The Case of Comrade Tulayev

by Victor Serge

  In 1922, Makeyev returned to Akimovka in a jolting Ford marked with the initials of the C.C. of the C.P.(b.) of the R.S.F.S.R. The village children surrounded the car. For some seconds Makeyev stared at them with a terrible intensity of emotion: really, he was looking for himself among them, but too awkwardly to recognize how much several of them resembled him. He threw them his whole stock of sugar and change, patted the cheeks of the little girls who were timid and hung back, joked with the women, went to bed with the merriest one — she had full breasts, big eyes, and big teeth — and installed himself, as Party organizing secretary for the district, in the best house. “What a backward place!” he said. “We have to begin at the very beginning. Not a ray of light!” Sent from Akimovka to eastern Siberia to preside over a regional Executive. Elected an alternate member of the C.C. the year after the death of Vladimir Ilich … Each year new distinctions were added to the service record in his personal dossier as a member of the Party in the most responsible category. Honestly, patiently, with sure tread, he climbed the rungs of power. Meanwhile, as he lost all distinct memories of his wretched childhood and adolescence, of his life of humiliations during the war, of a past without pride and without power, he began to feel himself superior to everyone with whom he came into contact — always excepting men whom the C.C. had appointed to positions of greater power. These he venerated, with no jealousy, as creatures of a nature that was not yet his but which was bound to be his some day. He felt himself, like them, possessed of a legitimate authority, integrated into the dictatorship of the proletariat like a good steel screw set in its proper place in some admirable, supple, and complex machine.

  As Secretary of the regional Committee, Makeyev had governed Kurgansk (both the city and the district) for a number of years, with the proud but unspoken thought of giving it his name: Makeyevgorod or Makeyevgrad — why not? The simplest form — Makeyevo — reminded him too much of peasant speech. The proposal, broached in the lobbies of a regional Party conference, was about to pass — by unanimous vote, according to custom — when, suddenly doubtful, Makeyev himself changed his mind at the last moment. “All the credit for my work,” he cried from the platform, under the huge picture of Lenin, “belongs to the Party. The Party has made me, the Party has done all.” Applause. But already Makeyev was terrified by the thought that his words might be construed as containing unfortunate allusions to the members of the Political Bureau. An hour later, he mounted the platform again, having meanwhile run through the last two issues of The Bolshevik, the magazine devoted to theory, where he found several phrases which he distributed to his audience, pounding them home with short jabs of his fists. “The highest personification of the Party is our great, our inspired Chief. I propose that we give his glorious name to the new school we are about to build!” His audience applauded confidently, as they would confidently have voted for Makeyevgrad, Makeyevo, or Makeyev City. He came down from the platform wiping his forehead, glad that he had been wise enough to refuse fame for the moment. It would come. His name would be on maps, among the blue curves of rivers, the green blotches of forest, the crosshatched hills, the sinuous black railroad line. For he had faith in himself as he had faith in the triumph of Socialism — and doubtless it was the same faith.

  In this present, which was the only reality, he no longer distinguished between himself and the country which — as big as centuries-old England — lies three quarters in Europe and one quarter in an Asia of plains and deserts still furrowed by caravan routes. A country without a history: the Khazars had passed that way in the fifth century on their little long-haired horses, as the Scythians had passed that way centuries before them, to found an empire on the Volga. Where did they come from? Who were they? Came too the Pechenegs, Genghis Khan’s horsemen, Kulagu Khan’s archers, the Golden Horde’s slant-eyed administrators and methodical headsmen, the Nogai Tatars. Plain upon plain — migrations vanished in them as water vanishes in sand. Of that immemorial legend, Makeyev knew only a few names, a few scenes; but he knew and loved horses as the Pechenegs and the Nogai did, like them he understood the flight of birds, like them he could find his way through blizzards by signs which men of other races could not discern. If by some miracle the weapon of past centuries, a bow, had been placed in his hands, he could have used it as skillfully as the divers unknown tribes whom that soil had nourished, who had died upon it and been absorbed into it … “All is ours!” he said, sincerely, at public meetings of the Railwaymen’s Club, and he could easily have substituted “All is mine,” since he was only vaguely aware where “I” ended and “we” began. (The “I” belongs to the Party, the “I” is of value only inasmuch as, through the Party, it incarnates the new collectivity; yet, since it incarnates it powerfully and consciously, the “I,” in the name of the “we,” possesses the world.) Makeyev could not have worked it out theoretically. In practice, he never felt the slightest doubt. “I have forty thousand head of sheep in the Tatarovka district this year!” he cried happily at the regional Production conference. “Next year I shall have three brickworks operating. I told the Plan Commission: ‘Comrade, you must give me three hundred horses before fall — or you’ll hold up the plan for the year! You want to put my only electric power station under the Center? Not if I can stop you, it’s mine, I’ll use every measure, the C.C. will decide.”’ (Instead of “measure” he said “resource,” or rather he thought he was saying “resource” but he actually said “recourse.”)

