The Case of Comrade Tulayev

by Victor Serge

  “Like the others, you mean?”

  “To what are you alluding, Makeyev? What is it that you presume to think, counterrevolutionary Makeyev, traitor to the Party, murderer of the Party?”

  “Nothing.”

  Again he collapsed.

  “In any case, this may be your last interrogation. It may be your last day. A decision may be reached this very evening, Makeyev — did you hear me? Take the prisoner back to his cell.”

  … At Kurgansk the man was taken from the prison in a van. Sometimes he was informed of his sentence, sometimes he was left in doubt — and that was better, because occasionally men who had no doubts left had to be carried, tied, helped along, gagged. The others walked like broken-down automatons, but they walked. A few miles from the station, at a place where the tracks make a shining curve under the stars, the van stopped. The man was led toward the underbrush … Makeyev attended the execution of four railwaymen who had stolen parcel-post packages. Traffic was being disorganized by such larcenies. At the regional Committee, Makeyev had demanded capital punishment for the proletarians turned brigands. The bastards! He held a grudge against them for forcing him into a hideous severity. The four still hoped for a transfer. “They won’t dare shoot workers for so little …” seven thousand rubles’ worth of merchandise … Their last hope vanished in the underbrush, under an ugly yellow moon whose sickly light filtered through little leaves. Standing at a turn in the path, Makeyev watched to see how the men would behave. The first walked straight on, his head held high, his step firm, charging forward toward the open grave (“the stuff of a revolutionary …”). The second stumbled over roots, jerked epileptically, hung his head — he looked as if he were plunged in deep thought, but when he came nearer Makeyev saw that, for all his fifty years, the man was crying silently. The third was like a drunken man with sudden intervals of clearheadedness. He dragged along, then ran a few steps (they were going in single file, followed by several men with rifles). The last, a lad of twenty, had to be supported. He recognized Makeyev, fell to his knees, and cried: “Comrade Makeyev, beloved father, pardon us, have mercy on us, we are workers …” Makeyev sprang back, his foot struck a root, he felt a stab of pain, the silent soldiers dragged the boy on … At that moment the first of the four turned his head and said calmly, in a voice perfectly distinct in the moonlit silence: “Keep quiet, Sacha, they are not men any more, they are hyenas … We ought to spit in his dirty face …” Four reports, quite close together, reached Makeyev in his car. A cloud darkened the moon, the driver almost drove the car into the ditch. Makeyev went straight to bed, put his arms around his sleeping wife, and lay so for a long time, his eyes open on darkness. Alia’s warmth and her regular breathing calmed him. Since it was easy for him not to think, he was able to escape from himself. The next morning, seeing a brief notice of the execution in the paper, he was almost glad to feel that he was “an iron Bolshevik” …

  Makeyev lived but little by his memories; rather, his memories lived a life of their own, an insidious and awkward life, in him. That one had appeared on the luminous screen of consciousness while he was being led toward his cell, toward … And, horribly, it brings another with it: In those days, Makeyev felt that he belonged to a different race from that of men who walked such paths at night, under the yellow moon, toward graves dug by soldiers of the Special Battalion. No conceivable event could cast him down from the summits of power, make him in turn one of the disinherited. Even disgraces would leave him in the files of the Central Committee. Nothing short of expulsion from the Party, and that was impossible … He was loyal, body and soul! Adaptable, too, and he knew very well that the Central Committee was always right, that the Political Bureau was always right, that the Chief was always right, because might is right; the errors of power compel recognition, become Truth; just pay the overhead, and a wrong solution becomes the right solution … In the little elevator cage Makeyev was pressed against the wall by the massive torso of a noncommissioned officer who might be forty and who looked like him — that is to say, who looked like the Makeyev of former days. The same rugged head and chin, the same stubborn eyes, the same broad shoulders. (But neither of them was aware of the resemblance at the time.) The guard fixed his prisoner with an anonymous eye. Man-pincers, man-revolver, man-password, man-might — and Makeyev was in the power of such men, from henceforth he belonged to the other race … He had a momentary vision of himself walking through a wood, under a patchwork of yellow moonlight and leaf shadows, with rifles following him at the ready … And the same man was waiting for Makeyev at a turn in the path, he was dressed in leather, his hands were in his pockets; and when Makeyev should be no more, the same man would go calmly home and climb into a wide, warm bed, beside a sleeping woman with burning breasts … The same man, or another, but with the same anonymous eyes, would come for Makeyev, perhaps that very night …

