The Case of Comrade Tulayev

Rating:
Summary: terror brought to life
Review: This book is a forgotten masterpiece! Its author, Victor Serge, was born in Belgium in 1890, of exiled russian parents, become an anarchist, went to revolutionary Russia in 1919 where he fought for the Bolsheviks, then became a left oppositionist to Stalin, being expelled from the Party, emprisioned and deported to Central Asia, then expelled from the Soviet Union in 1936 as a result of an international campaign. He died in Mexico in 1947. Of his many works, this novel is widely regarded as his fictional masterpiece, considered by many as the finest piece of literature ever written about the stalinist purges. This is indeed a wonderfully conceived work, with a structure that in a certain sense seems to mirror conditions under Stalin's reign: Tulayev, a member of the Central Committee of the USSR Communist Party is murdered by mere chance, in the first chapter, by an anonymous disgruntled moscovite youth. Then, in suceeding chapters, members of government, party funcionaries, and known oppositionists (all of them entirely innoced of this particular crime,) are charged of being part of a wide conspiracy, arrested and interrogated. As the action unfolds, the diverse independent characters become ever more connected, at least in the perpective of the officials in charge of the investigation, not a few of which end up also arrested as conspirators... After a number of life sentences for the supposed plot are passed on and duly executed, the true culprit discover by change, in the last chapter, the tragic dimensions his act has produced. The way the main investigator of the case deals with the anonymous letter he receives from the murderer is a telling parable of a totalitariam state contempt for the truth. All this evolved story is written with such a superb wit, and even brilliancy at times, that the reading of this book is made into an indelible experience.

Rating:
Summary: Kirov and after.
Review: This political novel tells the story of the murder (organized by Stalin, according to R. Medvedev) of comrade Kirov, the very popular head of the Leningrad party district.
The consequences of the murder were terrible: deportations, show trials, executions, a total 'cleansing' of the communist party and a liquidation of the party delegates in the Parliament.

This book gives an excellent portrait of the atmosphere in the USSR under Stalin just before World War II: suspicion, despondency, embitterment, poverty, prostitution, insecurity, theft.
As Marx said: I sowed dragons and I harvested fleas.
At the time of the publication of his book, Victor Serge was heavily criticized by the hardliners in the Western CP's, because he was a Trotskyist and his picture should be biased.
But in fact, the situation was even more catastrophic (see 'Harvest of Sorrow' by Roger Conquest).
A still very readable book. Not only for historians.