Adorno's famous statement - that it is barbaric to write
lyric poetry after Auschwitz –is an expression of a more general dilemma: how
does art deal with the horrors of reality, and is it indeed appropriate to create
an aesthetic experience based on horror? In the case of this novel, the horror
is the Great Purge of 1934-8, or the Yezhovshchina,
as it is called in Russian, and the novel stands on a par with Akhmatova's long
poem Requiem as both an indictment
and a testament to what occurred.
On December 1st 1934, the Leningrad Party head,
and member of the Central Committee Sergei Kirov was assassinated on his way to
work. The circumstances of his murder were – and still are – shrouded in a web
of conflicting conspiracy theories, but it marked the start of the Great Purge.
Suspects were rounded up, interrogated, forced to sign confessions, put on
trial during which evidence of more conspiracies came to light, and then they
were shot or imprisoned. The purge effected all ranks of Soviet society,
especially the Old Bolsheviks, as Stalin used the assassination and subsequent
enquiry as a pretext to remove anyone whose loyalty to him personally was not
to be trusted. Among the most prominent victims were Zinoviev, Kamenev and
Bukharin, all high level party members who had known Lenin personally, and who
had played crucial roles in the Revolutions of 1917 and the subsequent Civil
War, and who represented the main threat to Stalin's dictatorship. The chief implementer
of the purge was the head of the NKVD, Nikolai Yezhov, who was effectively
Stalin's puppet until he too was purged in 1938 and replaced by Beria. The
country became infected with fear as the purge extended its tentacles. Family,
friends, colleagues, chance acquaintances, old comrades of the accused were
hauled in for questioning and never heard of again; those who were doing the
investigating one day were themselves hauled in and liquidated the next.
These are the events the novel describes. Victor Serge's
credentials as a revolutionary were impeccable. Before the Revolution he had
been imprisoned many times for revolutionary and anarchist activity, and had
spent 5 years in solitary confinement before the age of 27. He joined the
Bolshevik Party in 1919, played an active role in the Civil War and was sent on
foreign missions for the Commintern. He became associated with the Left Opposition
to Stalin's rule in the late 1920s, and in 1933 was himself arrested as part of
the purge and sentenced to internal exile. He was expelled from the Soviet
Union in 1936 and died in exile in Mexico City in 1947. He produced major
studies of the early days of the Revolution in addition to other non-fiction
work and journalism, as well as seven novels. The Case of Comrade Tulayev was published in French in 1949.
ooOOOooo
One of the main themes of the book is the relation between reality
and fiction; and concomitantly about the difference between journalism and literature.
Tulayev is emphatically not journalism,
but literature grounded in fact, a distinction that is important for Serge
because he was a preeminent practitioner of both genres. Journalism is always
restricted by its historical circumstance; literature always rises above it;
journalism dates, literature - art in general- remains always relevant; and by
a strange alchemy, the greatest art is that which is most firmly of its period
and yet also eternally transcends it. This theme is signalled by the opening
disclaimer, a subtle parody of the usual legal rider:
This novel belongs
entirely to the domain of literary fiction. The truth created by the novelist
cannot be confounded, in any degree whatever, with the truth of the historian
or the chronicler.
Formally, what distinguishes journalism from literature is
the presence of pattern, literally artifice. The novel proclaims itself as a
work of literature through its structure, by the way it calls out to other
works of literature, by the way it allegorises the facts of history, and by the
presence of beauty.
Many readers and critics have seen the absence of a central
protagonist as a weakness of the book, but this is to misread the novel
entirely. For the first few chapters, the novel does indeed read like a
collection of character-centred short stories connected only by their historical
setting. Gradually the connections between these disparate characters become
clear; they begin to appear on the periphery of each other's stories. What
links them all is their connection to the case of Comrade Tulayev, the novel's
name for Kirov. The novel thus highlights the way that the purge connected
everyone in a kind of sinister six degrees of separation. The slightest
connection with someone else could result in arrest for something you didn't
know you had done. The novel – like the purge - is in effect a web, with the
spider – the case of Comrade Tulayev – at the centre.
The first chapter is a wonderful imagining of how some of
the most beloved characters in 19th century Russian literature would
have coped in the Soviet regime of the 20th century. The novel opens with Kostia
longing for a pair of shoes he has seen in a thrift shop. Shades of Gogol's
story The Overcoat are everywhere
present. The descriptions of the communal apartment are freighted with echoes
of the very early works of Dostoevsky: Poor
Folk, Mr Prokharchin and The Double;
the clerk Romachkin who lives on the other side of the wall from Kostia is in
effect an amalgamation of Dostoevsky's Prokharchin and Golyadkin. Life in the
1930s, Victor Serge seems to be saying, is not much different from life in the 1840s for
those at the bottom of society: there is the same poverty, repression and fear.
