The Case of Comrade Tulayev (3 page)

Trotskyist comrades had been the most active campaigners for Serge's freedom, and while in Brussels Serge gave his adherence to the Fourth International — as the league of Trotsky's supporters called themselves — although he knew the movement did not advance a viable alternative to the Leninist doctrines and practice that had led to Stalinist tyranny. (For Trotsky, the crime was that the
wrong
people were being shot.) His departure for Paris in 1937 was followed by the open rift with Trotsky, who, from his new, Mexican exile, denounced Serge as a closet anarchist; out of respect and affection for Trotsky, Serge refused to return the attack. Unfazed by the obloquy of being perceived as a turncoat, a traitor to the left, he published more against-the-stream tracts and dossiers on the destiny of the revolution from Lenin to Stalin, and another novel,
Midnight in the Century
(1939), set five years earlier, mostly in a remote town resembling Orenburg to which persecuted members of the Left Opposition have been deported. It is the very first depiction in a novel of the Gulag — properly,
GULAG
, the acronym for that vast internal carceral empire whose official name in Russian translates as Chief Administration of Camps.
Midnight in the Century
is dedicated to comrades from the most honorable of the radical parties in the Spanish Republic, the dissenting Communist — that is, anti-Stalinist — Partido Obrero de Unificación Marxista (
POUM
); its leader Andrès Nin, executed by Soviet agents in 1937, was a cherished friend of Serge's.

In June 1940, after the German occupation of Paris, Serge fled to the south of France, eventually reaching the haven set up by the heroic Varian Fry who, in the name of an American private group calling itself the Emergency Rescue Committee, was to help some two thousand scholars, writers, artists, musicians, and scientists find an exit from Hitler's Europe. There, in the villa outside Marseilles that its inmates and visitors — they included André Breton, Max Ernst, and André Masson — dubbed Espervisa, Serge continued work on the new, more ambitious novel about the reign of state murder in Soviet Russia he had begun in Paris in early 1940. When a Mexican visa finally came through for Serge (Breton and the others were all admitted to the United States), he set out in March 1941 on the long precarious sea voyage. Delayed for questioning, then jailed by Vichy government officials when the cargo ship stopped in Martinique, delayed again for want of transit visas in the Dominican Republic, where during the enforced sojourn he wrote a political tract designed for a Mexican public (
Hitler versus Stalin
), and delayed again in Havana, where, jailed once more, he went on with his novel, Serge did not arrive in Mexico until September. He finished
The Case of Comrade Tulayev
the following year.

At the beginning of the twenty-first century, nothing of the novel's once controversial aura remains. No sane person now can dispute the toll of suffering that the Bolshevik system inflicted on the Russian people. Then, the consensus was elsewhere, producing the scandal of Gide's unfavorable report on his trip,
Return from the USSR
(1937): Gide remained even after his death in 1951 the great left-wing writer who had betrayed Spain. The attitude was reproduced in Sartre's notorious refusal to broach the subject of the Gulag on the grounds that it would discourage the just militancy of the French working class. (“
Il faut pas faire désesperer Billancourt
.”) For most writers who identified with the left in those decades, or who simply thought of themselves as against war (and were appalled at the prospect of a Third World War), condemning the Soviet Union was at the very least problematic.

As if to confirm the anxiety on the left, those who had no problem denouncing the Soviet Union seemed to be precisely those who had no qualms about being racist or anti-Semitic or contemptuous of the poor; illiberals, who had never heard the siren call of idealism or been moved to any active sympathy with the excluded and the persecuted. The vice president of a major American insurance company, who was also America's greatest twentieth-century poet, might welcome Serge's testimony. Thus section XIV of Wallace Stevens's magisterial long poem “Esthétique du mal,” written in 1945, opens with:

That it seems odd to find Serge evoked in a poem of Stevens's suggests how thoroughly Serge has been forgotten, for he was indeed a considerable presence in some of the most influential serious magazines of the 1940s. Stevens is likely to have been a reader of
Partisan Review
, if not of Dwight Macdonald's maverick radical magazine
Politics
, which published Serge (and Simone Weil, too). Macdonald and his wife, Nancy, had been a lifeline, financially and otherwise, to Serge during the desperate months in Marseilles and the obstacle-ridden voyage, and went on with their assiduous help once Serge and his family were in Mexico. Sponsored by Macdonald, Serge had begun writing for
Partisan Review
in 1938, and continued to send articles from this last, improbable residence. In 1942, he became Mexican correspondent of the New York anti-Communist biweekly
The New Leader
(Macdonald strongly disapproved), and later began contributing — on Orwell's recommendation — to
Polemic
and to Cyril Connolly's
Horizon
in London.

Minority magazines; minority views. Excerpted first in
Partisan Review
, Czeslaw Milosz's masterly portraits of the mutilation of the writer's honor, the writer's conscience, under communism,
The Captive Mind
(1953), was discounted by much of the American literary public as a work of cold war propaganda by the hitherto unknown émigré Polish writer. Similar suspicions persisted into the 1970s: when Robert Conquest's implacable, irrefutable chronicle of the state slaughters of the 1930s,
The Great Terror
, appeared in 1969, the book could be regarded in many quarters as controversial — its conclusions perhaps unhelpful, its implications downright reactionary.

