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

by Victor Serge

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.

State and Revolution

The Revolution Betrayed

It is easy to underestimate the literary accomplishment of a writer the bulk of whose work is not literary.

Vera Figner (1852–1942), whose memoirs relate her twenty years of solitary confinement in a tsarist prison,

Hitler versus Stalin,

“Problems no longer have their former beautiful

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.”

How shall one live? How can I make sense of my own life? How can life be made better for those who are oppressed? — he honored by his lucidity,

English-language readers of Serge today have to think themselves back to a time when most people accepted that the course of their lives would be determined by history rather than psychology, public rather than private crises.

Was your life determined by history or psychology?

the couple was to spend the rest of the decade, in the words of their second-generation political-exile son, commuting “in quest of their daily bread and of good libraries…

“I think that if anyone had asked me at the age of twelve, ‘What is life?’ (and I often asked it of myself), I would have replied, ‘I do not know, but I can see that it means “Thou shalt think, thou shalt struggle, thou shalt be hungry.”’”

To read Serge’s memoirs is to be brought back to an era that seems very remote today in its introspective energies and passionate intellectual quests and code of self-sacrifice and immense hope: an era in which the twelve-year-olds of cultivated parents might normally ask themselves “What is life?” Serge’s cast of mind was not, for that time, precocious. It was the household culture of several generations of voraciously well-read idealists, many from the Slavic countries — the children of Russian literature, as it were. Staunch believers in science and human betterment, they were to provide the troops for many of the radical movements of the first third of the twentieth century; and were to be used, disillusioned, betrayed, and, if they happened to live in the Soviet Union, put to death. In his memoirs Serge reports his friend Pilnyak saying to him in 1933: “There isn’t a single thinking adult in this country who hasn’t thought that he might get shot.”

Il faut pas faire désesperer Billancourt.”)

As if to confirm the anxiety on the left, those who had no problem denouncing the Soviet Union seemed to be precisely those who had no qualms about being racist or anti-Semitic or contemptuous of the poor; illiberals, who had never heard the siren call of idealism or been moved to any active sympathy with the excluded and the persecuted.

“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.

Fiction, for Serge, is truth — the truth of self-transcendence, the obligation to give voice to those who are mute or have been silenced. He disdained novels of private life, most of all autobiographical novels. “Individual existences were of no interest to me — particularly my own,” he remarks in the Memoirs. In a journal entry (March 1944), Serge explains the larger reach of his idea of fictional truth:

Perhaps the deepest source is the feeling that marvelous life is passing, flying, slipping inexorably away and the desire to detain it in flight. It was this desperate feeling that drove me, around the age of sixteen, to note the precious instant, that made me discover that existence (human, “divine”) is memory. Later, with the enrichment of the personality, one discovers its limits, the poverty and the shackles of the self, one discovers that one has only one life, an individuality forever circumscribed, but which contains many possible destinies, and … mingles … with the other human existences, and the earth, the creatures, everything. Writing then becomes a quest of poly-personality, a way of living diverse destinies, of penetrating into others, of communicating with them … of escaping from the ordinary limits of the self … (Doubtless there are other kinds of writers, individualists, who only seek their own self-assertion and can’t see the world except through themselves.)

heroism and injustice in the first half of the European twentieth century,

Petrograd,

Solzhenitsyn’s historical novels are all of a piece from a literary point of view, and none the better for that.

roman à clef,

Koestler’s Darkness at Noon

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.

Stalinesque

The truth of the novelist — unlike the truth of the historian — allows for the arbitrary, the mysterious, the undermotivated. The truth of fiction replenishes: for there is much more than politics, and more than the vagaries of human feeling. The truth of fiction embodies, as in the pungent physicalness of Serge’s descriptions of people and of landscapes. The truth of fiction depicts that for which one can never be consoled, and displaces it with a healing openness to everything finite and cosmic.

“The moon, plump as a merchant’s wife, swam behind clouds, wearying of the chase.” But the moon is not to be extinguished.

Knut Hamsun, because he spoke for the hungry and loved the forest.

For a long time Romachkin had been living in solitary communion with a depressing thought.

But all the rest of the time he was obsessed by two thoughts — one rational and reassuring, the other disguised and perfidious, following its own obscure course, tenacious as decay in a tooth. The first was clearly formulated: “Why shouldn’t they retire me for just long enough to get this accursed case settled, since I seem to have made a mess of it? The Chief has shown that he is favorably disposed toward me. After all, all they have to do is send me back to the army. I can’t have offended anyone, because I have no past. Suppose I ask to be sent back to the Far East?” The second, the insidious one, murmured: “You know too much — they’re never going to believe you’ll keep your mouth shut. You will be made to disappear as your predecessors disappeared. Your predecessors went through all this — work, clues, anxiety, doubt, leaves of absence, irrational flight, resignation, and return — and they were shot.”

