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

The Case of Comrade Tulayev (New York Review Books Classics) | Victor Serge | Not to be missed-truly one of a kind.

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The Case of Comrad...

	The Case of Comrade Tulayev (New York Review Books Classics) Victor Serge NYRB Classics, 2004 - 400 pages average customer review:based on 11 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

One cold Moscow night, Comrade Tulayev, a high government official, is shot dead on the street, and the search for the killer begins. In this panoramic vision of the Soviet Great Terror, the investigation leads all over the world, netting a whole series of suspects whose only connection is their innocence?at least of the crime of which they stand accused. But The Case of Comrade Tulayev, unquestionably the finest work of fiction ever written about the Stalinist purges, is not just a story of a totalitarian state. Marked by the deep humanity and generous spirit of its author, the legendary anarchist and exile Victor Serge, it is also a classic twentieth-century tale of risk, adventure, and unexpected nobility to set beside Ernest Hemingway's For Whom the Bell Tolls and André Malraux's Man's Fate.

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The Eternal Exile

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 little blue flame from under fire-blackened ruins. The examiners herded along a motley crew of prisoners, all exhausted, all desperate, all despairing, all innocent in the old legal meaning of the word, all suspect and guilty in many ways; but it was in vain that the examiners herded them along, the examiners always ended up in some fantastic impasse."

Each of the major figures thus framed gets a chapter to himself in Serge's novel. Some of these chapters, such as the ones on party boss Artyem Makeyev ("To Build Is to Perish") and the character known only as Deportee Ryzhik ("The Brink of Nothing"), almost rise to the level of poetry. Makeyev is one of those talentless people who rise to the top through sheer consistency and brute strength. One day, he is visited by an old comrade, who for the first time plants the seeds of doubt in his friend's mind:

"Artyemich, I have been thinking things over. Our plans are 50 to 60 percent impossible to carry out. To carry them out to the extent of the remaining 40 per cent, the real wages of the working class will have to be reduced below the level they reached under the Imperial Government [i..e., the Tsar]--far below the present level even in backward capitalist countries... Have you thought about that? I fear not. In six months at most, we will have to declare war on the peasants and begin shooting them down--as sure as two and two makes four...."

As he goes backstage at a Moscow theater, Makeyev is picked up by the security services and whisked off, uncomprehending.

At the beginning of his chapter, Ryzhik is a prisoner in exile in a tiny hamlet in a godforsaken part of Siberia:

"Incomparable dawns rose for Ryzhik from the profound indifference of desert lands. He lived in the last of the five houses which made up the hamlet of Dyra (Dirty Hole), at the junction of two icy rivers lost in solitude. The houses were built of unhewn logs which had come down in the spring drives. The landscape had neither bounds nor landmarks. At first, when he still wrote letters, Ryzhik had named the place the Brink of Nothing ... He felt that he was at the extreme limit of the human world, at the very verge of an immense tomb. Most of the letters he wrote never reached any destination, of course, and none came from anywhere. To write from here was to shout into the emptiness which he sometimes did, to hear his own voice...."

Even so, the long arm of Stalin's prosecutors reaches him as a possible person to frame for the Tulayev murder, and he is whisked off to Moscow. He escapes having to admit his guilt only by cleverly going on a hunger strike unknown to the guards. He slowly feeds all his meals to the toilet until he is too weak to confess to anything and escapes further interrogation by his suicide.

In the end, three of Stalin's former associates are framed and executed. After a candid confrontation with the whimsical Stalin, one suspect is assigned to supervise a gold extraction operation in Siberia. As in the French Revolution, even the prosecutors and their stooges are picked off one by one and ground up in the mills of what passed for justice during those perilous times.

You will not find Victor Serge filed under Russian literature. You will not find him under French literature. You are not likely to find him at all unless you are extraordinarily fortunate. Reading The Case of Comrade Tulayev has whetted my appetite to hunt down other works by this most elusive of writers.

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Not to be missed-truly one of a kind.

This book is amazing for its ability to communicate the intimate thoughts of the characters and employ beautiful prose to describe the physical settings in which the action takes place, without abandoning the larger narrative. I loved it and would recommend it to anyone with an interest in Soviet history or literature. I read it after reading several other books on the period, and felt that they were an excellent preparation for this one (The Unquiet Ghost - Hochschild, Stalin: The Court of the Red Tsar - Montefiore, The Gulage Archipeligo), but even without the background this is a fantastic read.

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A Russian classic you probalby haven't read

A voracious reader I thought I finished the Russian classics when I completed Cancer Ward and the First Circle having devoured Crime and Punishment and War and Peace years before. Not so . Victor Serge has it all :the prose of Tolstoy, the impending doom of Dosteyesky and the currency of the Stalin era. Don't miss this one. FPB Ann Arbor

A Great Twenthieth Century Work of Fiction

I can only echo the five star reviews already on this list. I first read Arthur Koestler's "Darkness at Noon" 40 years ago and it made a profound impression on me. I re-read it this year for a book club and still found it powerful if somewhat dated. "The Case of Comrade Tulayev" is a greater book. I have read a fair amount about the early Soviet Union, including Stephen Cohen's brilliant biography of Nicholas Bukharin and Bukharin's own fiction written in prison. Victor Serge ranks at the very top of European writers. No one who is the least interested in this era can afford not to have read him. He is the equal of Vassily Grossman, who's "Life and Fate" is also essential 20th century testimony.

Serge penetrates in the most vivid manner the society in which the purges took place and the outward behavior and inner workings of the players' minds and their rationalizing philosophy. Highest possible praise for one of the heros of modern Russia and a truly great writer.

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Brilliant Appalling Account

A repressive shadow looms over the destiny of these men of all age, beliefs, and ranks ... insidious terror creeps into those innocent minds and their lives ends before they know it or before their hearts stopped beating. Some vainly fight back, some don't, but all are hopeless.
The implacable and revengeful wave of the Soviet rotten bureaucracy destroys the life of innocent men. When tyranny and deception shutters the greatest hope of and for humanity, one ought to question if it had to be that way.

reviews: page 1, 2, 3

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