The Case of Comrade Tulayev

To begin with, Victor Serge (1890-1947) is an anomaly. He is a Russian revolutionary and political agitator who just happened to be born in Belgium and who wrote most of his books in French. He is not widely read today because most of his books fall under the heading of politics, yet he wrote seven novels of which THE CASE OF COMRADE TULAYEV is perhaps the best known. He comes from a family of socialists, one of whom was involved in the assassination of Tsar Alexander II in 1881. During the Russian Revolution, he took part in the siege of Petrograd and knew Lenin personally. (His wife was one of Lenin's stenographers.) He ran afoul of Stalin, who had him arrested for being a Trotsykite. After years of imprisonment, he was one of the few writers ever released by Stalin in response to international pressure from André Gide and other European cultural figures. Later, he was also "excommunicated" by the exiled Leon Trotsky as an anarchist. Always on the edge of poverty and now on the outs with the Communist Party in all its many flavors, he wound up in Mexico after Trotsky's assassination and worked on a biography of the slain leader. In the end, the high altitude proved too much for his heart, and he died in 1947 while in the back seat of a Mexico City taxicab. THE CASE OF COMRADE TULAYEV has been reprinted in the excellent Willard R. Trask translation by New York Review Books, with an introduction by Susan Sontag. Although there have been other novels about Stalin's purges of the 1930s--most notably Arthur Koestler's DARKNESS AT NOON--nothing comes close to Serge's treatment. His story begins with two bachelors in Moscow who share adjacent rooms in an apartment building. On a sudden whim, one of them, the fusty Romachkin, buys a pistol and takes to carrying it around on his nocturnal rambles through the city. One day, just outside the Kremlin, he is shocked to find himself within a few feet of Stalin himself. Realizing that he could have taken out and shot the dictator before his bodyguards could intervene, he goes home and hands the gun over to his neighbor, Kostia, who also takes to walking around at night with it. When Kostia sees one of the more repressive members of the Central Committee, one Comrade Tulayev, getting out of a chauffeured limo to walk the extra few blocks for a clandestine tryst with his mistress, he shoots and kills him and gets away. In the chapters that follow, the murder of Comrade Tulayev, whom we never really get to know, extends like a ripple through the upper levels of the Russian leadership. It is said that the character of Tulayev was inspired by Sergei Kirov, who was reportedly murdered at the instigation of Stalin. As in the case with Kirov, Stalin puts unrelenting pressure on his political bosses to find the culprit or culprits, even if they have to manufacture them: "The case ramified in every direction, linked itself to hundreds of others, mingled with them, disappeared in them, re-emerged like a dangerous lit

in time the mind will make chains snap." Victor Serge. Victor Serge's novel "The Case of Comrade Tulayev" is set in the Soviet Union in the late 1930s, long before "the chains wore out." It is a classic and haunting look at Soviet society during an era of party purges, show trials, and executions that deserves a place of honor on any reading list that also includes Arthur Koestler's "Darkness at Noon", George Orwell's "1984" and Vasily Grossman's "Forever Flowing" . Serge, born in Brussels in 1890 to Russian emigre parents, returned to Russia early in 1919 in order to support the newly created Soviet Union. He served as both a writer and journalist. However, Serge was one of the first of the old-line revolutionaries to oppose Stalin's concentration of power. He was arrested, expelled from the party, released, and arrested again. Finally, in 1936 after a public campaign by leading European political and literary figures, Serge was released and deported to France. He eventually found his way to Mexico where he died, penniless, in 1947. The Case of Comrade Tulayev mirrors in some respects the murder of Sergei Kirov that set off Stalin's first great purge beginning in 1934. The story begins with the almost accidental murder of a leading member of the Central Committee, Comrade Tulayev by a disaffected clerk. The Chief (Serge's allusion to Stalin) immediately commences a round of purges, investigations, show trials and executions. The rest of the book takes us on a chapter-by-chapter account of a group of individuals caught up in the aftermath of the murder. Each individual represents a different component of Soviet society, from the lowly clerk to the high-ranking party functionary to the `oppositionist' already living in exile in Siberia. Serge paints an intimate, vivid picture of each individual as they meet their fate. Like a storm at seas these people can see the storm on the horizon but they all seem powerless to either flea. They are swept up and prepared for show trials. The only option available to each is their ability to fight the omnipotent forces that want them to admit to crimes they did not commit and to implicate others in these same acts. The power of Serge's writing lies in his examination of the inner lives of his protagonists and their reasons for either accepting this fate or fighting to retain some shred of inner dignity. The outcome of each protagonist's story provides a cross section of human responses ranging from cringing supplication to death-defying resistance. The story of Ryzshik, the exiled oppositionist is particularly haunting. As with the others, he knows what is expected of him but he chooses to starve himself to death rather than confess to some non-existent crime. The Case of Comrade Tulayev is most often compared to Koestler's Darkness at Noon. Although the comparison is very apt there are some critical differences in approach that bear mentioning. Darkness at Noon focuses on the self