“They assure themselves that it is better to die dishonored, murdered by the Chief, than to denounce him to the international bourgeoisie …” He almost screamed, like a man crushed in an accident: “And in that, they are right.”

“State Capitalism,”

Sometimes, at the bottom of a clear stream flowing over pebbles, a shadow appears, troubles the eye for a moment, and vanishes, leaving one wondering what it was, what mysterious life was following its destiny in those depths.

The end of their conversation was labored. Dora tried to start other subjects. “Have you been to the theater lately, Xenia? What are you reading?” Her questions found no answers. A damp, chill mist irresistibly invaded the room. It dimmed the lamp. Xenia felt a stab of cold between her shoulder blades.

men sacrificed in one way or another?”

It strikes me how much they all wanted the revolution to succeed: they the prosecutors-ted, the interrogators-ted, the leaders and followers, the ins and the outs, the past and the present

None of us any longer thought alone or acted alone: we acted, we thought, together, and always in the direction of the aspirations of innumerable masses, behind whom we felt the presence, the burning aspiration, of other yet greater masses — Proletarians of all countries, unite!

Enfeebled cohort, artfully invaded by your enemies, we still belong to you! If you could be cured, were it by red-hot iron, or replaced, it would be worth our lives. Incurable, and, at present, irreplaceable. Nothing remains for us, then, but to go on serving nevertheless, and, if we are murdered, to submit.

But the words that arranged themselves in his mind were so serious that they killed his laughter and made him screw up his face like a man who tries to raise a weight too heavy for his muscles.

and, in his soul, a will as tough as knotted roots in a rock crevice.

In this present, which was the only reality, he no longer distinguished between himself and the country which — as big as centuries-old England — lies three quarters in Europe and one quarter in an Asia of plains and deserts still furrowed by caravan routes.

“All is ours!” he said, sincerely, at public meetings of the Railwaymen’s Club, and he could easily have substituted “All is mine,” since he was only vaguely aware where “I” ended and “we” began. (The “I” belongs to the Party, the “I” is of value only inasmuch as, through the Party, it incarnates the new collectivity; yet, since it incarnates it powerfully and consciously, the “I,” in the name of the “we,” possesses the world.) Makeyev could not have worked it out theoretically. In practice, he never felt the slightest doubt.

taken you out behind the station and put a bullet

always cool. They were glad to see each other; they remained standing, face to face, their hands

“They live by the most enormous and most revolting lie history has known since the cheat of Christianity — a lie which contains a great deal of truth … They call their completed revolution to witness, and it’s true that it is completed; they fly the red flag, and so they appeal to the strongest and rightest instinct of the masses; they catch men by their faith, and then cheat them out of their faith, turn it into an instrument of power. Their most terrible strength lies in the fact that they themselves believe they are continuing the Revolution, while they are serving a new counterrevolution, a counterrevolution such as has never existed before, and set up in the very rooms where Lenin worked … 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.’

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.

“I’d like to see you in my place, old man — yes, that’s something I’d like to see. Old Russia is a swamp — the farther you go, the more the ground gives, you sink in just when you least expect to … And then, the human rubbish! … To remake the hopeless human animal will take centuries. I haven’t got centuries to work with, not I … Well, what’s the latest news?” “It’s execrable. Three fronts barely

Without even an explicit order, he built up a complicated structure of false hypotheses and bits of fact, spread a net of tortuous dialectic over the laboriously worked-up declarations of a score of defendants, took it upon himself to dictate the implacable sentence which his superiors hesitated to communicate to him, delayed the transmission of the petitions for reprieve

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 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 has taught them a more profound hatred and dissimulation, so dangerous that they are even capable of taking refuge in a temporary inactivity. Juridically innocent, they may have a feeling of impunity, believe that they are safe from the sword of justice. They prowl around us like hungry jackals at twilight, they are sometimes among us, hardly betray themselves by a look.

As Pakhomov was in Security, he lived in the most comfortable room (requisitioned) in the best of the five houses. It stood two thirds of a mile away, in front of the hamlet’s three fir trees. The only representative of the government in a region almost as extensive as a state of old Europe, he was decidedly well off: among his possessions were a sofa, a samovar, a chessboard, an accordion, some odd volumes of Lenin, last month’s papers, tobacco, vodka. What more does a man need?

from his shoulder — a rifle which is good for