves … Do you think I am talking nonsense?” “No.”

Even ideas were swept into a convulsive dance of death, texts suddenly meant the opposite of what they stated, a madness carried away men, books, the history that was supposed to have been made once and for all; and now there was nothing but aberration and buffoonery — one man beating his breast and crying, “I was paid by Japan,” another moaning, “I wanted to assassinate the Chief whom I worship,” yet another accompanying a scornful “Come now!” with a shrug that suddenly opened a hundred windows on an asphyxiated world … Ryzhik could have produced a set of biographies, with an appendix of documents and photographs, covering the public, private, and ideological lives of five hundred men who had been executed, three hundred who had disappeared. What could a Makarenko add to such a detailed picture? So long as he had retained the slightest hope of surviving usefully, Ryzhik had continued his investigations.

Not an inscription on the freshly repainted walls. Ryzhik sent for the assistant warden and asked for books. “Presently, citizen.” Later he came back and said: “You must make your request to the examining judge at your next hearing …” “I shall read no more,” thought Ryzhik, surprised that his farewell to books left him so indifferent. What were needed today were books like thunderbolts, full of an irrefutable historical algebra, full of merciless indictments, books which should judge these days, every line of which should breathe implacable intelligence, be printed in pure fire. Such books would be born later. Ryzhik tried to call to mind books which, for him, were connected with his sense of being alive. The grayish newsprint of the papers left him only a memory of insipidity.

In November ’17 another Ryzhik — yet was it the same? — went to a great printing plant in Vasili-Ostrov with the Red Guard, and requisitioned it in the name of the Party. Before the great machines which produce books and papers he exclaimed: “Now, comrades, the days of falsehood are done! Mankind will print nothing but the truth!” The owner of the plant, a fat, pale, yellow-lipped gentleman, cruelly put in: “That, gentlemen, I defy you to do!” and Ryzhik wanted to kill him on the spot, but we were not bringing barbarism, we were putting an end to war and murder, we were bringing proletarian justice. “We shall see, citizen; in any case, I inform you that there are no more gentlemen, now or henceforth …” The man he had been in those days was over forty, a hard age for a worker, but he felt himself an adolescent again: “Coming into power,” he said, “has made us all twenty years younger …”

For a moment the silence of the prison fell upon them all. The important people were calculating the consequences: responsibility to be established, the investigation to be begun over again from a different angle, the Chief to be told — what was the Tulayev case to be tied to now? “In whose charge was the prisoner?” Popov asked, without looking at anyone — because he knew very well. “In Comrade Zvyeryeva’s,” answered the Deputy High Commissar for Security, Gordeyev. “Did you have him given a medical examination when he arrived, Comrade Zvyeryeva? Have you been receiving daily reports on his condition and his attitude?” “I thought … No …” Popov’s reproach burst out: “Do you hear that, Gordeyev, do you hear that?” Swept on by his anger, he was the first to hurry out of the cell. He almost ran, feebly, like an overlarge puppet; but it was he who dragged along the imposing Gordeyev by an invisible thread. Zvyeryeva was the last to leave. As she passed Arkhipov, the soldier, she felt that he gave her a look of hatred.

His secretary, Tamara Leontiyevna, came into the glass-partitioned office too silently, her mute lips were outlined in too harsh a red, her eyes looked frightened, and why did she lower her voice like that when she answered him, and never smile? The thought came to him for a moment that perhaps he was like that himself, and that his expression, his coldness, his own anxiety (it was really anxiety) were apparent at first glance. Can I be contagious? He went to the washroom to look at himself in the mirror and stood there before himself for a long moment, almost without thinking, in a forsaken immobility. Absurd, really, how interesting we are to ourselves! That tired man is myself, that sallow face, that ugly mouth, those rust-red lips tinged with gray, myself, myself, myself, that human apparition, that phantom in flesh! The eyes recalled to him other Kondratievs, whose disappearance roused no regrets in the Kondratiev he now was. Ridiculous to have lived so much, only to have come to this!