Generally, historical novels leave me dissatisfied as real history provides enough dramatic tension. However, every once in a while a novel comes along that illuminates a historical situation better than a history and begs for some attention. Victor Serge's political parable falls in that category. His subject is a fictional treatment of the Great Terror highlighted by the Moscow Trials in the Soviet Union of the 1930's. This Great Terror liquidated almost the whole generation of those who made the October Revolution of 1917 and administered the early Soviet state as well as countless other victims. Adding a personal touch, as an official journalist of the Communist International Serge knew many of that generation. The political and psychological devastation created by this catastrophe is certainly worthy of novelistic treatment. In fact it may be the only way to truly comprehend its effects. Serge is particularly well placed to tell this story since he was a long time member of the Trotsky-led Left Opposition in the Soviet Union and barely got out of there at the height of the Terror as a result of an international campaign of fellow writers to gain his freedom. The insights painfully learned from his experiences in the Soviet Union place his book in the first rank. The plot line is rather simple- a disaffected Russian youth of indeterminate politics, as an act of hubris, kills a high level Soviet official in the then Stalinized Soviet Union and sets in motion a whirlwind of governmental reaction. As if to mock everything the Russian Revolution had stood until that time this youth ultimately goes free while a whole series of oppositionalists of various tendencies, officials investigating the crime and other innocent, accidental figures are made to `confess' or accept responsibility for the crime with their lives in the name of defending the Revolution (read Stalinist rule). While the plot line is simple the political and personal consequences are not, especially for anyone interested in drawing the lessons of what went wrong with the Russian Revolution. The central question Serge poses is this- How can one set of Communists persecute and ultimately kill another set of Communist who it is understood by all parties stand for the defense of the same revolution? Others such as Arthur Koestler in Darkness at Noon, Andre Malraux in Man's Fate and George Orwell in several of his books have taken up this same theme of political destruction with mixed success and ambiguous conclusions. In any case, aside from the tales of bureaucratic obfuscation in turning a simple criminal matter into a political vendetta which Serge treats masterfully the answer does not resolve itself easily. What Serge concludes, based I believe on his own personal trial of fire in that same period, and makes his novel more valuable than the others listed above is that one must defend ones revolutionary integrity at all costs. His personal conduct bears this out. The hi

This book is a forgotten masterpiece! Its author, Victor Serge, was born in Belgium in 1890, of exiled russian parents, become an anarchist, went to revolutionary Russia in 1919 where he fought for the Bolsheviks, then became a left oppositionist to Stalin, being expelled from the Party, emprisioned and deported to Central Asia, then expelled from the Soviet Union in 1936 as a result of an international campaign. He died in Mexico in 1947. Of his many works, this novel is widely regarded as his fictional masterpiece, considered by many as the finest piece of literature ever written about the stalinist purges. This is indeed a wonderfully conceived work, with a structure that in a certain sense seems to mirror conditions under Stalin's reign: Tulayev, a member of the Central Committee of the USSR Communist Party is murdered by mere chance, in the first chapter, by an anonymous disgruntled moscovite youth. Then, in suceeding chapters, members of government, party funcionaries, and known oppositionists (all of them entirely innoced of this particular crime,) are charged of being part of a wide conspiracy, arrested and interrogated. As the action unfolds, the diverse independent characters become ever more connected, at least in the perpective of the officials in charge of the investigation, not a few of which end up also arrested as conspirators... After a number of life sentences for the supposed plot are passed on and duly executed, the true culprit discover by change, in the last chapter, the tragic dimensions his act has produced. The way the main investigator of the case deals with the anonymous letter he receives from the murderer is a telling parable of a totalitariam state contempt for the truth. All this evolved story is written with such a superb wit, and even brilliancy at times, that the reading of this book is made into an indelible experience.