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.

Mr. Jones is a gut-punch of a film that reminds us of evil, and its unlikely cheerleaders

Review by Doug Gibson

I've watched the film "Mr. Jones" several times the past few days. Each viewing is a stronger punch in the gut. This is the most important film of the year, and even if there wasn't a pandemic it would likely have a limited release, with its commercial life relegated to streaming.

I watched it with my son, 15, yesterday. He's readying for 10th grade; an intelligent 4.0 student as well as an accomplished amateur boxer. His reaction to the film -- succinct and appropriate: Why haven't we learned about this in school?

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"Mr. Jones" is a true story, albeit with composite characters and some non-relevant historical license (George Orwell (Joseph Mawle) floats through the story, quoting "Animal Farm" and sharing two apocryphal scenes with the main character.)

It's the story of Gareth Jones, (James Norton) a young Welsh policy wonk in the early 1930s who had a passion for journalism. Through dogged persistence, also called shoe-leather journalism, he once snagged an off-the-cuff interview with Adolf Hitler.

The film opens with Jones, an adviser to a top British government official, warning his boss and others about the danger Hitler poses. His listeners respond with condescending laughter. Afterward, Jones is let go by his employer; not for his advice. His employer is genuinely fond and appreciative of Jones. It's the global depression; he can't be fit in the budget.

Jones has been researching Stalin and his economic policies in Russia. He can't understand how Stalin has so much money. The numbers don't add up. With a letter of recommendation from his boss, and some help from a journalist in Russia, Paul Kleb (1), he secures a press credential to visit Russia. His goal, greeted often with amusement, is to interview Stalin.

He is advised to contact a journalist for the New York Times, a Pulitzer Prize winner named Walter Duranty (Peter Sarsgaard). Duranty, the media star there, is known as the man with Stalin's ear. In Moscow, Jones is assigned two days (he expected a week) in a luxury hotel. He finds out journalists are not allowed to leave Moscow. He learns Kleb, who had told him on the phone he was working on a big story on the Ukraine before the line went bad -- was murdered on the same day.

Duranty is cordial but patronizing with Jones, inviting him to a party with other journalists, in Duranty's suite at the same hotel. It's a sex party, and Jones declines entreaties for sex with women, drug use, and sex with men. A memorable line comes from an intoxicated journalist telling a bewildered Jones to associate the party with Poe's "The Masque of the Red Death," at least until that book is banned, he adds.

I've hewed tightly to the plot to set the film's scenario, but I'll move faster now. Jones develops a friendship with an employee of Duranty's, a journalist named Ada (Vanessa Kirby). She provides Kleb's notes on Ukraine, entrusted with her, to Jones. Using his association with his prominent former employer in Britain, Jones manages to finagle, from an arrogant Soviet official, a government-approved trip to the Ukraine area to see their engineering success. Once on the luxury train, Jones easily eludes his alcoholic minder and transfers himself to a cargo boxcar. Inside, he sees travelers herded like cattle, freezing as the train moves forward.

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The second half of the film provides historical gut punch after gut punch. The movie at times seems to  be a stream of consciousness, the viewer transported behind Jones' eyes, as he plays witness to an evil far greater than the 20-something journalist dreamed possible. It's also an evil hidden from the world, and enabled by a media unwilling to confront it.

In the boxcar, every eye turns to Jones as he eats an orange. When he tosses the peeling to the ground, more than several try to get a bite at it. At one point Jones offers money to buy a winter coat from a traveler. The seller has no interest in money, but he'll trade for a loaf of black bread. When he arrives in Ukraine, Jones quickly learns the answer to his questions. Stalin's government is transporting all the grain harvested to Moscow. Menacing soldiers push people around, ignoring dead bodies in the streets. People are starving to death.