You will drown at the end of the road, brother, I pity you. Terrible days are coming, and you will be alone with millions of lying faces, alone with huge portraits of yourself placarded over the fronts of buildings, alone with ghosts whose skulls show the round hole of a bullet, alone at the summit of the pyramid of their bones, alone with this country which has forsaken itself, which has been betrayed by you, you who are loyal as we too are loyal, you who are mad with loyalty, mad with suspicions, mad with jealousies you have repressed all your life … Your life has been black, you alone see yourself approximately as you are, weak, weak, weak, driven mad by problems, weak and loyal, and evil because, under the armor that you will never take off, in which you will die, taut with will, you are feeble, you are nothing. That is your tragedy. You would like to destroy all the mirrors in the world, so that you would never see yourself in them again, and our eyes are your mirrors and you destroy them, you have had heads shot open to destroy the eyes in which you saw yourself, in which you judged yourself, just as you are, irremediably … Do my eyes trouble you, brother? Look me in the face, drop all the documents manufactured by our machine for crushing men. I do not reproach you with anything, I assess all the wrong you have done, but I see all your solitude and I think of tomorrow.

“Are we going to have war?” Sacha asked in the same unemotional voice. “Probably.” Sacha’s face barely lit up with a restrained smile. Kondratiev smiled broadly. He thought: Don’t say a word, lad. I know. The enemy first. “Do you need any books?” “Yes, Ivan Nicolayevich. I want German books on tank tactics … We shall have to meet superior tactics …” “But our morale will be superior …” “Right,” said Sacha dryly. “I will try to get the books for you … Good luck, Sacha.” “Good luck to you too,” the young man said.

The group entered a sort of drawing room and buffet in one. Two heavily framed pictures faced each other from cream-colored walls, on either side of the edibles: one represented Marshal Klimentii Efremovich Voroshilov on a rearing charger, his naked saber pointing to a murky spot on the horizon; red flags surrounded by bayonets hurried to overtake him under a sky of dark clouds. The horse was painted with extraordinary care, the nostrils and the dark eye, to which a highlight lent animation, were even more successfully rendered than the details of the saddle; the rider had a round, slightly foreshortened head which might have come out of a popular picture book; but the stars on his collar glittered. The other large portrait showed the Chief, in a white tunic, delivering a speech from a platform, and he was pure painted wood, his smile a grimace, the platform looked like an empty buffet, the Chief like a Caucasian waiter saying, in his pungent accent: “Nothing left, citizen …” On the other hand, the real buffet gleamed white and opulent, with caviar, Volga sturgeons, smoked salmon, glazed eels, game, fruits from the Crimea and Turkestan. “Gifts of our native soil,” Kondratiev joked cheerfully, as he went to the buffet to receive the offered glass of Tsinondali from the plump hands of a dazzled blonde. His joke, the bitterness of which no one divined, was greeted by obliging little laughs, not very loud because no one knew whether it was really permissible to laugh in the pr...

Why have I come here? Why have they come here? Because we are trained to obedience. Nothing is left of us but obedience. They do not know it yet. They do not suspect that my obedience is deadly. Everything that I say to them, even if it is as true as the whiteness of snow, becomes spectral and false because of obedience. I speak, they listen, some of them perhaps try to understand me, and we do not exist: we obey. A voice within him answered: To obey is still to exist. And he continued the debate: It is to exist as numbers and machines … He went on delivering the prepared speech. He saw Russians with shaved heads, the strong race which we formed by freeing the serfs, then by breaking their will, then by teaching them to resist us unendingly, thereby creating within them a new will, despite ourselves and against ourselves.

The Chief said: “Do you know that you have been denounced? That you are accused of treason?” “Naturally! What should all those vermin do but denounce me? That’s what they live on. They gobble denunciations day and night …” “What they affirm seems not unlikely …” “Of course! They know how to cook these things up. In our day what is easier? But whatever stinking nonsense they may have sent you …” “I know. I have gone into it. A piece of stupidity, or worse, in Spain … You were wrong to get yourself mixed up in it, there’s no doubt of that … I know better than anyone how many vile things and stupid things have been done there… That fool of a prosecutor wanted to have you arrested … Once let them get started and they’d arrest all Moscow. He is a brute we shall have to get rid of someday. A sort of maniac.

