No Pasarán!

by Pete Ayrton

  The situation in Spain must have appeared so serious that the Chief received him on the day he arrived. Kondratiev waited only a few moments in the spacious ante-room, from whose huge windows, which flooded the room with white light, he could see a Moscow boulevard, trams, a double row of trees, people, windows, roofs, a building in course of demolition, the green domes of a spared church... ‘Go in, please... ’

  A white room, bare as a cold sky, high-ceilinged, with no decoration except a portrait of Vladimir Ilich, larger than life, wearing a cap, hands in his pockets, standing in the Kremlin courtyard. The room was so huge that at first Kondratiev thought it empty; but behind the table at the far end of it, in the whitest, most desert, most solitary corner of that closed and naked solitude, someone rose, laid down a fountain pen, emerged from emptiness; someone crossed the carpet, which was the pale grey of shadowed snow, someone came to Kondratiev holding out both hands, someone, He, the Chief, the comrade of earlier days – was it real?

  ‘Glad to see you, Ivan, how are you?’

  Reality triumphed over the stunning effect of reality. Kondratiev pressed the two hands which were held out to him, held them, and real warm tears gathered under his eyelids, only to dry instantly, his throat contracted. The thunderbolt of a great joy electrified him:

  ‘And you, Yossif?... You... How glad I am to see you... How young you still are... ’

  The short greying hair still bristled vigorously; the broad, low, deeply lined forehead, the small russet eyes, the stiff moustache, still held such a compact charge of life that the flesh-and-blood man shouldered away the image presented by his innumerable portraits. He smiled, and there were smiling lines around his nose, under his eyes, he emanated a reassuring warmth – would he be as warm and kind as he looked? But how was it that all the mysterious dramas, the trials, the terrible sentences pondered in the Political Bureau had not exhausted him more?

  ‘You too, Vania,’ he said (yes – it was the old voice). ‘You’ve stood up well, you haven’t aged much.’

  They looked at each other, relaxed. How many years, old man! Prague, London, Cracow years ago, that little room in Cracow where we argued so fiercely all one evening about the expropriations in the Caucasus; then we went and drank good beer in a Keller, with Romanesque vaulting, under a monastery... The processions in ’seventeen, the congresses, the Polish campaign, the hotels in the little towns we captured, where fleas devoured our exhausted revolutionary councils. Their common memories came back in such a crowd that not one became dominant: all were present, but silently and unobtrusively, re-creating a friendship beyond expression, a friendship which had never known words. The Chief reached into the pocket of his tunic for his pipe. Together they walked across the carpet, towards the tall bay windows at the farther end of the room, through the whiteness...

  ‘Well, Vania, what’s the situation now, down there? Speak plainly, you know me.’

  ‘The situation,’ Kondratiev began with a discouraged look and that gesture of the hands which seems to let something drop, ‘the situation... ’

  The Chief seemed not to have heard this beginning. His head bowed, his fingers tamping tobacco into the bowl of his short pipe, he went on:

  ‘You know, brother, veterans like you, members of the old Party, must tell me the whole truth... the whole truth. Otherwise, who can I get it from? I need it, I sometimes feel myself stifling. Everyone lies and lies and lies! From top to bottom they all lie, it’s diabolical... Nauseating... I live on the summit of an edifice of lies – do you know that? The statistics lie, of course. They are the sum total of the stupidities of the little officials at the base, the intrigues of the middle stratum of administrators, the imaginings, the servility, the sabotage, the immense stupidity of our directing cadres... When they bring me those extracts of mathematics, I sometimes have to hold myself down to keep from saying, Cholera! The plans lie, because nine times out of ten they are based on false data; the Plan executives lie because they haven’t the courage to say what they can do and what they can’t do; the most expert economists lie because they live in the moon, they’re lunatics, I tell you! And then I feel like asking people why, even if they say nothing, their eyes lie. Do you know what I mean?’

  Was he finding excuses for himself? He lighted his pipe furiously, put his hands in his pockets, squared his head and shoulders, stood firmly on the carpet in the harsh light. Kondratiev looked at him, studying him sympathetically, yet with a certain basic suspicion, considering. Should he risk it? He risked an unemphatic:

  ‘Isn’t it a little your own fault?’

