The Case of Comrade Tulayev

by Victor Serge

  At that moment, Gordeyev came in: stout, blond, his hair pomaded, round face, a suspicion of downy mustache, big tortoise-shell spectacles. There was something porcine about him, and with it the servile insolence of the domestic animal too well fed by its human masters.

  “I fail to understand you, Comrade Gordeyev,” the High Commissar said carelessly. “You have communicated this absurd statement to the Political Bureau? To what end?”

  Gordeyev looked offended. “But, Maxim Andreyevich,” he protested, “there is a C.C. circular which prescribes that all complaints, denunciations, and even allusions to which we are subjected shall be submitted to the P.B. Circular dated March 16 … And the Titov matter is hardly to be called absurd — it reveals a state of mind among the masses of which we should be more fully informed … I have had Titov arrested, together with a number of his acquaintances …”

  “Perhaps you have even interrogated him yourself by now?”

  The High Commissar’s mocking tone appeared to escape Gordeyev, who thought it his best tactics to appear stupid:

  “Not personally. My secretary was present at the interrogation. It is extremely interesting to trace the origins of the myths which get into circulation about us. Don’t you think so?”

  “And have you found the origin of this one?”

  “Not yet.”

  On the sixth day of the investigation, High Commissar Erchov, summoned by telephone to present himself at the General Secretariat immediately, waited in an anteroom there for thirty-five minutes. Everyone in the Secretariat knew that he was counting the minutes. At last the tall doors opened to him, he saw the Chief at his desk, before his telephones — solitary, graying, his head bowed. It was a massive head; and seen, as Erchov saw it, against the light, it looked somber. The room was large, high-ceilinged, and comfortable, but almost bare … The Chief did not raise his head, did not hold out his hand to Erchov, did not ask him to sit down. To maintain his dignity, the High Commissar advanced to the edge of the table and opened his brief case.

  “The plot?” the Chief asked, Erchov saw that his face had the concentrated look, the hard lines, of his cold rages.

  “I am inclined to accept the view that the assassination of Comrade Tulayev was the act of an isolated individual …”

  “Very efficient, your isolated individual! Remarkably well organized!”

  Erchov felt the sarcasm in the back of his neck, the place where the executioner’s bullet lodges. Could Gordeyev have sunk so low as to carry on a secret investigation of his own and then conceal the results? It would have been almost impossible. In any case, there was nothing to answer …

  The silence which followed annoyed the Chief.

  “Let us accept your view provisionally. By the decision of the Political Bureau, the case will not be closed until the criminals have been punished …”

  “Exactly what I was about to propose,” said the High Commissar, playing up.

  “Do you propose any sanctions?”

  “I have them here.”

  The sanctions filled several typewritten sheets. Twenty-five names. The Chief glanced over them.

  “You are losing your mind, Erchov,” he said angrily. “This doesn’t sound like you! Ten years for the chauffeur! When it was his duty not to leave the person entrusted to him until he had seen him safely home?”

  To the other proposals he said nothing. On the other hand, his outburst caused the High Commissar to increase all the suggested sentences. The sentry who had been warming himself at the brazier during the assassination would be sent to the Pechora labor camp for ten years instead of eight. Tulayev’s secretary and her lover, the student, would be deported — the woman to Vologda, which was mild, the student to Turgai, in the Kazakstan desert — for five years each (instead of three). As he handed the revised sheet to Gordeyev, the High Commissar allowed himself the pleasure of saying:

  “Your proposals were considered too mild, Comrade Gordeyev. I have corrected them.”

  “Thank you,” said Gordeyev, with a polite bow of his pomaded head. “For my part, I have permitted myself to take a step which you will certainly approve. I have had a list made of all persons whose antecedents might make them suspect of terrorism. So far we have found seventeen hundred names of persons still at liberty.”