Jones narrowly escapes capture after disembarking from the train. A starving old man, noticing his camera, accuses him of being a spy to a soldier. After escaping the city, we spend several scenes of Jones wandering through deserted, frozen country, with long empty fields dotted with mostly silent villages. The white cinematography is superb, and director Agnieszka Holland frames the land so perfectly; so beautiful but so desolate, a gorgeous hell of death and suffering.

It is very, very hard to endure some of the ensuing scenes. I'll mention a couple because this is history and no one should complain about "spoilers." The scene that hit me the hardest was Jones encountering a cart on its way, collecting the dead along the road. A toddler, little more than an infant, is crying loudly next to his dead mother. The cart's driver tosses the mother in the cart, and without a thought, tosses the crying toddler, alive, into the cart with the dead bodies.

Another scene involves Jones entering a house where three children live. They are cooking meat. During dinner Jones inquires, to the oldest child, who provided the meat. She gives the name of her brother. Is he a hunter, Jones asks. No one at the table responds. Jones gets up and walks around the house. At an open back door, he sees a corpse preserved in the snow, a portion of meat from his leg cut out.

Later, at a bread line, a woman tells Jones that millions have died. He is then captured and returned to Moscow. He is released after being forced to say that the Ukraine has no problems and the people are happy. Before Jones is allowed to go home, six British engineers are arrested as "spies."

Duranty tells Jones that he got him released. An angry Jones confronts the corrupt journalist, offering him a piece of bark --- the food staple of Ukranians -- and tells him to place it next to his Pulitzer. Duranty tells Jones it's a pity, he would have made a good journalist.

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The final third of the film covers Jones' return to Britain and his attempts to tell about the forced famine, only to be hit with a continued barrage of fake news. A successful attack on his credibility is led by the Pulitzer-winner Duranty. Seventeen years ago, Sarsgaard effectively played an ethical journalist in the film, "Shattered Glass,"' about the New Republic plagiarism scandal. But the now-older actor is even better as the hobbling, slithering esteemed liar Duranty, happy to perpetuate fake news that feeds a famine. As National Review's Kyle Smith points out in his review (linked in this paragraph) Duranty was not a stereotypical hack or useful idiot, he was "a deeply evil man."

Even Jones' ex-employer demands he retract his claims. He won't. But he enters a journalistic and cultural purgatory that, frankly, is not uncommon in history. His principles insist he do what is right, rather than what is easy (apologies to "Albus Dumbledore").

Norton's Jones is a contrast. A deferential, glasses-wearing, mild young man with resolve of steel and a moral code that can withstand the taunts of the 1930s' version of Twitter and cancel culture. He doesn't take his blows without showing injury. Gordon's Jones cries as he is mocked.

He endures, and he finds an opportunity to get the truth about Ukraine in print, boldly barging into publisher William F. Hearst's vacation home and pitching his story. Hearst accepts it, seeming to take pleasure at taking on Duranty and the Times.

The movie ends with Jones' reports in the press and being widely discussed. Hearst ran a conservative empire so, like today, I'm sure Jones' reports were tagged as "conservative propaganda" by Duranty and others. But the facts got out; and that is what is important, as Jones' notes to a skeptical Ada early in the film.

While the film is about Stalin's Holodomor (Holocaust) it is also about fake news, and there are parallels to today, although of course not to the extent of covering up an event that killed millions. The past four years a fake Russian conspiracy charge against the current President, and many others, has been propagated, debunked, and nevertheless still propagated by both politicos and prominent media. One can read definitive accounts noting this hoax by journalists from the right and the left. History perhaps, doesn't change as much as we think.

Back to my son's questions: Why don't I know of Gareth Jones? Why does Walter Duranty still have a Pulitzer? There's a simple answer. Truth and courage does not always provide a great reputation among the world.

Jones was murdered about a year later in Mongolia while reporting. According to the film, his guide was associated with the Russian secret police. Duranty lived a cosseted, comfortable life, dying in Florida at the age of 73.

(1) Kleb, a composite character, is obviously in name an homage to Paul Klebnikov, a journalist for Forbes murdered in Russia in 2004.