  The Chief shook his head; the minute wrinkles of a warm smile flickered about his nose, under his eyes...

  ‘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 holding out – a push, and collapse... They haven’t even dug trenches in front of essential positions... ’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Lack of spades, bread, plans, officers, discipline, ammunition, of...’

  ‘I see. Like the beginning of ’eighteen with us, eh?’

  ‘Yes... On the surface... But without the Party, without Lenin’ – Kondratiev hesitated for a fraction of a second, but it must have been perceptible – ‘without you... And it’s not a beginning, it’s an end – the end.’

  ‘The experts have prophesied it – three to five weeks, don’t they say?’

  ‘It can last a long time, like a man taking a long time to die. It can be over to-morrow.’

  ‘I need,’ said the Chief, ‘to keep the resistance going for a few weeks.’

  Kondratiev did not answer. He thought: ‘That is cruel. What’s the use?’

  The Chief seemed to divine his thought:

  ‘We are certainly worth that,’ he resumed. ‘And now: Our Sormovo tanks?’

  ‘Nothing to boast about. Armour plate passable...’ Kondratiev remembered that the builders had been shot for sabotage, and felt a momentary embarrassment. ‘Motors inadequate. Breakdowns in combat as high as thirty-five per cent... ’

  ‘Is that in your written report?’

  ‘Yes.’ Embarrassment. Kondratiev was thinking that he had laid the foundation for another trial, that his ‘thirty-five per cent’ would burn in phosphorescent characters in brains exhausted by night-long interrogations. He resumed:

  ‘In point of defectiveness, the human matériel is the worst... ’

  ‘So I’ve been told. What is your explanation?’

  ‘Perfectly simple. We fought, you and I, under other conditions. The machine pulverizes man. You know I am not a coward. Well, I wanted to see – I got into one of those machines, a No. 4, with three first-class men, a Catalan Anarchist... ’

  ‘... a Trotskyist, of course... ’

  The Chief had spoken with a smile, out of a cloud of smoke; his russet eyes twinkled through almost closed lids.

  ‘Very likely – I didn’t have time to go into it... You wouldn’t have either... Two olive-skinned peasants, Andalusians, wonderful marksmen, like our Siberians or Letts used to be... Well, there we are, rolling along an excellent road, I try but can’t imagine what it would be like if we were on bad terrain... There are four of us inside there, dripping sweat from head to foot, stifling, in the darkness, the noise, the stench of gasoline, we want to vomit, we’re cut off from the world, if only it were over! There was panic in our guts, we weren’t fighters any longer, we were poor half-crazed beasts squeezed together in a black, suffocating box... Instead of feeling protected and powerful, you feel reduced to nothing... ’

  ‘The remedy?’

  ‘Better planned machines, special units, trained units. Just what we have not had in Spain.’

>   ‘Our planes?’

  ‘Good, except for the old models... It was a mistake to unload so many old models on them... ’ The Chief gave a decided nod of approval. ‘Our B104 is inferior to the Messerschmitt, outclassed in speed.’

  ‘The maker was sabotaging.’

  Kondratiev hesitated before answering, for he had thought a great deal on the subject, convinced that the disappearance of the Aviation Experiment Centre’s best engineers had unquestionably resulted in poorer quality products.

  ‘Perhaps not... Perhaps it is only that German technique is still superior...’

  The Chief said:

  ‘He was sabotaging. It has been proved. He confessed it.’

  The word confessed produced a distinct feeling of discomfort between them. The Chief felt it so clearly that he turned away, went to the table for a map of the Spanish fronts, and began asking detailed questions which could not really have been of any significance to him. At the point which things had reached, what could it matter to him whether Madrid’s University City was more or less well supplied with artillery? On the other hand, he did not discuss the shipping of the gold reserves, probably having been already informed of it by special messenger. Kondratiev passed over the subject. The Chief made no reference to the changes in personnel suggested in Kondratiev’s report... On a clock in the faraway bay window, Kondratiev read that the audience had already lasted more than an hour. The Chief walked up and down, he had tea brought, answered a secretary, ‘Not until I call you... ’ What was he expecting? Kondratiev became tensely expectant too. The Chief, his hands in his pockets, took him to the bay window from which there was a view of the roofs of Moscow. There was only a pane of glass between them and the city, the pale sky.