Although the novel is recognisably of its historical
circumstances, the essential facts of the purge have been scrupulously
ambiguated. The action of the novel takes place in an unnamed year, and it is
unclear exactly how long the action of the novel lasts. Some of the real events
mentioned in narrative arc include the demolition of the Cathedral of Christ
the Saviour (1931), the show trials of Zinoviev and Kamenev (1936), the Battle of
Madrid in the Spanish Civil War (1936), and the re-establishment of religion
(1941), and it's through these events that a time frame for the action of the
novel can be worked out. A similar ambiguation for characters is employed.
Tulayev is obviously Kirov, but Kirov is also mentioned in the text, so perhaps
Tulayev is not Kirov. Kostia both is and is not Leonid Nikolayev, the Lee
Harvey Oswald-figure who was ostensibly Kirov's assassin. Candidates for Yezhov
include Erchov, while the Prosecutor General Vyshinsky, who led the show trials,
is represented by Rachevsky; Rublev in the novel could be both Zinoviev and
Bukharin; and Kondratiev, the Old
Bolshevik, writer and Commintern activist, could be Serge himself. Stalin
appears in the novel as the Chief, not as the Boss, which was how he was actually
called by the Party rank and file. The novel employs the same device used by
Dostoevsky in Demons in which a
character represents both a real person and a type, in a kind of double
signification. However, the opening disclaimer disingenuously warns against
looking for these kind of connections:
Any attempt to
establish a precise connection between characters or episodes in this book and
known historical personages and events would therefore be without
justification.
A recurring image throughout the novel is starlight, and
stars; and it's in these passages – and in the passages describing nature
generally -that Serge's writing is at its most beautiful. Amidst the terror and
the squalor, the descriptions of starlight on snow, or cranes flying over a
winter forest stab the heart with beauty:
Crystals full of a
secret light flowered on stones, covered the house fronts, clothed monuments.
You walked on powdered stars through a stellar city: myriads of crystals
floated on the globes of light around the street lamps. Toward midnight the sky
became incredibly clear. The smallest light shot skyward like a sword. It was a
festival of frost. The silence seemed to scintillate...
oooOOOooo
Historians of the purges have exercised themselves over the
question of why the purges happened. This is the wrong question: they happened
because Stalin ordered them. What's more interesting, surely, are the questions
of how those purged reacted, how they themselves perceived the way purges were effecting
the progress of the Revolution, why the Old Bolsheviks allowed Stalin to get
away with what he did, why no one inside the upper echelons of the party
stopped him before it was too late, how they justified the purges to
themselves, indeed, how they lived with themselves. What historians cannot
answer, the novelist can; and one of the most interesting aspects of the novel
is the way it examines these questions by imagining how key figures in the Party
attempted to reconcile their commitment to the Revolution with their sense of
revulsion of what Stalin was doing to it.
In a hushed conversation in their bugged apartment between
the intellectual Rublev and his wife Dora shortly before his arrest, Dora asks:
"Don't they realize they are poisoning
the soul of the proletariat? That they are poisoning the springs of the
future?" Rublev answers: "No, they are not cowards...they are
true, that is still true to the Party, and there is no more Party, there are
only inquisitors, executioners, criminals... They assure themselves that it is
better to die dishonoured, murdered by the Chief, than to denounce him to the
international bourgeoisie..." He almost screamed like a man crushed in an
accident: "And in that they are right."
In another scene, the High Commissar, now under arrest
himself, is brought face to face with an old comrade, Ricciotti, who tries to
persuade him to sign the confession which has been prepared for him. "Better men than you and I have done it
before us. Others will do it after us. No one can resist the machine. No one
has the right, no one can resist the Party without going over to the enemy."
As Erchov resists and protests his innocence, Ricciotti reminds him of all
those Erchov himself has signed off for execution, of the terrible things the
Bolsheviks did in the name of Revolution. Erchov's riposte is: "I was a soldier, I obeyed orders-
that's all", the eternal refrain of the loyal functionary who has
forgotten his humanity.
In another key scene where Kondratiev reports on his trip to
Spain to the Chief, the Chief asks him: "Do
you think I have many faults, Ivan?" Kondratiev answers him: "It is not for me to judge you. You are
the Party." The Chief muses: "I'll wipe out every one of them,
tirelessly, mercilessly, down even to the least of the least. It is hard, but
it must be. Every one of them. There is the country, the future. I do what must
be done. Like a machine."
In addition to the all-pervasive fear of the times, Victor
Serge movingly brings to life the sense of great ideals, sacrifices and hopes
utterly crushed by the burden of petty expediences, violence and lies, and the
resultant feeling of desolation and unspeakable regret; and in this, perhaps,
lies the great achievement of the novel.
The stars of death
stood over us.
And Russia, guiltless,
beloved, writhed
Under the crunch of
bloodstained boots
Under the wheels of
Black Marias.
From Requiem
Anna Akhmatova
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