  “Very interesting …”

  (He hadn’t thought that up himself, the greasy-headed stool pigeon! Perhaps the idea had come from high up, from very high up …)

  “Of these seventeen hundred persons, twelve hundred are Party members; about a hundred still hold important offices; several have repeatedly occupied positions in the immediate circle of the Chief of the Party; three are actually in Security …”

  He had spoken with assurance but without emotion, and every sentence had told. What are you doing, who are you after, you climber? You have your sights on the very heart of the Party! The High Commissar remembered that, during the trouble in Tashkent in 1914, he had fired on the mounted militia, and as a result had been imprisoned in a fortress for eighteen months … Then am I suspect? Am I one of the three “ex-terrorists,” “members of the Party,” with jobs in Security?

  “Have you informed anyone whomsoever of your researches in this direction?”

  “No, naturally not,” the pomaded head replied suavely, “certainly not. Only the General Secretary, who made the necessary arrangements for me to obtain certain dossiers from the Central Control Commission.”

  This time, the High Commissar felt definitely caught in the meshes of a net that was closing about him for no reason at all. Tomorrow or next week, on one pretext or another, they would finish the process of removing the last colleagues in whom he could trust: Gordeyev would replace them by men of his own … For years this same office had been occupied by someone else — a man whose figure and voice, whose peculiarities of speech, whose trick of clasping his hands, of frowning and holding his pen suspended over a document he was to sign, Erchov knew intimately; a man who had worked zealously and conscientiously ten or twelve hours a day … Around that obedient, skillful, and implacable man, too, the net had closed; he had struggled in its inextricable meshes, refusing to understand, to see, yet feeling more defeated day by day, growing visibly older; in a few weeks he had acquired the look of a little clerk who had taken orders all his life; he had let his subordinates make his decisions for him; he had spent his nights drinking with a little actress from the Opera, his days thinking of blowing out his brains — until the evening when they had come and arrested him … But perhaps he was actually guilty, whereas I …

  Gordeyev said:

  “I have made a selection from the list of seventeen hundred — some forty names for the present. Some of them are very highly placed. Do you care to go over it?”

  “Have it brought to me immediately,” said the High Commissar in a tone of authority, while an uncomfortable chill crept through his limbs.

  Alone in his huge office, communing with the dossiers, with suspicion, fear, power, powerlessness, the High Commissar became his simple self — Maxim Andreyevich Erchov, a man forty years old, in vigorous health, prematurely wrinkled, with puffy eyelids, a thin-lipped mouth, and uneasy eyes … His predecessors here had been Henri Grigoryevich, who had breathed the air of these offices for ten years and was executed after the trial of the Twenty-one; then Piotr Eduardovich, who had disappeared — that is to say, who was confined on the second floor of the subterranean prison under the particular supervision of an official appointed by the Political Bureau. What admission did they want from him? Piotr Eduardovich had been fighting for five months — if “fighting” was the proper term for turning gray at thirty-five and repeating “No, no, no, it is not true,” with no hope except to die in silence — unless solitary confinement had driven him mad enough to hope for anything else.

