The Case of Comrade Tulayev

by Victor Serge

  He lit the candle which he used to soften sealing wax. The stearine was encrusted with red streaks like coagulated blood. In the flame of the bloodstained candle Fleischman burned the letter, collected the ashes in the ash tray, and crushed them under his thumb. He drank his two glasses of tea and felt better. Half aloud, with as much relief as gloomy sarcasm, he said:

  “The Tulayev case is closed.”

  Fleischman decided to hurry through the rest of the filing, so that he could get away earlier. The notebooks which Kiril Rublev had filled in his cell had been put with a sheaf of letters “Held for the inquiry” — they were Dora Rublev’s letters, written from a small settlement in Kazakstan. Sent from the depths of solitude and anguish to be read only by Comrade Zvyeryeva, they made him furious. “What a bitch! If I can lay my hands on her, I’ll see that she gets her fill of steppes and snow and sand …”

  Fleischman leafed through the notebooks. The writing remained regular throughout, the forms of certain letters suggested artistic interests (very early in his life, and long outgrown), the straightness of the lines recalled the man, the way he squared his shoulders when he talked, the long bony face, the intellectual forehead, the particular way he had of looking at you with a smile which was only in his eyes, as he expounded a train of reasoning as rigorous and as subtle as an arabesque in metal … “We are all dying without knowing why we have killed so many men in whom lay our highest strength …” Fleischman realized that he thought as Kiril Rublev had written a few days or a few hours before his death.

  The notebooks interested him … He ran through the economic deductions based on the decrease in the rate of profit resulting from the continuous increase of constant capital (whence the capitalist stagnation?), on the increase of the production of electrical power in the world, on the development of metallurgy, on the gold crisis, on the changes in character, functions, interests, and structure of social classes and more particularly of the working class … Several times Fleischman murmured: “Right, absolutely right … questionable, but … worth considering … true on the whole or in trend …” He made notes of data which he wanted to check in books by specialists. Next came pages of enthusiastic or severe opinions on Trotsky. Kiril Rublev praised his revolutionary intuition, his sense of Russian reality, his “sense of victory,” his reasoned intrepidity; and deplored his “pride as a great historic figure,” his “too self-conscious superiority,” his “inability to make the mediocre follow him,” his “offense tactics in the worst moments of defeat,” his “high revolutionary algebra perpetually cast before swine, when the swine alone held the front of the stage …”

  “Obviously, obviously,” Fleischman murmured, making no effort to overcome his uneasiness.

  Rublev must have been very sure that he was going to be shot, or he would never have written such things?…

  The tone of the writing changed, but the same inner conviction gave it even more detachment. “We were an exceptional human accomplishment, and that is why we are going under. A half century unique in history was required to form our generation. Just as a great creative mind is a unique biological and social accomplishment, caused by innumerable interferences, the formation of our few thousand minds is to be explained by interferences that were unique. Capitalism at its apogee, rich with all the powers of industrial civilization, was planted in a great peasant country, a country of ancient culture, while a senile despotism moved year by year toward its end. Neither the old castes nor the new classes could be strong, neither the one nor the other could feel sure of the future. We grew up amid struggle, escaping two profound captivities, that of the old ‘Holy Russia,’ and that of the bourgeois West, at the same time that we borrowed from those two worlds their most living elements: the spirit of inquiry, the transforming audacity, the faith in progress of the nineteenth-century West; a peasant people’s direct feeling for truth and for action, and its spirit of revolt, formed by centuries of despotism. We never had a sense of the stability of the social world; we never had a belief in wealth; we were never the puppets of bourgeois individualism, dedicated to the struggle for money; we perpetually questioned ourselves about the meaning of life and we worked to transform the world …

  “We acquired a degree of lucidity and disinterestedness which made both the old and the new interests uneasy. It was impossible for us to adapt ourselves to a phase of reaction; and as we were in power, surrounded by a legend that was true, born of our deeds, we were so dangerous that we had to be destroyed beyond physical destruction, our corpses had to be surrounded by a legend of treachery …

