Back to the Classics #5

I read this book for the Back to the Classics Challenge 2018.

The Case of Comrade Tulayev – Victor Serge

Revolutionaries, being imperfect people, make imperfect decisions, which make imperfect political systems. The Old Bolsheviks, for example, went along with Lenin in the employment of repressive measures against the adversaries of socialism. After Lenin died, Joseph Stalin, to consolidate power,  unleashed the apparatus of repression against the Old Bolsheviks, exiling jailing torturing and killing thousands of them. The most famous novel to come out of the Stalinist purges was Darkness at Noon by Arthur Koestler. Its power comes from its concision: it focuses on the story of a high official asked to confess falsely to treason, willing to take on ignominy and nine grams of lead in his skull as his last duty to the party.

Victor Serge, an Old Bolshevik, lived through the purges in various points in the Stalinesque meat grinder – surveillance, imprisonment, uneasy release.  He lived because the regime feared the opinion of influential people in the West. Serge ended up in Paris in the late 1930s. Though this book is out of his direct and miserable experience, he writes of repression under Stalin with detachment. This novel is not the nightmare of 1984, not the angry expose of Soviet stupidity of The First Circle nor Soviet hypocrisy of Darkness at Noon. The Case of Comrade Tulayev is more realistic and yet more symbolic and more unified than the novel he wrote in different places and times, Conquered City.

The high official who oversaw purges of innocent college professors and students, Comrade Tulayev, is shot down on a Moscow street one wintry night. “You must see, nevertheless," a high official tells one of the blameless accused, "that the Party cannot admit that it is impotent before a revolver shot fired from no one knows where, perhaps from the depths of the people's soul.” As the Party is unable to ascribe anything to chance, the investigator goes on, implicating, disgracing, imprisoning, and killing hundreds of people. The real murderer, in fact, goes free, working as a clerk in a subway construction yard. The killer had acted on impulse, with gun that had fallen into his hands by sheer chance. But the Party saw the assassination as an opportunity to do in a few more enemies.

The fascination of this novel lies in its examination of officials at all levels, party members, old Bolsheviks, and suspected Trotskyists who must face repression. The Left Opposition basically shit on the bureaucratic creeps that flourished under Stalin. The toadies, like lickspittles everywhere, developed finely tuned antennae that told them which officials where in and worth cultivating and which were out, bound for the labor camps. Serge re-creates amazing atmospheres, such as that of a typical office of a suspect where people that like him can barely contain their sorrow that he will soon be arrested, but others are cowardly and craven and seem to look right through him. Various scenes are incredible, such as the old party man on his way to his Moscow trial sharing a freezing jail with boys on their way to a labor camp.

A symbolic theme of the novel is time. Serge often references relentless time and change. We may cry and stamp our feet that paranoid megalomaniacs are our leaders and sorry craps their enablers. But we still live in a world of flux. Even ordeals have their endpoints. And lots of people – like the Old Bolsheviks – keep their faith.