  ‘And here at home, in this magnificent and heart-rending Moscow, what is not going right, do you think? What isn’t gelling? Eh?’

  ‘But you just said it, brother. Everyone lies and lies and lies. Servility, in short. Whence, a lack of oxygen. How build Socialism without oxygen?’

  ‘Hmm... And is that all, in your opinion?’

  Kondratiev saw himself driven to the wall. Should he speak? Should he risk it? Should he wriggle out of it like a coward? The tension in him prevented him from reading the Chief’s face clearly, though it was only two feet away. Despite himself he was very direct, and therefore very clumsy. In a voice that was emphatic though he tried to make it casual:

  ‘The older generation is getting scarce... ’

  The Chief put aside the outrageous allusion, pretending not to notice it:

  ‘On the other hand, the younger generation is rising. Energetic, practical, American style... It’s time the older generation had a rest...’

  ‘May they rest with the saints’ – the words of the Chant for the Dead in the liturgy...

  Tensely, Kondratiev changed his tack:

  ‘Yes, the younger generation, of course... Our youth is our pride... ’ (‘My voice rings false, now I’m lying too...’)

  The Chief smiled curiously, as if he were laughing at someone who was not present. And then, in the most natural tone:

  ‘Do you think I have many faults, Ivan?’

  They were alone in the harsh white light, with the whole city before them, though not a sound from it reached them. In a sort of spacious courtyard below and some distance away, between a squat church with dilapidated towers and a little red-brick wall, Georgian horsemen were at sabre practice, galloping from one end of the courtyard to the other; about half-way they stooped almost to the ground to impale a piece of white cloth on their sabres...

  ‘It is not for me to judge you,’ said Kondratiev uncomfortably. ‘You are the Party.’ He observed that the phrase was well received. ‘Me, I’m only an old militant’ – with a sadness that had a shade of irony – ‘one of those who need a rest... ’

  The Chief waited like an impartial judge or an indifferent criminal. Impersonal, as real as things.

  ‘I think,’ said Kondratiev, ‘that you were wrong in “liquidating” Nicolai Ivanovich.’

  Liquidating: the old word that, out of both shame and cynicism, was used under the Red terror for ‘execute.’The Chief took it without flinching, his face stone.

  ‘He was a traitor. He admitted it. Perhaps you don’t believe it?’

  Silence. Whiteness.

  ‘It is hard to believe.’

  The Chief twisted his face into a mocking smile. His shoulders hunched massively, his brow darkened, his voice became thick.

  ‘Certainly... We have had too many traitors ... conscious or unconscious... no time to go into the psychology of it ... I’m no novelist.’ A pause. ‘I’ll wipe out every one of them, tirelessly, mercilessly, down even to the least of the least... It is hard, but it must be... Every one of them... There is the country, the future. I do what must be done. Like a machine.’

  Nothing to answer? – or to cry out? Kondratiev was on the point of crying out. But the Chief did not give him time. He returned to a conversational tone:

  ‘And in Spain – are the Trotskyists still intriguing?’

  ‘Not to the extent that some fools insist. By the way, I want to talk to you about a matter that is of no great importance but which may have repercussions ... Our people are doing some stupid and dangerous things... ’

  In a few sentences Kondratiev set forth the case of Stefan Stern. He tried to divine whether the Chief had already been told of it. Natural and impenetrable, the Chief listened attentively, made a note of the name, Stefan Stern, as if it were new to him. Was it really new to him?

  ‘Right – I’ll look into it... But about the Tulayev case, you are wrong. It was a plot.’

  ‘Ah!’

  ‘Perhaps, after all, it was a plot... ’ Kondratiev’s mind gave a halting assent s... ‘How accommodating I’m being – the devil take me!’

  ‘May I ask a question, Yossif?’

  ‘Of course.’

  The Chief’s russet eyes still had their friendly look.

  ‘Is the Political Bureau dissatisfied with me?’