  Erchov, recalled from the Far East, where he had thought himself happily forgotten by the Personnel Service, had been offered an unparalleled promotion: High Commissar for Secu
rity in conjunction with Commissar of the People for Internal Affairs, which practically carried with it the rank of marshal — the sixth marshal — or was it the third, since three of the five had disappeared? “Comrade Erchov, the Party puts its confidence in you! I congratulate you!” The words were spoken, his hand shaken, the office (it was one of the Central Committee offices, on the same floor as the General Secretariat) was full of smiles. Unannounced, the Chief entered quickly, looked him up and down for a split second — a superior studying an inferior; then, so simply, so cordially, smiling like the others and perfectly at ease, the Chief shook Maxim Andreyevich Erchov’s hand and looked into his eyes with perfect friendliness. “A heavy responsibility, Comrade Erchov. Bear it well.” The press photographer flashed his magnesium lightning over all the smiles … Erchov had reached the pinnacle of his life, and he was afraid. Three thousand dossiers, of capital importance because they called for capital punishment, three thousand nests of hissing vipers, suddenly descended like an avalanche upon his life, to remain with him every instant. For a moment the greatness of the Chief reassured him. The Chief, addressing him as “Maxim Andreyevich” in a cordial tone, paternally advised him “to go easy with personnel, keeping the past in mind yet never failing in vigilance, to put a stop to abuses.” — “Men have been executed whom I loved, whom I trusted, men precious to the Party and the State!” he exclaimed bitterly. “Yet the Political Bureau cannot possibly review every sentence! It is up to you,” he concluded. “You have my entire confidence.” The power that emanated from him with spontaneous, human, and perfectly simple; the kindly smile, in which the russet eyes and the bushy mustache joined, attested it; it made you love him, believe in him, praise him as he was praised in the press and in official speeches, but sincerely, warmly. When the General Secretary filled his pipe, Maxim Andreyevich Erchov, High Commissar for Interior Defense, “sword of the dictatorship,” “keen and ever-wakeful eye of the Party,” “the most implacable and the most human of the faithful collaborators of the greatest Chief of all times” (these phrases had appeared in the Political Service Schools Gazette that very morning) — Maxim Andreyevich Erchov felt that he loved the man and that he feared him as one fears mystery. “No bureaucratic delays, now!” the Chief added. “Not too much paper work! Clear, up-to-date dossiers, with no official rigmarole and no missing documents — and action! Otherwise you will find yourself drowned in work.” — “An inspired directive” was the sober comment of one of the members of the Special Commission (composed of the heads of bureaus) when Erchov repeated it to them word for word.

  Nevertheless, the swarming, proliferating, overflowing, all-conquering dossiers refused to relinquish the most minor memorandums; on the contrary, they continued to swell. Thousands of cases had been opened during the first great trial of traitors, a trial “of world-wide importance”; thousands more had been opened, before the original thousands had been disposed of, during the second trial; thousands during the third trial; thousands during the preliminary investigations for the fourth, fifth, and sixth trials, which never came into court because they were suppressed. Dossiers arrived from the Ussuri (Japanese agents), from Yakutia (sabotage, espionage, and traitors in the gold placers), from Buriat-Mongolia (the case of the Buddhist monasteries), from Vladivostok (the case of the submarine fleet command), from the construction yards of Komsomolsk, City of the Young Communists (terrorist propaganda, demoralization, abuse of power, Trotskyism-Bukharinism), from Tsingkiang (smuggling, contacts with Japanese and British agents, Moslem intrigues), from all the Turkestan republics (separatism, Pan-Turkism, banditry, foreign intelligence services; Mahmudism — but who on earth was Mahmud? — in Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan, Tadjikistan, Kazakstan, Old Bokhara, Syr Darya); the Samarkand assassination was connected with the Alm Ata scandal, the Alm Ata scandal with the case of espionage (aggravated by the kidnaping of an Iranian national) at the Ispahan Consulate; forgotten cases came to life again in concentration camps in the Arctic, new cases were born in prisons; memorandums in code, dated from Paris, Oslo, Washington, Panama, Hankow, Canton in flames, Guernica in ruins, bombed Barcelona, Madrid desperately surviving under a succession of terrors (and so on — consult a map of the two hemispheres) demanded investigations; Kaluga announced suspicious epidemics among livestock, Tambov agrarian discontent, Leningrad presented twenty dossiers simultaneously — the Sailors’ Club case, the Red Triangle Factory case, the Academy of Sciences case, the Former Revolutionary Prisoners case, the Leninist Youth case, the Geologic Committee case, the Free Masons case, the matter of homosexuality in the Fleet … Now here, now there, a succession of shots traversed this mass of names, documents, figures, mysterious lives whose mystery was never entirely laid bare, supplementary investigations, denunciations, reports, insane ideas. Several hundred uniformed men, ranked in a strict hierarchy, dealt with these papers day and night, were dealt with by them in their turn, suddenly vanished into them, passing the perpetual labor on to other hands. On the summit of the pyramid stood Maxim Andreyevich Erchov. What could he do?

