The Case of Comrade Tulayev

by Victor Serge

  “My wife …”

  The short, fat one broke in cordially:

  “Set your mind at ease, Maxim Andreyevich, I shall look out for her myself …”

  “Thank you very much,” said Erchov stupidly.

  “Be so good as to change your clothes,” said the tall, thin one, “because of the insignia …”

  Ah yes, his insignia … A military tunic without insignia, a military overcoat much like his own, but without insignia, lay over the back of a chair. It had all been carefully thought out. He dressed like a somnambulist. Everything was becoming clear — first of all, certain things that he had done himself … His own portrait, yellowed by the sun and dirtied with flyspecks, looked at him. “Have that portrait taken down,” he said severely. The sarcasm did him good, but it was received in silence.

  When Erchov came out of the little back room, walking between the tall, thin officer and the short, fat one, the outer room was empty. The men who had seen him come in wearing the stars of power on collar and sleeves did not see him walk out disgraced. “Whoever organized this deserves to be complimented,” thought the ex-High Commissar. He did not know whether the idea had come to him from force of habit, or whether he was thinking ironically. The station was deserted. Black rails against the snow, empty space. The special train was gone — carrying away Valia, carrying away the past. A hundred yards away another car waited — an even more special car. Toward it Erchov strode, between the two silent officers.

  3. Men at Bay

  Born in the Arctic, sweeping across the sleeping forests along the Kama, slow-falling, eddying snowstorms, before which packs of wolves fled here and there, bore down on Moscow. They seemed to be torn to shreds over the city, worn out by their long journeyings through the air, suddenly blotting out the blue sky. A dull milky light spread over the squares, the streets, the little forgotten private houses in ancient alleys, the streetcars with their frost-traced windows … Life went on in a soft swirling and eddying that was like a burial. Feet trod on millions of pure stars, fresh every instant. And suddenly, high up, behind church domes, behind delicate crosses springing from inverted crescents and still showing traces of gilt, the blue reappeared. The sun lay on the snow, caressed dilapidated old façades, shone in through double windows … Rublev never tired of watching these changes. Delicate, bediamonded branches appeared in the window of his office. Seen from there, the universe was reduced to a bit of forsaken garden, a wall, and, behind the wall, an abandoned chapel with a greenish-gold dome growing pink under the patina of time.

  Rublev looked up from the four books which he was simultaneously consulting: the same series of facts appeared in them under four undeniable but unsubstantiated aspects — whence the errors of historians, some purposeful, others unconscious. You made your way through error as you did through snowstorms. Centuries later, the truth became apparent to someone — today it is to me — out of the tangle of contradictions. Economic history, Rublev made a note, often has the deceitful clarity of a coroner’s report. Something, fortunately, escapes them both — the difference between corpse and living man.

  “My handwriting looks neurotic.”

  Assistant Librarian Andronnikova came in. (“She thinks that I look neurotic …”) “Be so good, Kiril Kirillovich, as to look over the list of banned books for which special permissions have been requested …” Usually Rublev carelessly OK’d all such requests — whether they came from idealistic historians, liberal economists, social-democrats with a tinge of bourgeois eclecticism, cloudy intuitionists … This time he gave a start: a student at the Institute of Applied Sociology had asked for The Year 1905 by L. D. Trotsky. Assistant Librarian Andronnikova, with her small face framed in a foam of white hair, had expected that Rublev would be surprised.

  “Refused,” he said. “Tell him to apply to the Library of the Party History Commission …”

  “I did,” Andronnikova answered gently. “But he was very insistent.”

  Rublev thought he read a childish sympathy in her eyes, the sympathy of a weak, clean, and good creature.

  “How are you, Comrade Andronnikova? Did you find any cloth at the Kuznetsky-most Co-op?”

  “Yes, thank you, Kiril Kirillovich,” she said, a restrained warmth coloring her voice.

  He took his overcoat down from the coat stand, and, as he put it on, joked about the art of life:

  “We lie in wait for luck, Comrade Andronnikova, for our friends and for ourselves … We are living in the jungle of the transition period, eh?”