  Two Narychkins successively exiled to Kurgansk — one, at the end of the eighteenth century, for misappropriations considered excessive when he fell into disfavor with an aging and obese empress; the other, early in the nineteenth, for some witty remarks on the Jacobinism of Monsieur Bonaparte — built a little square palace there in the Neo-Greek style of the Empire, with a peristyle and columns. On either side of this palace extended the wooden houses of the merchants, the low-walled caravansary, the gardens of the more luxurious dwellings. Makeyev set up his office in one of the drawing rooms to the old-regime governors-general, the very drawing room to which the liberal Narychkin, waited on by indolent servitors, had been wont to retire to reread Voltaire. A local antiquarian told Comrade Artyem Artyemiyevich about it. “He was a Freemason too — belonged to the same lodge as the Decembrists.” — “Do you really believe any of those feudal dogs could be sincerely liberal?” Makeyev asked. “Anyway, what does liberal mean?” A copybook containing a part of the family journal, odd volumes of Voltaire, a copy of Montesquieu’s Spirit of the Laws annotated in the nobleman’s own hand, were still in the attic, together with odd pieces of old furniture and some family portraits, one of which, signed by Madame Vigée-Lebrun, a French Revolutionary émigrée, represented a stout dignitary of fifty, with penetrating brown eyes and an ironic and sensual mouth … Makeyev had it brought down, contemplated Narychkin for a moment, looked sourly at the glittering cross on his chest, touched the frame with the toe of his boot, and pronounced judgment: “Not bad. A real feudal mug. Send it to the regional museum.” The title of Montesquieu’s book was translated for him. He sneered: “Spirit of exploitation! … Send it to the library.” “I should suggest the museum,” the antiquarian objected. Makeyev turned on him and, in a crushing voice (because he did not understand), said: “Why?” The frightened antiquarian made no answer. On the double mahogany door a sign was tacked: Office of the Regional Secretary. Inside: a large desk; four telephones, one of them a direct wire to Moscow, the C.C., and the Central Executive; dwarf palms between the tall windows; four big leather armchairs (the only ones in the district); on the right-hand wall, a map of the district especially drawn by a deported ex-officer; on the left-hand wall, a map from the Economic Plan Commission indicating the sites of future factories, of a projected railway and a projected canal, of three workers’ housing developments to be built, of baths, schools, and stadiums to be brought into existence in the city … Behind the Regional Secretary’s comfortable armchair hung a large portrait in oils of the General S
ecretary, supplied for eight hundred rubles by the Universal Stores in the capital — a slick and shining portrait, in which the Chief’s green tunic seemed to be cut out of heavy painted cardboard and his half-smile miscarried into absolute nullity. When the office was completely furnished, Makeyev entered it with suppressed delight. “Wonderful, that portrait of the Chief. That’s real proletarian art!” he said expansively. But what was lacking in the room? What was this strange, irritating, improper, inconceivable blank? He turned on his heel, vaguely displeased, and the people around him — the architect, the secretary of the city Committee, the commandant of the building, the chief clerk, his private stenographer — all felt the same discomfort. “And Lenin?” he said at last; then added, with almost thunderous reproach: “You have forgotten Lenin, comrades! Ha, ha, ha!” His laughter rang out insolently amid the general confusion. The secretary of the city Committee was the first to regain his self-possession:

  “Not at all, Comrade Makeyev, not at all. We hurried to get things finished this morning and there wasn’t time to put in the bookcase — there’s where it will stand — with Ilich’s Complete Works, in the Institute edition, and the little bust that goes on top of it, just like in my place.”

