The Case of Comrade Tulayev (2 page)

Is it because there were too many dualities in his life? He was a militant, a world-improver, to the end, which made him anathema to the right. (Even if, as he noted in his journal in February 1944, “Problems no longer have their former beautiful simplicity: it was convenient to live on antinomies like socialism or capitalism.”) But he was a knowledgeable enough anti-Communist to worry that the American and British governments had not grasped that Stalin's goal after 1945 was to take over all of Europe (at the cost of a Third World War), and this, in the era of widespread pro-Soviet or anti-anti-Communist bias among intellectuals in Western Europe, made Serge a renegade, a reactionary, a warmonger. “All the right enemies,” the old motto proclaims: Serge had too many enemies. As an ex-, now anti-, Communist, he was never penitent enough. He deplores but he does not regret. He has not given up on the idea of radical social change because of the totalitarian outcome of the Russian Revolution. For Serge — to this extent he agrees with Trotsky — the revolution was betrayed. He is not saying it was a tragic illusion, a catastrophe for the Russian people, from the beginning. (But might Serge have said this had he lived another decade or more? Probably.) Finally, he was a lifelong practicing intellectual, which seemed to trump his achievement as a novelist, and he was a passionate political activist, which did not enhance his credentials as a novelist either.

Is it because he continued to the end to identify himself as a revolutionary, a vocation that is now so discredited in the prosperous world? Is it because, most implausibly, he insisted on being hopeful…still? “Behind us,” he wrote in 1943, in
Memoirs of a Revolutionary
, “lies a victorious revolution gone astray, several abortive attempts at revolution, and massacres in so great a number as to inspire a certain dizziness.” And yet Serge declares that “those were the only roads possible for us. And insists, “I have more confidence in mankind and in the future than ever before.” Surely this could not have been true.

Is it because, embattled and defeated as he was, his literary work refused to take on the expected cargo of melancholy? His indomitability is not as attractive to us as a more anguished reckoning. In his fiction, Serge writes about the worlds he has lived in, not about himself. It is a voice that forbids itself the requisite tones of despair or contrition or bewilderment — literary tones, as most people understand them — although Serge's own situation was increasingly grim. By 1947, he was desperately trying to get out of Mexico, where, by the terms of his visa, he was banned from all political activity, and, since an American visa was out of the question because of his Communist Party membership in the 1920s, to return to France. At the same time, incapable of being uninterested, unstimulated, wherever he was, he became fascinated by what he had observed on several trips around the country of the indigenous cultures and the landscape, and had begun a book about Mexico. The end was miserable. Shabbily dressed, ill-nourished, increasingly plagued by angina — worsened by the high altitude of Mexico City — he had a heart attack while out late one evening, hailed a taxi, and died in the backseat. The driver deposited him at a police station: it was two days before his family learned what had happened to him and were able to claim the body.

In short, there was nothing, ever, triumphant about his life, as much that of the eternal poor student as the militant on the run — unless one excepts the triumph of being immensely gifted and industrious as a writer; the triumph of being principled and also astute, and therefore incapable of keeping company with the faithful and the cravenly gullible and the merely hopeful; the triumph of being incorruptible as well as brave, and therefore on a different, lonely path from the liars and toadies and careerists; the triumph of being, after the early 1920s, right.

Because he was right, he has been punished as a writer of fiction. The truth of history crowds out the truth of fiction — as if one were obliged to choose between them…

Is it because the life was so steeped in historical drama as to overshadow the work? Indeed, some of his fervent supporters have asserted that Serge's greatest literary work was his own tumultuous, danger-filled, ethically stalwart life. Something similar has been said of Oscar Wilde, who himself could not resist the masochistic quip, “I put all my genius into my life; I put only my talent into my works.” Wilde was mistaken, and so is this misguided compliment to Serge. As is the case with most major writers, Serge's books are better, wiser, more important than the person who wrote them. To think otherwise is to condescend to Serge and to the very questions — How shall one live? How can I make sense of my own life? How can life be made better for those who are oppressed? — he honored by his lucidity, his rectitude, his valor, his defeats. While it is true that literature, particularly nineteenth-century Russian literature, is the home of these questions, it is cynical — or merely philistine — to consider as literary a life lived in their light. That would be to denigrate both morality and literature. History, too.

English-language readers of Serge today have to think themselves back to a time when most people accepted that the course of their lives would be determined by history rather than psychology, public rather than private crises. It was history, a particular historical moment, that drove Serge's parents out of tsarist Russia: the wave of repressiveness and state terror that followed the assassination of Alexander II by Narodnaya Volya (People's Will), the terrorist branch of the populist movement, in 1881. Serge's scientist father, Leon Kibalchich, at that time an officer in the Imperial Guard, belonged to a military group sympathetic to the
narodnik
(populist) demands, and barely escaped being shot when the group was discovered. In his first refuge, Geneva, he met and married a radical student from St. Petersburg of Polish gentry origin, and the couple was to spend the rest of the decade, in the words of their second-generation political-exile son, commuting “in quest of their daily bread and of good libraries… between London (the British Museum), Paris, Switzerland, and Belgium.”

Revolution was at the heart of the socialist exile culture into which Serge was born: the quintessential hope, the quintessential intensity. “The conversations of grown-ups dealt with trials, executions, escapes, and Siberian highways, with great ideas incessantly argued over, and with the latest books about these ideas.” Revolution was the modern tragic drama. “On the walls of our humble and makeshift lodgings, there were always the portraits of men who had been hanged.” (One portrait, surely, was of Nikolai Kibalchich, a distant relative of his father, who was among the five conspirators convicted of assassinating Alexander II.)