And now? You let me off after what I came here to say to you? Are you trying to make a fool of me? Am I not going to disappear at the first corner I come to after I leave here? It is too late to restore our confidence, you have killed too many of us, I no longer believe in you, I don’t want any of your missions which turn out to be traps! You will never forget what I have said to you, and if you let me off today, it will be to order my arrest six months from now, when remorse and suspicion have gone to your head … “No, Yossif, I thank you for granting me life, I believe in you, I came here to find my salvation, you are great despite everything, you are sometimes blind when you strike, you are perfidious, you are eaten by bloody jealousies, but you are still the leader of the Revolution, we have no one but you, I thank you.”

He squeezed her into a corner of the bench, knee to knee, put his arm around her waist, looked her up and down with eyes that were like a fine stallion’s. But what Xenia said froze him. He drew away. And, severely: “Xeniuchka, don’t do anything foolish. Keep out of this business. If Rublev has been arrested, then he is guilty. If he has confessed, you cannot make a denial for him. If he is guilty, he no longer exists for anyone. That is my point of view, and there is no other.” Xenia was already looking for someone else to help her. Sukhov took her hand. The contact aroused such intense disgust in her that she suppressed it and remained inert. Was I mad that I thought of him to save a Rublev? “Are you leaving so soon, Xeniuchka, you’re not angry, are you?” “What an idea! I’m busy. No, don’t come with me.” You are nothing but a brute, Sukhov, just fit to turn out poems for rotary presses. Your loud linen waistcoat is grotesque, your double crepe-rubber soles give me the horrors. Xenia was refreshed by her irritation. “Taxi … Anywhere … Bois de Boulogne … No, Buttes-Chaumont …”

The only piece of furniture in his office was a bare table, littered with papers which were turning yellow like dead leaves. The open windows gave onto the fields. At the other end of the room a portrait of the Chief contemplated a sooty samovar perched on the stove. Under it slumped sacks, piled one on another like exhausted animals and not one containing the prescribed amount of seed. It was contrary to the instructions of the regional Directorate for Kolkhozes, and Kostia, checking the weight of the sacks, emphasized the fact with a sneer. “It’s not worth putting a crick in my back to find out whether somebody’s been sending out short-weight sacks, Yefim Bogdanovich! If you think the muzhiks won’t know it just because they haven’t a pair of scales! You don’t know them, the devils, they can weigh a sack by looking at it — and you’ll see what a howl they’ll set up …”

Father Guerassim said nothing until almost the end, then he spoke in a veiled voice, full of implications: “Are you quite sure, Citizen Secretary, that there is no sabotage at the bottom of this?” Nettled, the secretary answered: “I guarantee it, Citizen Administering the Cult! Gasoline deliveries are behind, that is all.” “In your place, I would not guarantee it, Citizen Secretary, for God alone probes men’s consciences and hearts.” His repartee roused a hearty laugh. “Isn’t he getting to be a little too influential?” the representative of Security whispered, uncomfortably caught between two directives, one of which prescribed that the clergy should be permitted to acquire no political influence, the other ordering the cessation of religious persecution. “Judge for yourself,” answered the Party secretary, also in a whisper. Kostia increased their embarrassment by emphatically stating: “The Comrade Administering the Cult is our real organizer today.”

“Maria, listen to me, Maria, it’s really true. Maria, I love you.” She did not move, her hands were crossed under her head. He heard her regular breathing. She said nothing for a time, then answered calmly: “That’s fine, Kostia. We can make a good solid couple.” A sort of anguish seized him, he overcame it and swallowed his saliva. He did not know what to say or to do. A moment passed. The sky was magnificently bright. Kostia said: “I knew a Maria in Moscow; she worked underground, building the subway. She came to a sad end, which she didn’t deserve. Her nerves weren’t strong enough. When I remember her, I think of her as Maria the Unhappy. I want you to be Maria the Happy. You shall be.” “I don’t believe in happiness during transition periods,” said Maria. “We will work together. We will see life. We will fight. That is enough.”