  Yet another somber image rose from the past. At the Party club a new moving picture in honor of Soviet aviation, Aerograd, was being shown. In the Siberian forest, in the Far East, bearded peasants who had been Red partisans were standing up against Japanese agents … There were two old trappers who were like brothers, and one of them discovered that the other was a traitor. Face to face under the great grim trees, in the murmuring taiga, the patriot disarmed the traitor: “Walk ahead!” The other walked, bent toward the ground, feeling himself sentenced to death. Again and again, the two almost identical faces alternated on the screen — the face of an old bearded man, stricken with terror, and the face of his comrade, his like, who had judged him, who cried to him: “Prepare yourself! In the name of the Soviet people …” and who raised his carbine … Around them the maternal forest, the inescapable forest. Close-up: the enormous face of the guilty man baying at death … It disappeared at last in the welcome roar of a shot. Makeyev gave the signal for applause … The elevator stopped, Makeyev would have liked to bay at death. Yet he walked uprightly enough. When he reached his cell he sent for a sheet of paper. Wrote:

  “I cease all resistance in the face of the Party. I am ready to sign a complete and sincere confession …”

  Signed it: Makeyev. The M was still strong, the other letters looked crushed.

  Kiril Rublev refused to answer his examiners’ questions. (“If they need me, they will give in. If they only intend to get rid of me, I am shortening the formalities …”) A high official came to inquire into his demands. “I do not wish to be treated worse in a Socialist prison than in a prison under the old regime … After all, citizen, I am one of the founders of the Soviet State.” (As he spoke, he thought: “I am being ironical despite myself … Integral humor …”) “I want books and paper …” He was given books from the prison library and notebooks with numbered pages … “Now, leave me in peace for three weeks …” He needed the time to clarify his thought. A man feels singularly free when all is lost, he can at last think in a strictly objective fashion — to the extent, that is, to which he overcomes the fear which, in a living being, is a primordial force comparable to the sex instinct … Both the instinct and the force are almost insurmountable; it is a matter of inner training. Nothing more to lose. A few gymnastic exercises in the morning: naked, loose-limbed, sharp-faced, he found it amusing to imitate the supple movement of the reaper in the wheat field — the upper body and both arms swinging vigorously forward and to the side. Then he walked a little, thinking; sat down and wrote. Interrupted himself to meditate on another theme: on death, from the only rational point of view, that of the natural sciences: a field of poppies. The thought of Dora often tormented him, more often than it ought. “We had been prepared for so long, Dora …” All her life, all their life, their real life, seventeen years, since the hardships and enthusiasms of the Revolution, Dora had been strong, under a defenseless gentleness, a scrupulous gentleness that was full of hesitancies and doubts. There are plants like that, plants which under their delicate tracery of leaves have such a resistance and vitality that they survive storms, that, see
ing them, we divine the existence of a true and admirable strength entirely different from the mixture of instantaneous ardor and brutality which is commonly called strength. Kiril talked to Dora as if she had been present. They knew each other so well, they had so many thoughts in common, that when he wrote she sometimes foresaw the sentence or the page that was to follow. “I thought you would go on like that, Kiril,” she would say; and looking up, he would see her, pale and pretty, her hair brushed away from her forehead and drawn into tresses that lay piled above either temple. “Why, you’re absolutely right!” he would marvel. “How well you read me, Dora!” In the joy of their mutual understanding they sometimes kissed each other over his manuscripts. Those were the days of the Cold, of the Typhoid, of the Famine, of the Terror, of the War Fronts which were always being broken through but which never quite gave in, the days of Lenin and Trotsky, the good days. “What luck if we had died together then, Dora!” This conversation between them took place fifteen years later, when they were struggling in the grip of night-mare as suffocating miners struggle in a doomed mine. “We even missed the chance, you remember: you had typhoid, and one day the bullets made a perfect half-circle around me …” — “I was delirious,” said Dora, “I was delirious and I saw everything, I understood everything, I had the key to things, and it was I who kept the bullets from your head by moving my hand, and I touched your hair … My hallucination was so real that I almost believed it, Kiril. Afterward I had a terrible period of doubt — what was I good for if I could not keep the bullets away from you, had I a right to love you more than the Revolution, for I knew very well that I loved you more than anything in the world, that if you disappeared I could not go on living, even for the Revolution … And you scolded me when I told you, you talked to me so well in my delirium, that was the first time I came to really know you …” Kiril put both his hands on Dora’s hips and looked into her eyes; they smiled only with their eyes now, and they were very pale, very much older, very much troubled. “Have I changed much since?” he asked in a strangely young voice. “You are amazingly the same,” Dora answered, stroking his cheeks. “Amazingly … But as for me, who have always told myself that you must go on living because the world would be a lesser place if you were not in it, and that I must go on living with you … I begin to believe that we missed that chance to die, really I do … Perhaps there are whole periods when, for men of a certain kind, it is no longer worth while to live …” Kiril answered slowly: “Whole periods, you say? You are right. But since, in the present state of our knowledge, no one can foresee the duration or the succession of periods, and since we must try to be present at the moment when history needs us …” He would have talked like that in his course on “Chartism and the Development of Capitalism in England” … Now he squeezed into the right-hand corner of his cell, directly against the wall; and, raising his Ivan the Terrible profile toward the window at the precise angle which allowed him to see a lozenge of sky a foot square, he murmured: “Well, Dora, well, Dora, now the end has come …”

