Graham Jepps of Highlands Solidarity
reviews an often overlooked classic of Russian and Soviet
literature - The Case of Comrade Tuleyev,
by Victor Serge, writer and revolutionary.
“This novel belongs entirely
to the domain of fiction. The truth created by the novelist
cannot be confounded, in any degree whatever, with the truth of
the historian or the chronicler. Any attempt to establish a
precise connexion between characters or episodes in this book and
known historical personages and events would therefore be without
justification.”
The disclaimer on the frontispiece of Victor
Serge’s novel of political intrigue and paranoia may have
been born out of fear of reprisal but it soon becomes apparent
that it is in fact one of the most glaringly unsubtle pieces of
irony ever written. The random assassination of a high-ranking
Politburo official triggers an investigation which becomes
increasingly paranoid as it spreads its net ever wider across the
reaches of Soviet influence around Europe. Sound familiar?
This book is indeed a thinly-veiled allegory
of the assassination of Sergei Kirov which led to the Great
Terror of the Stalinist purges in the 1930s. Serge, however, has
an unusual slant on the narrative. The orthodox view of the
assassination, as examined in great detail by Robert Conquest in
his now standard work on the subject The Great Terror, is
that Stalin surreptitiously instigated the murder of Kirov,
giving him the excuse to give vent to his paranoia and purge the
Communist Party of an ever-increasing number of people whom he
believed to be undesirable or a threat to his and the
state’s security.
Serge always maintained that the murder was
a random attack and that Stalin had no knowledge of it. The fact
that the events were manipulated by Stalin to his own political
advantage was nothing more than an example of the opportunism and
paranoia which marked his personality. Serge stood pretty much
alone in this view until the post-Glasnost access to the
Kremlin’s archives uncovered evidence which may well have
vindicated him, and which will no doubt keep students of Soviet
history in gainful employment for decades to come.
Victor Serge was born to Russian émigré
parents in Belgium in 1889 and grew up in a highly intellectually
politicised but poverty stricken environment. He was imprisoned
in Paris for anarchist activities and later made his way to
Russia in the early years of the revolution where he worked for
Zinoviev and later became an ally of Trotsky. He was in turn
imprisoned in Siberia, a victim of early Stalinist paranoia, but
was released in 1931, and spent the rest of his life in political
exile.
The book is wonderfully written, taking the
reader on a grand tour of Soviet influence around Europe, from
the Siberian gulags to an embattled Barcelona. Filled with
sublime descriptive passages, the pinnacle of which is perhaps
the surreal troika journey across the Siberian wastes, it is also
suffused with a Kafkaesque ability to conjure up a nightmare
vision of petty bureaucratic officiousness, in which people live
in fear of imminent arrest for reasons the party apparatchiks
never feel the need to explain.
Serge introduces us to a wide assortment of
beautifully portrayed characters, representing all levels of
Soviet political hierarchy, from the humblest civil servant,
through party apparatchiks, to a subtle and far from demonised
Stalin, who appears as The Chief.
The greatness of this novel lies in the fact
that Serge not only had first-hand experience of the events about
which he wrote, but was a truly masterful and experimental,
though much overlooked, writer. Although written in French, the
novel calls to mind the panoramic surrealism of other great
Russian novels of the twentieth century such as Bulgakov’s The
Master and Margarita and Bely’s Petersburg. In
common with those novels, this story is not a simple character
narrative but an exploration of the interplay of almost cosmic
political forces which take on a life of their own. This is a
novel which will appeal to lovers of great literature and Soviet
history alike; a true forgotten masterpiece.