  “The weight of the world is upon us, we are crushed by it. All those who want neither drive nor uncertainty in the successful revolution overwhelm us; and behind them they have all those whom the fear of revolution blinds and saps …” Rublev was of the opinion that the implacable cruelty of our period is explained by its feeling of insecurity: fear of the future … “What is going to happen in history tomorrow will be comparable only to the great geological catastrophes which change the face of the planet …” — “We alone, in this universe in transformation, had the courage to see clearly. It is more a matter of courage than of intelligence. We saw that, to save man, what was needed was the attitude of the surgeon. To the outside world, hungry for stability to the point of shutting its eyes to the ever-darkening horizon, we were the intolerable evil prophets of social cataclysms; to those who were comfortably established inside our own revolution, we represented venturesomeness and risk. Neither on one side nor the other did anyone see that the worst venture, the hopeless venture, is to seek for immobility at a time when continents are splitting up and breaking adrift. It would be so comforting to say to oneself that the days of creation are over: ‘Let us rest! We are sure of all tomorrows!’ ” — “An immense rage of reprobation and incomprehension rose up against us. But what sort of wild conspirators were we? We demanded the courage to continue our exploit, and people wanted nothing but more security, rest, to forget the effort and the blood — on the eve of rains of blood!” — “Upon one point we lacked clarity and daring: we were unable to perceive what the evil was which was sapping our country and for which for a time there was no remedy. We ourselves denounced as traitors and men of little faith those among us who revealed it to us … Because we loved our work blindly, we too …”

  Rublev refuted the executed Nicolas Ivanovich Bukharin who, during the trial of March 1938, exclaimed: “We were before a dark abyss …” (And now it became only a dialogue of the dead.) Rublev wrote: “On the eve of our disappearance we do not reckon up the balance sheet of a disaster, we bear witness to the fullness of a victory which encroached too far upon the future and asked too much of men. We have not lived on the brink of a dark abyss, as Nicolas Ivanovich said, for he was subject to attacks of nervous depression — we are on the eve of a new cycle of storms and that is what darkens our consciences. The compass needle goes wild at the approach of magnetic storms …” — “We are terribly disquieting because we might soon become terribly powerful again …”

  “You thought well, Rublev,” said Fleischman, and it made him feel a sort of pride.

  He shut the notebook gently. So he would have closed the eyes of a dead man. He heated the sealing wax and slowly let drops of it, like burning blood, fall on the envelope which contained the notebooks. On the wax he pressed the great seal of the Archives of the Commissariat of the Interior: the proletarian emblem stood deeply printed.

  About five o’clock Comrade Fleischman had himself driven to the stadium where the Athletic Festival was in progress. He took a seat on the official stand, among the decorated uniforms of the hierarchy. On his left breast there were two medals: the Order of Lenin and the Order of the Red Flag. The high, flat military cap increased the size of his fat face, which with the passing years had come to look much like the face of a huge frog. He felt emptied, anonymous, important: a general identical with any general of any army, feeling the first touch of old age, his flesh flabby, his spiri
t preoccupied by administrative details. Battalions of athletes, the young women with their arching breasts preceding the young men, marched past, necks straight, faces turned toward the stands — where they recognized no one, since the Chief, whose colossal effigy dominated the entire stadium, had not come. But they smiled at the uniforms with cheerful confidence. Their footsteps on the ground were like a rhythmic rain of hail. Tanks passed, covered with green branches and flowers. Standing in the turrets, the machine gunners in their black leather headgear waved bouquets tied with red ribbons. High banks of cloud, gilded by the setting sun, deployed powerfully over the sky.

  Paris (Pré-St.-Gervais),

  Agen, Marseille,

  Ciudad Trujillo (Dominican Republic),

  Mexico 1940–42.

  This is a New York Review Book

  Published by The New York Review of Books

  435 Hudson Street, New York, NY 10014

  www.nyrb.com

  Copyright © 1950, copyright renewed 1967 by the Victor Serge Foundation

  Introduction copyright © 2004 by Susan Sontag

  All rights reserved.

  Cover photograph: Victor Serge in San Juan de Parangaricutiro, Mexico, 1944

  Cover design: Katy Homans

  Published by arrangement with The Victor Serge Foundation, 16 rue de la

  Teinturerie, Montpellier 34000 France, a nonprofit corporation dedicated

  to promoting Serge’s writings and ideas internationally through publication,

  translation, research, and related activities.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Serge, Victor, 1890–1947.

  [Affaire Toulaév. English]

  The case of Comrade Tulayev / by Victor Serge ; translation by Willard R. Trask;

  introduction by Susan Sontag.

  p. cm. — (New York Review Books classics)

  ISBN 1-59017-064-4 (alk. paper)

  I. Trask, Willard R. II. Title. III. Series.

  PQ2637.E49A6513 2004

  843’.912—dc22

  2004001563

  eISBN 978-1-59017-426-5

  v2.0

  For a complete list of books in the NYRB Classics series, visit www.nyrb.com or write to:

  Catalog Requests, NYRB, 435 Hudson Street, New York, NY 10014