(Posted to FB by Jairus Banaji.)
In the corpus of left-wing literary works it would be hard to find
writing that is vaguely comparable to the power of Victor Serge’s
mesmerizing prose. Here is how he describes the predicament faced by a
major character in “The Case of Comrade Tulayev”, viz. Maxim Andreyevich
Erchov, the head of Stalin’s security apparatus, soon after ‘the General
Secretary’ has told him (abruptly) to clear the backlog of pending
cases. Serge sets the scene by first conjuring an image of “the
swarming, proliferating, overflowing, all-conquering Dossiers” that have
piled up before Erchov and his staff at the ministry of “internal defense”.
Here’s the passage that follows, pure brilliance:
Dossiers arrived from the Ussuri (Japanese agents), from Yakutia
(sabotage, espionage, and traitors in the gold placers), from
Buriat-Mongolia (the case of the Buddhist monasteries), from Vladivostok
(the case of the submarine fleet command), from the construction yards
of Komsomolsk, City of the Young Communists (terrorist propaganda,
demoralization, abuse of power, Trotskyism-Bukharinism), from Tsingkiang
(smuggling, contacts with Japanese and British agents, Moslem
intrigues), from all the Turkestan republics (separatism, Pan-Turkism,
banditry, foreign intelligence services; Mahmudism — but who on earth
was Mahmud? — in Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan, Tadjikistan, Kazakstan, Old
Bokhara, Syr Darya); the Samarkand assassination was connected with the
Alm Ata scandal, the Alm Ata scandal with the case of espionage
(aggravated by the kidnaping of an Iranian national) at the Ispahan
Consulate; forgotten cases came to life again in concentration camps in
the Arctic, new cases were born in prisons; memorandums in code, dated
from Paris, Oslo, Washington, Panama, Hankow, Canton in flames, Guernica
in ruins, bombed Barcelona, Madrid desperately surviving under a
succession of terrors (and so on — consult a map of the two hemispheres)
demanded investigations; Kaluga announced suspicious epidemics among
livestock, Tambov agrarian discontent, Leningrad presented twenty
dossiers simultaneously — the Sailors’ Club case, the Red Triangle
Factory case, the Academy of Sciences case, the Former Revolutionary
Prisoners case, the Leninist Youth case, the Geologic Committee case,
the Free Masons case, the matter of homosexuality in the Fleet…Now here,
now there, a succession of shots traversed this mass of names,
documents, figures, mysterious lives whose mystery was never entirely
laid bare, supplementary investigations, denunciations, reports, insane
ideas. Several hundred uniformed men, ranked in a strict hierarchy,
dealt with these papers day and night, were dealt with by them in their
turn, suddenly vanished into them, passing the perpetual labor on to
other hands. On the summit of the pyramid stood Maxim Andreyevich
Erchov. What could he do?
(I love that “who on earth was Mahmud?”!)
Pdfs of “The Case of Comrade Tulayev” are easily available online. The
best one is a scan of the NYRB edition of 2012, available at the first
site you come to on typing ‘Victor Serge pdf of Case of Comrade Tulayev’.
And here is the renegade Hitchens’s review of the novel:
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2003/12/pictures-from-an-inquisition/302838/<https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2003/12/pictures-from-an-inquisition/302838/?fbclid=IwAR17lqNFW5DJy-9TBEvz53D7FmWYZSDqQUd-G65Q80qd8gbB94moK7Iix7w>
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VICTOR SERGE INTRODUCTION BY SUSAN SONTAG'
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127Matthew E Strauss, Richard Draytonand125 others
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