  That really meant: ‘Are you dissatisfied with me, now that I have spoken to you freely?’

  ‘What answer can I give you?’ said the Chief slowly. ‘I do not know. The course of events is unsatisfactory, there is no doubt of that – but there was not much you could do about it. You were in Barcelona only a few days, so responsibility does not extend far ... When everything is going to the dogs, we have no one to congratulate, eh? Ha-ha.’

  He gave a little guttural laugh, which broke off abruptly.

  ‘And now what shall we do with you? What work do you want? Would you like to go to China? We have fine little armies there, a trifle infected with certain diseases... ’ He gave himself time to think. ‘But probably you’ve had enough of war?’

  ‘I’ve had enough of it, brother. No, thank you – so far as China is concerned, spare me that, please. Always blood, blood – I am sick of it... ’

  Precisely the words he ought not to have spoken, the words that had been in his throat since the first minute of their meeting, the weightiest words in their secret dialogue.

  ‘I see,’ said the Chief, and suddenly the bright daylight became sinister. ‘Well, what then? A job in production? In the diplomatic corps? I’ll think about it.’

  They crossed the carpet diagonally. Sleepwalkers. The Chief took Ivan Kondratiev’s hand.

  ‘I have enjoyed seeing you again, Ivan.’

  Sincere. That spark deep in the eyes, that concentrated face – the ageing of a strong man living without trust, without happiness, without human contacts, in a laboratory solitude... He went on:

  ‘Take a rest, old man. Have yourself looked after. At our age, after our lives, it has to be done. You’re right, the older generation is getting scarce.’

  ‘Do you remember when we hunted wild ducks on the tundra?’

  ‘Everything, everything, old man, I remember everything. Go and take a rest in the Caucasus. But I’ll give you a piece of ad
vice for down there: let the sanatoriums look out for themselves, and you go climb as many mountain trails as you can. That’s what I’d like to do myself’.

  Here there began, within them and between them, a secret dialogue, which they both followed by divination, distinctly: ‘Why don’t you go?’ Kondratiev suggested. ‘It would do you so much good, brother.’ – ‘Tempting, those out-of-the-way trails,’ mocked the Chief. ‘So I’ll be found one day with my head bashed in? I’m not such a fool as that – I’m still needed... ’ – ‘I pity you, Yossif, you are the most threatened, the most captive of us all... ’ – ‘I don’t want to be pitied. I forbid you to pity me. You are nothing, I am the Chief.’ They spoke none of these words: they heard them, uttered them, only in a double tête-à-tête – together corporeally and also together, incorporeally, one within the other.

  ‘Good-bye.’

  ‘Good-bye.’

  Half-way across the huge ante-room Kondratiev encountered a short man with shell-rimmed glasses, a thick, curving nose, and a heavy brief case which almost dragged along the carpet: the new Prosecutor of the Supreme Tribunal, Rachevsky. He was going in the opposite direction. They exchanged reticent greetings.

  Born in Brussels in 1890 to anti-Czarist Russian exiles, Victor Serge was directly involved in the major political conflicts of the first half of the 20th century. In 1913, he was sentenced in France to five years in prison for his alleged involvement in the robberies of the anarchist Bonnot Gang. Released from prison in 1917, Serge went to Russia to support the revolutionary movement. An early supporter of the Bolsheviks, Serge worked, after the Revolution, for the Comintern. The harsh repression by the government of the Kronstadt Uprising in 1921 confirmed Serge’s doubts about the ‘democratic deficit’ of the new regime, and from 1923 he was a member of the Left Opposition led by Trotsky. Expelled from the Communist Party in 1928, Serge was sent into internal exile and forced to leave the Soviet Union in 1936. He went to Paris, where he was the Paris correspondent of the POUM. When the Germans occupied Paris in 1940, Serge escaped south. He was able to sail on the last ship out of Marseille (André Breton and Claude Lévi-Strauss were also on board) and arrived in 1942 in Mexico City after having been imprisoned in Martinique and the Dominican Republic on the way! A firm friend of the many Republicans in exile in Mexico, Serge died in Mexico City in 1947 – without a nationality, he was buried as ‘a Spanish Republican’.