  His manuscript progressed. In a swift hand, a little unsteady at the beginning of each day’s first paragraph, but firm after twenty lines, he went over the history of the last fifteen years, wasting no words, with the concision of an economist, quoted figures from the secret statistics (the correct ones), analyzed the decisions and acts of those in power. He achieved a terrifying objectivity, which spared nothing. The confused battles for the democratization of the Party; the first debates of the Communist Academy on the subject of industrialization; the real figures on goods shortages, on the value of the ruble, on wages; the growing tension of the relations between the rural masses, a weakling industry, and the State; the NEP crisis; the effects of the world crisis on Soviet economy, shut up within its own borders; the gold crisis; the solutions imposed by a power which was at once farsighted (in matters of danger which threatened it directly) and blinded by its instinct for self-preservation; the degeneration of the Party, the end of its intellectual life; the birth of the authoritarian system; the beginnings of collectivization, conceived as an expedient to avoid the bankruptcy of the directing group; the famine which spread over the country like a leprosy … Rublev knew the minutes of the meetings of the Political Bureau, he quoted the most forbidden passages from them (passages probably now destroyed); he showed the General Secretary daily encroaching upon all powers; he followed the intrigue in the lobbies of the Central Committee; against it as a background, the figure of the Chief began to appear, still hesitantly, between resignation, arrest, the violent scene at the end of which two equally pale members of the P.B. faced each other among the overturned chairs and one said: “I will kill myself so that my corpse will denounce you! But as for you, the muzhiks will rip your guts out one day, and more power to them — but the country, the Revolution …” And the other, his face closed as the grave, murmured: “Calm yourself, Nicolas Ivanovich. If you will accept my resignation I tender it …” It was not accepted, there were no more successors.

  When he had written page after page, written freely, as he had not written for more than ten years, Kiril Rublev would walk up and down his cell, smoking. “Well, Dora, what do you think of it?” Dora invisibly turned over the written sheets. “Good,” she said. “Firm and clear. Yourself. Go on, Kiril.” Then he returned to that other necessary meditation, his meditation on the poppy field.