  From the P.B. meeting which he had attended he brought back an oral directive which the Chief had repeated several times: “You must make good your predecessor’s errors!” Predecessors were never mentioned by name; Erchov felt grateful to the Chief (but why, after all?) for not having said, “the traitor’s errors.” From every branch of the Central Committee arrived complaints concerning the disorganization of personnel, which had been so affected by purges and repressive measures in the last two years that instead of being rejuvenated it was melting away; the result had been fresh cases of sabotage, clearly due to the muddleheadedness, incompetence, insecurity, and pusillanimity of industrial personnel. Without arousing the Chief’s disapproval, a member of the Organization Bureau had emphasized the urgent necessity of restoring to productive employment those who had been wrongfully sentenced, upon calumnious denunciations, as a result of mass campaigns, and so forth, and even of guilty persons toward whom indulgence seemed feasible. “Are we not,” he had cried, “the country which remakes men? We transform even our worst enemies …” This oratorical sally had fallen into a sort of void. For a second the High Commissar’s mind dwelt on an annoying counterrevolutionary joke: “Remaking men consists in reducing them, by persuasion, to the condition of corpses …” Precisely at that moment the Chief’s kindly eyes looked meaningfully at Erchov. Erchov put his entire staff on their mettle: within ten days, ten thousand dossiers, preferably those of industrial administrators (Communists), technicians (non-Party members), and officers (Communists and non-Party members), were carefully reviewed, which made possible 6,727 releases, of which 47.5 per cent resulted in rehabilitations. The more thoroughly to overwhelm his “predecessor” — whose chief assistants had just been executed — the papers announced that, during the late purges, the percentage of innocent persons sentenced had risen to over 50; this seemingly produced a good effect; but the C.C. statisticians responsible for the figures, and the assistant press director who had authorized their publication, were immediately dismissed when it was learned that an émigré newspaper published in Paris had perfidiously commented upon the facts thus revealed. Erchov and his staff fell upon yet more mountains of dossiers, working day and night. At this point two pieces of news threw them into confusion. An ex-Communist, expelled from the Party on the basis of an undeniably calumnious denunciation which accused him of being a Trotskyist and the son of a priest (the documents proved that he had been conspicuous in the campaigns against Trotskyism from 1925 to 1937, and that he was the son of a mechanic in the factory at Bryansk), having been released from the “special cases” concentration camp at Kem, on the White Sea, returned to Smolensk and there killed a member of the Party Committee. A woman doctor, released from a work camp in the Urals, was arrested as she attempted to cross the border into Estonia. Seven hundred and fifty new denunciations against recently released persons appeared; in thirty instances the supposedly innocent turned out to be undeniably guilty — or at
least so divers committees affirmed. A rumor gained headway: Erchov was not doing the job. Too liberal, too hasty, not sufficiently versed in the technique of repression.

  Then came the Tulayev case.

  Gordeyev was still following it, in accordance with special instructions from the Political Bureau. When Erchov questioned him about the chauffeur’s execution, he answered, with offensive reserve:

  “… Night before last, with the four Fur Trust saboteurs and the little music-hall actress condemned for espionage …”

  Erchov flinched — but imperceptibly, for he made every effort to keep his feelings concealed. Was it chance, coincidence, or a slap? He had admired the little actress — her lithe body leaping onto the stage, more attractive in the yellow-and-black tights than if it had been naked! — had admired her enough to send her flowers. Gordeyev went on (was it a second slap?):

  “The report was submitted to you …”

  So he didn’t read all the reports that came to his desk? …

  “It is most unfortunate,” Gordeyev resumed innocuously, “because, only yesterday, we found material which throws quite a new light on the chauffeur’s personality …”

  Erchov raised his head, obviously interested.