  “Living in it is a dangerous art,” thought the white-haired woman, but she merely smiled, more with her eyes than with her lips. Did this singular man — scholarly, keen-minded, passionately fond of music — really believe in the “twofold period of transition, from Capitalism to Socialism and from Socialism to Communism,” about which he had published a book in the days when the Party still allowed him to write? Citizenness Andronnikova, sixty, ex-princess, daughter of a great liberal (and monarchist) politician, sister of a general massacred by his soldiers in 1916, widow of a collector of pictures the only loves of whose life had been Matisse and Picasso, deprived of the ballot because of her social origins, lived by a private cult whose saint was Wladimir Soloviev. The philosophy of mystical wisdom, if it did not help her to understand the species of men called “Bolsheviks” — men strangely stubborn, hard, limited, dangerous, yet some of whom had souls of unequaled richness — helped her to regard them with an indulgence in which, of late, there was an admixture of secret compassion. If the worst were not also to be loved, what place would there be for Christian charity here below? If the worst were not sometimes very near to the best, would they really be the worst? Andronnikova thought: “They certainly believe what they write … And perhaps Kiril Kirillovich is right. Perhaps it really is a period of transition …” She knew the names, faces, histories, smiles, characteristic gestures, of several prominent Party members who had recently disappeared or been executed in the course of incomprehensible trials. They were true brothers of the man before her; they all called each other by nicknames; they all talked of a “period of transition,” and no doubt it was because they believed in it that they had died … Andronnikova watched over Rublev with an almost painful anxiety, though he did not suspect it. She repeated the name of Kiril Kirillovich in her mental prayers at night, before she went to sleep with the covers pulled up to her chin, as she had at sixteen. Her room was tiny and full of faded things — old letters in elaborate boxes, portraits of handsome young men, cousins and nephews, most of them buried no one knew where, in the Carpathians, at Gallipoli, before Trebizond, at Yaroslavl, in Tunisia. Two of these aristocrats were presumably still alive — one a waiter in Constantinople, the other, under a false name, a streetcar motorman in Rostov. But when Andronnikova managed to get hold of some half-decent tea and a little sugar, she still found a certain pleasure in life … As a means of getting a few minutes’ conversation with Rublev every day she had hit on the idea of searching the shops for dress goods, letter paper, choice foods, and telling him the difficulties she encountered. Rublev, who liked to walk the streets of Moscow, went into shops to get information for her.

  Since he enjoyed breathing the cold air, Rublev went home on foot through the white boulevards. Tall, thin, and broad-shouldered, he had begun to stoop during the last two years, not under the burden of years but under that heavier burden, anxiety. The little boys chasing each other on skates over the snowy boulevard knew his old fur-lined coat, much faded about the shoulders, the astrakhan cap which he wore pulled down to his eyes, his scanty beard, his big bony nose, his bushy eyebrows, the bulging brief case he carried under his arm. As he passed he heard them call: “Hi, Vanka, here’s Professor Checkmate,” or “Watch out, Tiomka, here comes Czar Ivan the Terrible.” The fact is that he both looked like a schoolmaster who was a champion chess player and resembled the portraits of the Bloody Czar. Once a schoolboy who had come whizzing along at top speed on a single skate and had cra
shed into him muttered this odd apology: “Excuse me, Citizen Professor Ivan the Terrible” — and could not understand the strange fit of laughter with which the stern old codger answered him.

  He passed the ironwork gateway of No. 25 Tverskoy Boulevard, “Writers’ House.” On the façade of the little building a medallion displayed the noble profile of Alexander Herzen. Out of the basement windows wafted the odors of the “Writers’ Restaurant” — or rather of the scribblers’ trough. “I sowed dragons,” said Marx, “and reaped fleas.” This country is forever sowing dragons, and in times of stress it produces them, strong with wings and claws, furnished with magnificent brains, but their posterity dies out in fleas, trained fleas, stinking fleas, fleas, fleas! In this house was born Alexander Herzen, the most generous man in the Russia of his time, and therefore driven to live in exile; and because he had perhaps exchanged messages with him, a man of the high intelligence of Chernyshevski was manhandled by the police for twenty years. Now in this house the scribblers filled their bellies by writing, in verse or prose, and in the name of the Revolution, the stupidities and infamies which despotism ordered them to write. Fleas, fleas. Rublev still belonged to the Writers’ Syndicate, whose members, who not long ago sought his advice, now pretended not to see him in the street for fear of compromising themselves … A sort of hate came into his eyes when he saw the “poet of the Young Communists” (forty years old) who had written, for the executed Piatakov and certain others:

  Shooting them is little,

  Is too little, is nothing!

  Poison carrion, profligates,

  Imperialist vermin,

  Who soil our proud Socialist bullets!

  All in double rhymes. There were a hundred lines of it. At four rubles a line, it came to a skilled workman’s wages for a month, a ditchdigger’s for three months. The author of it, dressed in a sport suit made of good brown German cloth, displayed a rubicund face in editorial offices.