  “That’s better,” said Makeyev, his eyes still gleaming with mockery.

  And, before dismissing them, he announced sententiously:

  “Never forget Lenin, comrades — that is the Communist’s law.”

  Left alone, Makeyev sat squarely down in his revolving chair, turned it happily back and forth, dipped the new pen into the red ink, and wrote a large signature, complete with flourishes — A. A. MAKEYEV — on the memorandum pad with its printed heading: C.P. of the U.S.S.R. Kurgansk Regional Committee. The Regional Secretary. After admiring it for a while, he looked at the telephones, and his full cheeks creased in a smile. “Hello, operator. Seven-six.” His voice became soft: “Is that you, Alia?” Half mockingly, half caressingly: “Nothing, nothing. Everything going all right? Yes, of course, pretty soon.” He turned to the second telephone: “Hello, Security? The Chief’s office. Hello, Tikhon Alexeyich — come about four o’clock. Is your wife feeling better? Yes — yes — all right.” Great stuff! He looked long and eagerly at the direct Moscow connection, but could think of nothing urgent to tell the Kremlin; yet he put his hand on the receiver (suppose I call the Central Plan Commission about trucks?), but then did not dare. In times past the telephone had been a wonder to him, a magical instrument; awkward about using it, he had long feared it, losing far too much of his self-assurance in the presence of the little black cylinder of the receiver. Now that all its terrifying magic was placed at his service, he saw it as a symbol of power. The little local committees came to fear his calls. His imperious voice burst from the receiver: “Makeyev speaking.” It was an almost unintelligible roar. “That you, Ivanov? More lapses, eh? I won’t have it … immediate sanctions … Give you twenty-four hours! …” He preferred to act these scenes before a few deferential colleagues. The blood rose to his heavy face, his broad, conical, shaven skull. The reprimand delivered, he slammed down the receiver, stared into space like an angry beast of prey, pretending to see no one, opened a dossier, ostensibly to calm himself. (But it was all only an inner rite.) Woe to the Party member under investigation whose personal dossier fell into Makeyev’s hands at such a moment! In less than a minute he infallibly discovered the weak point in the case: “Claims to be the son of poor peasants, was actually the son of a deacon.” The genuine son of landless peasants laughed harshly, and wrote in the column reserved for suggested action: “exp.” (expulsion) followed by an implacable M., all in heavy blue pencil. He had a disconcerting faculty of remembering such dossiers, fishing them out from among a hundred others to confirm his decision a year and a half later, when the file, swelled by a dozen reports, came back from Moscow. If the Central Control Commission happened to favor keeping the poor wretch in the Party “with a solemn warning,” Makeyev was even capable of renewing his opposition with Machiavellian ingenuity. The C.C.C. was well aware of these cases, and indulgently supposed that Makeyev was settling personal accounts — no one had the least idea of the absolute impartiality of the rages which he put on for the sake of his prestige. Only one of the C.C.C. secretaries occasionally permitted himself to override these decisions of Makeyev’s — Tulayev. “One down for Makeyev,” he muttered into his thick mustache as he ordered the reinstatement of the expelled member whom neither he nor Makeyev had ever seen or would ever see. On the rare occasions when they met in Moscow, Tulayev, who was a bigger man than Makeyev, addressed him genially in the familiar form, though at the same time calling him “comrade,” to indicate that not all Bolsheviks were equal. Tulayev discerned Makeyev’s value. Basically the two men were much alike, though Tulayev was better educated, more adaptable, and more blasé about exercising power (as chief clerk to a substantial Volga merchant, he had taken courses at a commercial school). Tulayev was embarked on a bigger career. He once plunged Makeyev into unbearable embarrassment by reporting to a meeting that the last May Day procession at Kurgansk had included no less than 137 large or small portraits of Comrade Makeyev, Regional Secretary, and then going on to mention the official opening of a Makeyev Day Nursery in a Kazak village which had soon after emigrated in a body to newer pastures … Crushed by the laughter, Makeyev rose and stood looking into the sea of hilarious faces, his eyes full of tears, his voice half choked, demanding the floor … He did not get it, for a member of the Political Bureau came in, wearing an elegantly tailored workman’s blouse, and the whole assembly rose for the ritual seven-to-eight-minute ovation. After the meeting Tulayev sought out Makeyev: “That was a pretty good trouncing I gave you, eh, brother? But don’t let a little thing like that make you angry. If you get the chance, come back at me as hard as you like. Have a drink?” Those were the good old times of rough-and-ready brotherhood.

