Victor Serge: The First Neo-Conservative? Reviewing The Case of Comrade Tulayev

 

ESSAY/Review BY DOUG GIBSON. 

NOTE: Recently, I discovered on the Internet archived reviews (at a Geocities site!!) that I had published more than a generation ago for The Event, a now-defunct Salt Lake City alternative weekly. If The Event had a website, I was unaware of it. It is my desire to re-publish these pieces on the above blog. Here is the first post.

        Is the late Victor Serge making a comeback? Seemingly forgotten for decades, his many novels not available at most libraries, let alone bookstores, the Russian revolutionist-turned dissident who survived Stalin’s gulag is the subject of a new biography by radical journalist Susan Weissman. It’s a pleasure to see Serge’s life revived for the 21st century, although Weissman, like many leftists, seems to ignore that Serge rejected all forms of Bolshevism and by the end of his life was an anti-communist. Those leftists who do know that deal with it in proper Marxist fashion by attacking Serge, an act which would make Stalin proud.

       The conservative Weekly Standard’s Stephen Schwartz recently reviewed Weissman’s biography of Serge and profiled the first neo-conservative. He was born in Belgium. Early in his life he was a violent anarchist and spent several years in a French jail. After being freed in 1916, Serge gravitated towards the Bolshevik revolution. He was a dedicated adherent of the revolution, and was disgusted by the anti-democratic betrayals committed by Lenin and Stalin. Serge chose to align himself with Trotsky, a move that led him to a prison cell. That he escaped with his life, writes Schwartz, was due to the protests of French writers Andre Gide, Andre Malraux and Romain Rolland. Serge was exiled to Mexico. He went to Spain, where the failed Spanish revolution disillusioned him to Trotskyism. He eventually settled in Mexico. He died mysteriously in 1947, likely murdered by communist agents, writes Schwartz.

       Serge was a prolific writer. His novels include Birth of Our Power, Conquered City, Midnight in the City, The Long Dusk, Men in Prison and The Case of Comrade Tulayev. His novels are allegories of totalitarianism. Men in Prison was an account of his time in a French jail. Midnight in the Century provides readers a glimpse of what he endured in Stalin’s gulag. Birth of Our Power details the successful Russian revolution.

       After learning of Victor Serge, your reviewer was determined to find one of his novels. It wasn’t easy, but eventually a battered 1963 paperback copy of The Case of Comrade Tulayev was purchased through the online auction house Ebay. The novel is set in 1930s Russia, at the height of Stalin’s purges of the veterans of the revolution. A powerful communist leader named Comrade Tulayev is murdered (modeled after the 1934 murder of Leningrad party boss Sergei Mironovich Kirov). Tulayev’s assassin is a low-level party functionary named Kostia, who in a moment of frustration impulsively shoots Tulayev.

       The murder sets off a chain of events in paranoiac Russia. It’s used as an excuse for a round of purges where powerful party leaders are arrested and charged with complicity in Tulayev’s death. Not one is guilty of the crime although most eventually “confess.” Meanwhile, no one ever suspects the anonymous Kostia, who by the end of the novel has prospered.

       The key strength of Comrade Tulayev is how Serge is able to get into the heads of his characters. Erchov, a high commissar in state security assigned the impossible task of finding Tulayev’s killer, is aware that he is soon to be purged, but is unable to escape his fate. His fear and sense of helplessness make him inert to resist as his world starts to crumble around him. When he is finally arrested, he can only applaud the smooth manner in which he was taken into custody.

       Others arrested include a thuggish province leader lured to his capture with a promise of adulterous sex. He’s the sole one unaware of his fate. The strongest “suspect” is a veteran dissident who scorns his captors and cheats torture by starving himself to death. His suicide seals the fate of his interrogator.

       A unique character is Popov, an emaciated old veteran of the Bolshevik revolution who has maintained power by betraying colleagues. In a unique twist, his daughter protests an arrest he has helped orchestrate. When she is arrested, Popov realizes that in the dysfunctional world of power he resides in, he will soon be arrested as well.

       Stalin, who is called The Chief, is a study of reserved fanaticism in Comrade Tulayev. His calm demeanor belies an unflinching loyalty contaminated by madness which thrives on fear. In fact, Stalin’s character as sketched by Serge (who knew him) is so much like the Inner Party torturer O’Brien in 1984 that George Orwell must have read Victor Serge before writing his classic tale.

       The Case of Comrade Tulayev is a powerful novel that deserved to be re-discovered. It reminds us that wickedness feeds on itself, and that the chief incentive to be cruel is fear that the torturer will soon be the tortured.