  Strastnaya Square — Square of the Monastery of the Passion. Pushkin meditated on his pedestal. May you be forever blessed, Poet of Russia, because you were not a rat, because you were only a little of a coward, just enough, probably, to save your neck under an enlightened tyranny, when they hanged your friends the Decembrists! The little monastery tower across the square was being gradually demolished. The reinforced concrete Izvestia building, distinguished by a clock, rose above the gardens of the old monastery. At the four corners of the square: a little white church, movie theaters, a bookstore. People in single file waited patiently for a bus. Rublev turned right, into Gorki Street, looked idly into the windows of a big grocery store displaying fat fish from the Volga, magnificent fruits from Central Asia, de-luxe viands for handsomely paid specialists. He lived in an eleven-story apartment building in the next little side street. The spacious halls were scantly lighted. Slowly the elevator rose to the eighth floor. Rublev went down a dark gloomy corridor, knocked softly at a door. It opened, he entered and kissed his wife on the forehead:

  “Any heat today, Dora?”

  “Not much. The radiators are barely warm. Put on your old field jacket.”

  Neither meetings of the tenants of Soviet House nor the annual arrest and trial of the technicians of the Regional Bureau of Combustibles did anything to improve the situation. The cold brought a sort of desolation into the big room. Touched by the twilight, the whiteness of roofs filtered through the window. The green leaves of the plants seemed to be made of metal, the typewriter displayed a dusty keyboard that looked like a fantastic set of false teeth. The strong radiant human bodies which Michael Angelo had painted for the Sistine Chapel, reduced to black and gray by photography, had become uninteresting blotches on the wall. Dora lit the lamp on the table, sat down, crossed her arms under her brown woolen shawl, and looked up at Kiril out of her calm gray eyes. “Did you have a good day?” She kept down her joy at having him back, as a moment earlier she had kept down her fear that he would not come back. It would always be like that. “Have you read the papers? … I ran through them … A new People’s Commissar for Agriculture has been appointed in the R.S.F.S.R.; the one before has disappeared. And this one will disappear before six months are out, Dora, I assure you. And the one who follows him too! Which of them will make things any better?” They talked in low voices. If there had been any occasion to draw up a list of tenants of this very building, all influential people, who had disappeared in the last twenty months, they would have discovered surprising percentages, would have concluded that certain floors were unlucky, would have seen twenty-five years of history under more than one murderous aspect. But the list was there — it was in them, obscurely. That was what was aging Rublev. It was the only way in which he yielded.

  In that same room, between the plants with their metallic leaves and the dim reproductions of the Sistine frescoes, they had listened all day and late into the night to the senseless, demonic, inexorable, incredible voices that poured from the loud-speaker. Those voices filled hours, nights, months, years, they filled the soul with delirium, and it was astonishing that one could go on living after having heard them. Once, Dora had stood up, pale and shattered, her hands hanging limp, and said:

  “It is like a snowstorm covering a continent. No roads, no light, no possible way of traveling, everything will be buried … It is an avalanche coming down on us, carrying us away … It is a horrible revolution …”

  Kiril was pale too, the room flickered with white light. From the varnished case of the radio came a slightly hoarse, shaky, hesitating voice, with a heavy Turkish accent — the voice of an ex-member of the Turkmanistan Central Committee, who, like everyone else, was confessing to unending treason. “I organized the assassination of … I took part in the attempt on … which failed … I prevented the irrigation plans from succeeding … I incited the revolt of the Basmachi … I dealt with the British Intelligence … The Gestapo sent me … I was paid thirty thousand …” Kiril turned a knob and stopped the flood of insanity. “Abrahimov on the stand,” he murmured. “Poor devil!” He knew him — an ambitious young fellow from Tashkent who liked to drink good wine, hard-working, not stupid … Kiril rose to his feet and said solemnly:

  “It is the counterrevolution, Dora.”

  The voice of the Supreme Prosecutor went dismally on and on, rehashing conspiracies, assassinations, crimes, destruction, felonies, treason; it became a sort of weary barking, heaping insults upon men who listened, their heads bowed, desperate, done for, under the eyes of a mob, between two guards: among those men there were several who were spotless, the purest, the best, the most intelligent men of the Revolution — and precisely for that reason they were undergoing martyrdom, they accepted martyrdom. Hearing them over the radio, he sometimes thought: “How he must be suffering! … But no — that is his normal voice — what is it? Is he mad? Why is he lying like that?” Dora walked back and forth across the room, bumping against the walls, Dora collapsed onto the bed, shaken by dry sobs, choking. “Wouldn’t it be better if they let themselves be torn to pieces alive? Don’t they realize that they are poisoning the soul of the proletariat? That they are poisoning the springs of the future?”