  In those days the Party was turning over a new leaf. No more heroes — what was needed was good administrators, practical unromantic men. No more venturesome spurts of international or planetary or name-your-own-adjective revolution — we must think of ourselves, build Socialism for ourselves, in our own country. A renovation of cadres, opening the way to second-rank men, rejuvenated the Republic. Makeyev took part in the purges, acquired a reputation as a practical man devoted to the “general line,” learned the official phrases which bring peace to the soul, and was able to recite them for an hour by the clock. It was with strange emotion that he one day received a visit from Kasparov. The former Commissar of the Steppes Division, the leader of the fiery Civil War days, quietly entered the Regional Secretary’s office, without knocking or sending in his name, about three o’clock one torrid summer afternoon. A Kasparov who had aged and grown thinner, in a white blouse and cap. “You!” Makeyev exclaimed, and flew to embrace his visitor, kissed him, clasped him to his chest. Kasparov gave the impression of being light. They sat down facing each other in the deep armchairs, and now a feeling of uneasiness extinguished their joy. “Well,” said Makeyev, who did not know what to say, “where are you bound in that outfit?” Kasparov’s face looked tense and severe, as it used to look when they camped on the Orenburg steppes, or during the Crimean campaign, or at Perekop … He looked at Makeyev impenetrably; perhaps he was judging him. Makeyev felt uncomfortable. “Appointed by the C.C.,” said Kasparov, “to be director of river transport in the Far East …” Makeyev instantly computed the extent of this disgrace: distant exile, a purely economic position, whereas a Kasparov could have governed Vladivostok or Irkutsk, at the very least.

  “And you?” said Kasparov, with something of melancholy in his tone.

  To shake off his uneasiness, Makeyev stood up — herculean, massive, shaven-skulled. Sweat stains showed on his blouse.

  “I’m building,” he said cheerfully. “Come and see.” He took Kasparov to the Plan Commission’s map — irrigation canals, brickworks, railway yard, schools, baths, stud farms. “Just look at that — yo
u can see the country growing under your eyes, in twenty years we’ll be up with the U.S.A. I believe it because I am in the thick of it.” His voice rang a little false and he noticed it. It was the voice in which he made official speeches … With a barely sketched gesture, Kasparov waved aside the vain words, the economic plans, his old comrade’s simulated joy — and that was just what Makeyev obscurely feared. Kasparov said:

  “All that is fine. But the Party is at the crossroads. The fate of the Revolution is being decided, brother.”

  By the greatest of luck, the telephone began buzzing shrilly at that moment. Makeyev gave some orders relative to nationalized trade. Then, taking his turn at dismissing what he preferred to overlook, he spread his broad, plump hands in a conclusive gesture, and, with a guileless look:

  “In this country, old man, everything has been decided once and for all. The general line — I don’t see any other way. I’m going ahead. Come back here in two or three years, and you won’t recognize the town or the district. A new world, old man, a new America! A young Party that doesn’t know what fear is, full of confidence. Will you come and review the Young Communist sports parade with me this evening? You’ll see!”

  Kasparov shook his head evasively. Another played-out Thermidorian, a fine administrative animal who could glibly recite the four hundred current ideological phrases that obviated thinking, seeing, feeling, and even remembering, even suffering the least remorse when you did the vilest things! There were both irony and despair in the little smile that lighted Kasparov’s lined face. Makeyev bristled in the presence of feelings utterly foreign to his nature but which he nevertheless divined.