Those decades of turning a blind eye to what went on in Communist regimes, specifically the conviction that to criticize the Soviet Union was to give aid and comfort to Fascists and warmongers, seem almost incomprehensible now. In the early twenty-first century, we have moved on to other illusions — other lies that intelligent people with good intentions and humane politics tell themselves and their supporters in order not to give aid and comfort to their enemies.

There have always been people to argue that the truth is sometimes inexpedient, counterproductive — a luxury. (This is known as thinking practically, or politically.) And, on the other side, the well-intentioned are understandably reluctant to jettison commitments, views, and institutions in which much idealism has been invested. Situations do arise in which truth and justice may seem incompatible. And there may be even more resistance to perceiving the truth than there is to acknowledging the claims of justice. It seems all too easy for people
not
to recognize the truth, especially when it may mean having to break with, or be rejected by, a community that supplies a valued part of their identity.

A different outcome is possible if one hears the truth from someone to whom one is disposed to listen. How was the Marquis de Custine, during his five-month tour of Russia a century earlier, able — prophetically — to understand how central to this society were the extravagances of despotism and submissiveness and indefatigable lying for the benefit of foreigners, which he described in his journal in the form of letters,
Letters from Russia
? Surely it mattered that Custine's lover was Polish, the young Count Ignacy Gurowski, who must have been eager to tell him of the horrors of tsarist oppression. Why was Gide, among all the left-wing visitors to the Soviet Union in the 1930s, the one to remain unseduced by the rhetoric of Communist equality and revolutionary idealism? Perhaps because he had been primed to detect the dishonesty and the fear of his hosts by the intrusive briefings of the unimpeachable Victor Serge.

Serge, modestly, says it only takes some clarity and independence to tell the truth. In
Memoirs of a Revolutionary
, he writes:

“What is terrible when you seek the truth…” A dictum to be pinned above every writer's desk.

The ignominious obtuseness and lies of Dreiser, Rolland, Henri Barbusse, Louis Aragon, Beatrice and Sidney Webb, Halldór Laxness, Egon Erwin Kisch, Walter Duranty, Leon Feuchtwanger, and the like are mostly forgotten. And so are those who opposed them, who fought for the truth. The truth, once acquired, is ungrateful. We can't remember everyone. What is remembered is not testimony but … literature. The presumptive case for exempting Serge from the oblivion that awaits most heroes of truth lies, finally, in the excellence of his fiction, above all
The Case of Comrade Tulayev
. But to be a literary writer perceived only or mainly as a didactic writer; to be a writer without a country, a country in whose literary canon his fiction would find a place — these elements of Serge's complex fate continue to obscure this admirable, enthralling book.

Fiction, for Serge, is truth — the truth of self-transcendence, the obligation to give voice to those who are mute or have been silenced. He disdained novels of private life, most of all autobiographical novels. “Individual existences were of no interest to me — particularly my own,” he remarks in the
Memoirs
. In a journal entry (March 1944), Serge explains the larger reach of his idea of fictional truth:

The point of fiction was storytelling, world-evoking. This credo drew Serge as a fiction writer to two seemingly incompatible ideas of the novel.

One is the historical panorama, in which single novels have their place as episodes of a comprehensive story. The story, for Serge, was heroism and injustice in the first half of the European twentieth century, and could have started with a novel set in anarchist circles in France just before 1914 (about which he did finish a memoir, seized by the GPU). Of the novels Serge was able to complete, the time line runs from the First through the Second World War — that is, from
Men in Prison
, written in Leningrad at the end of the 1920s and published in Paris in 1930, to
Les Années sans pardon
(The Pitiless Years), his last novel, written in Mexico in 1946 and not published until 1971, in Paris. (It has yet to be translated into English.)
The Case of Comrade Tulayev
, whose material is the Great Terror of the 1930s, comes towards the end of the cycle. Characters recur — a classic feature of novels, like some of Balzac's, conceived as a sequence — though not as many as one might expect, and none of them an alter ego, a stand-in for Serge himself. The High Commissar for Security Erchov, the prosecutor Fleischman, the loathsome apparatchik Zvyeryeva, and the virtuous Left Oppositionist Ryzhik of
The Case of Comrade Tulayev
had all figured in
Conquered City
(1932), Serge's third novel, which takes place during the siege of Petrograd, and, probably, in the lost novel,
La Tourmente
(The Storm), which was the sequel to
Conquered City
. (Ryzhik is also an important character, and Fleischman a minor one, in
Midnight in the Century
.)

Of this project we have only fragments. But if Serge did not commit himself doggedly to a chronicle, like Solzhenitsyn's sequence of novels about the Lenin era, it is not simply because Serge lacked the time to complete his sequence, but because another idea of the novel was at work, somewhat subverting the first. Solzhenitsyn's historical novels are all of a piece from a literary point of view, and none the better for that. Serge's novels illustrate several different conceptions of how to narrate and to what end. The “I” of
Men in Prison
(1930) is a medium for giving voice to the others, many others; it is a novel of compassion, of solidarity. “I don't want to write memoirs,” he said in a letter to Istrati, who did the preface to Serge's first novel. The second novel,
The Birth of Our Power
(1931), uses a mix of voices — the first-person “I” and “we” and an omniscient third person. The multivolume chronicle, the novel as sequel, was not the best vessel for Serge's development as a literary writer, but remained a kind of default position from which, always working under harassment and financial strain, he could generate new fictional tasks.