Revolution entailed danger, the risk of death, the likelihood of prison. Revolution entailed hardship, privation, hunger. “I think that if anyone had asked me at the age of twelve, ‘What is life?' (and I often asked it of myself), I would have replied, ‘I do not know, but I can see that it means “
Thou shalt think, thou shalt struggle, thou shalt be hungry
.”'”

And it was. To read Serge's memoirs is to be brought back to an era that seems very remote today in its introspective energies and passionate intellectual quests and code of self-sacrifice and immense hope: an era in which the twelve-year-olds of cultivated parents might normally ask themselves “What is life?” Serge's cast of mind was not, for that time, precocious. It was the household culture of several generations of voraciously well-read idealists, many from the Slavic countries — the children of Russian literature, as it were. Staunch believers in science and human betterment, they were to provide the troops for many of the radical movements of the first third of the twentieth century; and were to be used, disillusioned, betrayed, and, if they happened to live in the Soviet Union, put to death. In his memoirs Serge reports his friend Pilnyak saying to him in 1933: “There isn't a single thinking adult in this country who hasn't thought that he might get shot.”

Starting in the late 1920s, the chasm between reality and propaganda widened drastically. It was the climate of opinion that made the courageous Romanian-born writer Panaït Istrati (1884–1935) consider withdrawing his truthful report on a sixteen-month stay in the Soviet Union in 1927–1928,
Vers une autre flamme
(Towards Another Flame), at the behest of his powerful French literary patron, Romain Rolland, which, when he did publish it, was rejected by all his former friends and supporters in the literary world; and that led André Malraux in his capacity as editor at Gallimard to turn down the adversarial biography of Stalin by the Russian-born Boris Souvarine (1895–1984; real name: Boris Lifchitz) as inimical to the cause of the Spanish Republic. (Istrati and Souvarine, who were close friends of Serge's, formed with him a kind of triumvirate of foreign-born francophone writers who, from the late 1920s on, assumed the thankless role of denouncing from the left — therefore, prematurely — what was happening in the Soviet Union.) To many living in the Depression-afflicted capitalist world, it seemed impossible
not
to sympathize with the struggle of this vast backward country to survive and to create, according to its stated aims, a new society based on economic and social justice. André Gide was being only a bit florid when he wrote in his journal in April 1932 that he would be willing to die for the Soviet Union:

As for what was actually happening in the USSR in 1932 — this is how Serge began “The Hospital in Leningrad,” a short story he wrote in Mexico City in 1946 that anticipates the narratives of Solzhenitsyn:

In October 1932, Serge wrote to the Central Committee of the Party appealing to be allowed to emigrate; permission was refused. In March 1933, Serge was arrested again, and after a term in the Lubyanka was sent into internal exile to Orenburg, a bleak town on the frontier between Russia and Kazakhstan. Serge's plight was the subject of immediate protests in Paris. At the International Congress of Writers for the Defense of Culture, a stellar gathering held in Paris in June 1935, presided over by Gide and Malraux, which was the climax of Comintern-designed efforts to mobilize unaffiliated progressive-minded writers in defense of the Soviet Union — this just as Stalin's program of framing and executing all the surviving members of the Bolshevik Old Guard was getting under way — “the case of Victor Serge” was raised by a number of delegates. The following year, Gide, who was about to leave, with entourage, for a triumphal tour of the Soviet Union on which great propaganda importance had been placed, went to see the Soviet ambassador in Paris requesting Serge's release. Rolland, on a return state visit to Russia, brought up the case with Stalin himself.

In April 1936, Serge (with his teenage son) was taken from Orenburg to Moscow, stripped of his Soviet citizenship, reunited with his mentally fragile wife and their infant daughter, and put on a train to Warsaw — the sole instance during the era of the Great Terror when a writer was liberated (that is, expelled from Soviet Russia) as the result of a foreign campaign of support. Undoubtedly, it helped enormously that the Belgian-born Russian was considered a foreigner.

After reaching Brussels in late April, Serge published an “Open Letter” to Gide in the French magazine
Esprit
, thanking him for a recent approach he had made to the Soviet authorities to try to recover Serge's confiscated manuscripts, and evoking some Soviet realities Gide might not hear about during his tour, such as the arrest and murder of many writers and the total suppression of intellectual freedom. (Serge had already sought contact with Gide in early 1934, sending him a letter from Orenburg about their shared conceptions of freedom in literature.) The two writers were able to meet secretly several times after Gide's return, in Paris in November 1936 and in Brussels in January 1937. Serge's journal accounts of these meetings provide a poignant contrast: Gide the consummate insider, the master on whom the mantle of the Great Writer had descended, and Serge, the knight of lost causes, itinerant, impoverished, always in jeopardy. (Of course, Gide was wary of Serge — of being influenced, of being misled.)

The French writer of the period whom Serge does resemble — in the starkness of his rectitude, his incessant studiousness, his principled renunciation of comfort, possessions, security — is his younger contemporary and fellow political militant, Simone Weil. It is more than likely that they met in Paris in 1936, shortly after Serge's liberation, or in 1937. Since June 1934, right after his arrest, Weil had been among those committed to keeping alive “the case of Victor Serge” and making direct protests to the Soviet authorities. They had a close friend in common, Souvarine; both wrote regularly for the syndicalist magazine
La Révolution prolétarienne
. Weil was well known to Trotsky — the twenty-five-year-old Weil had had an evening of face-to-face debate with Trotsky on his brief visit to Paris in December 1934, when Weil arranged for him to use an apartment belonging to her parents for a clandestine political meeting — and figures in a letter to Serge in July 1936 in response to the suggestion that she collaborate on the new magazine Serge hoped to found. And, during Weil's two months in late summer 1936 as a volunteer with an international militia fighting for the Spanish Republic, her principal political contact, whom she saw upon arriving in Barcelona, was the dissident Communist Julian Gorkin, another close friend of Serge's.