  Early morning. A field of red flowers on a gentle slope, undulating like flesh. Each flower is a flame, and so frail that a mere touch makes the petals fall. How many flowers are there? Impossible to count them. Every instant one withers, another opens. If you were to cut down the tallest ones, those that had made the best growth — whether because they sprang from more vigorous seed or because they had found some elements unequally distributed through the soil — neither the appearance nor the nature nor the future of the field would be changed. Shall I give a name, shall I vow a love, to one flower among them all? It seems to be a fact that each flower exists in itself, is unique and solitary in its particular kind, different from all the others, and that, once destroyed, that flower will never be born again … It seems so, but are we sure? From instant to instant, the flower changes, it ceases to be like itself, something in it dies and is reborn. The flower of this instant is no longer the flower of the instant before. Is the difference between its successive selves, in time, really less than the present difference between itself and many others which closely resemble it, which are perhaps what it was an hour before, what it will be an hour hence?

  A rigorous investigation thus abolished in reverie the boundaries between the momentary and the enduring, the individual and the species, the concrete and the conceptual, life and death. Death was completely absorbed into that marvelous field of poppies, sprung perhaps from a mass grave, perhaps fed by decomposed human flesh … A different and vaster problem. Studying it, would one not likewise see the boundaries between species abolished? “But that would no longer be scientific,” Rublev answered himself, who considered that, outside of purely experimental syntheses, philosophy does not exist or is only “the theoretical mask of an idealism which is theological in origin.”

  As he was brave, lyrical, and a little tired of living, the poppies helped him to grow accustomed to a death which was not far distant, and which had been the death of so many of his comrades that it was no longer strange or too terrifying. Besides, he knew that men were seldom executed while an investigation was in process. So the threat — or the hope — was not immediate. When he should have to go to sleep with the thought of being waked only to be shot, his nerves would undergo another trial … (But weren’t there executions in the daytime too?)

  Zvyeryeva sent for him. She tried to give the examination the tone of a familiar conversation.

  “You’re writing, Comrade Rublev?”

  “Yes, I am writing.”

  “A message to the Central Committee, I take it?”

  “Not exactly. I don’t really know whether we still have a
Central Committee in the sense in which we used the term in the old Party.”

  Zvyeryeva was surprised. Everything that was known about Kiril Rublev suggested that he was “in line,” docile — not without inward reservations — disciplined; and inward reservations strengthen acceptances in practice. The investigation was in danger of failing.

  “I don’t quite understand you, Comrade Rublev. You know, I believe, what the Party expects of you?”

  Prison had made the less change in his appearance because he had always worn a beard. He did not look depressed, though he looked tired: dark circles under his eyes. The face of a vigorous saint, with a big bony nose, such as are to be seen in certain icons of the Novgorod school. Zvyeryeva tried to decipher him. He spoke calmly:

  “The Party … I know more or less what is expected of me … But what Party? What is now called the Party has changed so much … But you certainly cannot understand me …”

  “And why, Comrade Rublev, should you think that I cannot understand you? On the contrary, I …”

  “Don’t go on,” Rublev interrupted. “What is on your tongue is an official phrase that no longer means anything … I mean to say that you and I probably belong to different human species. I say it without the slightest animosity, I assure you.”

  What might be offensive in his remark was lessened by his objective tone and the polite look he gave her.

  “May I ask you, Comrade Rublev, what you are writing, and to whom, and for what purpose?”

  Rublev shook his head and smiled, as if one of his students had asked him an intentionally embarrassing question.

  “Comrade Examining Judge, I am thinking of writing a study on the machine-smashing movement in England at the beginning of the nineteenth century … Please don’t protest, I am seriously thinking of it.”

  He waited to see what effect his joke would produce. Zvyeryeva was observing him too. Small, shrewd eyes.