  “They do not realize it,” Kiril Rublev said. “They believe that they are still serving Socialism. Some of them hope that they will be allowed to live. They have been tortured …”

  He wrung his hands. “No, they are not cowards; no, they have not been tortured. I do not believe it. They are true, that is it, still true to the Party, and there is no more Party, there are only inquisitors, executioners, criminals … No, I’m talking nonsense, it is not so simple. Perhaps I would do as they are doing if I were in their place …”

  At that instant he thought, perfectly clearly: “Their place is mine, and some day I shall be there, infallibly …” and his wife knew, perfectly clearly, that he was thinking it.

  “They assure themselves that it is better to die dishonored, murdered by the Chief, than to denounce him to the international bourgeoisie …”


  He almost screamed, like a man crushed in an accident:

  “And in that, they are right.”

  For a long time they returned to this obsessing thought again and again, discussed it again and again. Their minds worked on nothing else, they scrutinized this single theme from every standpoint, because in that part of the world — the Great Sixth — history had nothing to work on but this darkness, these lies, this perverse devotion, this blood that was shed day in and day out. Old Party members avoided one another — so that they should not have to meet each other’s eyes, or lie ignobly to each other’s faces out of a reasonable cowardice, so that they might not stumble over the name of a comrade who had disappeared, not have to compromise themselves by a handshake, or disgust themselves by not giving it. Nevertheless, they came to know of the arrests, the disappearances, the fantastic sick leaves, the ill-omened transfers, bits of secret interrogations, sinister rumors. Long before a member of the General Staff — ex-coal miner, a Bolshevik in 1908, once famous for a campaign in the Ukraine, a campaign in the Altai, a campaign in Yakutsk, thrice decorated with the Order of the Red Flag — long before this general disappeared, a perfidious rumor followed him everywhere, making the women whom he met look at him with eyes that were strangely wide, emptying the antechambers of the Defense Commissariat when he passed through them. Rublev saw him one evening at Red Army House: “Imagine it, Dora. The reception line was not ten feet from him … Those who found themselves face to face with him smiled sweetly and too politely, and disappeared … I watched him for twenty minutes. He sat all alone, between two empty chairs — brand-new uniform, all his decorations, looking like a wax doll as he watched the dancing. Fortunately some young lieutenants, who knew nothing, danced with his wife … Arkhinov came up, recognized him, hesitated, pretended to look for something in his pockets — and slowly turned his back on him …” A month later, when he was arrested as he left a committee meeting at which he had not opened his mouth, the general felt relieved; in fact, everyone felt the relief that comes at the end of a long wait. When the same icy atmosphere began to surround another Red general, summoned to Moscow from the Far East to receive mythical orders, he blew out his brains in the bathtub. Contrary to all expectations, the Artillery Command gave him a handsome funeral; three months later, in accordance with the decree providing that the families of traitors must be deported to “the most remote districts of the Union,” his mother, his wife, and his two children were ordered to set forth into the unknown. News of such cases — and they were many — came to people by chance, confidentially, in whispered conversations, and the details were never fully known. You knocked at a friend’s door, and the maid looked at you in terror when she opened it. “I don’t know anything about it, he is not here, he will not be back, I have been told to go to the country … No, I don’t know anything, no …” She was afraid to say another word, afraid of you as if danger were at your heels. You telephoned to a friend — from a public booth, by way of precaution — and the voice of an unknown man asked, “Who is calling?” very clearly, and you understood that a spy had been posted there and you answered mockingly, though you felt disturbed, “The State Bank, on business,” and then you got away as fast as you could because you knew that the booth would be searched within ten minutes. New faces appeared in offices instead of the faces you had known; you felt ashamed when you mentioned the former incumbent’s name, and ashamed when you did not mention it. The papers published the names of new members of the federated governments without saying what had become of their predecessors — which was obvious enough. In communal apartments, occupied by several families, if the bell rang at night, people thought: “They’ve come for the Communist” — as in earlier days they would immediately have thought it was the technician or the ex-officer who was being arrested. Rublev checked over the list of his earlier comrades and found only two still alive with whom he was more or less intimate: Philippov, of the Plan Commission, and Wladek, a Polish émigré. The latter had once known Rosa Luxemburg, had belonged, with Warsky and Waletsky, to the first Central Committees of the Polish C.P., had done secret-service work under Unschlicht … Warsky and Waletsky, if perhaps they were still alive, were alive in prison, in some secret isolator reserved for those who had once been influential leaders of the Third International; the corpulent Unschlicht, with his big face and spectacles, was generally supposed to have been executed — it was almost a certainty. Wladek, holding an obscure post in an Institute of Agronomy, did his utmost to remain forgotten there. He lived some twenty-five miles from Moscow in a dilapidated villa in the heart of the forest; he came to the city only for his work, saw no one, wrote to no one, received no letters, and made no telephone calls.