Chantal Delsol made a comment in one of her recent books to the effect that Communism never received the disapprobation that it merited due to the extant perception that its crimes were perpetrated for—and its foundational theories developed from—good intentions, a generosity never extended to its Fascist coevals. When you factor in the powerful rational strains within its evolving form—the philosophical rigor, scientific drapery, dialectic propulsion and inexorable historical necessity—you have

Chantal Delsol made a comment in one of her recent books to the effect that Communism never received the disapprobation that it merited due to the extant perception that its crimes were perpetrated for—and its foundational theories developed from—good intentions, a generosity never extended to its Fascist coevals. When you factor in the powerful rational strains within its evolving form—the philosophical rigor, scientific drapery, dialectic propulsion and inexorable historical necessity—you have an ideology with no room for doubt or dissent; which, due to its overwhelmingly complete and total purview, must by its very constitution always be right, by its own nature ever in possession of truth; what individual, absorbed by the petty inadequacies of a misguided and ego-riven personal ethos or morality based, in large measure, upon the errors that permeated within the Christian, Feudal, and Capitalist oppressions from which Communism arose to be the deliverer, could dare stand in the way of such a determined collective manumission? As Whittaker Chambers understood of Ayn Rand's fictive philosophy in his withering review of Atlas Shrugged, the Bolshevik continuation of the prophecies of Marx-via-Lenin were eschatological in form; and so they functioned as the nonnegotiable bringer of a final revelation. Therefore, resistance to the Message cannot be tolerated because disagreement can never be merely honest, prudent, or just humanly fallible. Dissent from revelation so final can only be willfully wicked. This meant that regarding the victims of Stalin's Great Purge—and especially to the Old Bolsheviks who starred in the Show Trials that ran from 1936 to 1938—it was important for the state prosecutors, armed with the iron logic of the Bolshevik Orthodoxy, to present the legal fiction of the accused admitting their culpability, detailing the acts—however absurd and improbable—that led to their downfall. There had to be an explanation for the abysmal and shocking failures of Collectivization, the Five-Year Plans, of Socialism in One Country, of unacceptable crop yields and resource extraction and production levels; and since, by the unyielding rules of Historical Materialism, the Party and, therefore, Stalin, who was the Party personified, could not in any way assume the responsibility, it must perforce be borne by others, by those who maliciously and selfishly and consciously—however unconsciously they themselves might believe their guilt wreaked its corruptive evil—sought to undermine the very system that was geared to lead to the stateless utopia; it was they who brought about the all-encompassing party-and-police despotism that sent them, along with tens of millions of fellow citizens, to barren exile, frozen prison camps and/or unmarked graves.



This was understood by writers such as Orwell and Grossman and Koestler—but perhaps most acutely and intuitively of all by Victor Serge who, as a member of the United Opposition, felt the wrath of the Stalinist majority in 1928 and subsequently became well-acquainted with exile in Central Asia and the interior of the political prisons. He had a front-row seat to witness the transformation of the Bolshevik party as the founding members were weeded out and purged, and the fanatically rigorous younger generation assumed their places in the hierarchy of power. He observed the spread of reaction over the years, as the desire for a rigid ordering of things, an end to the unsettling uncertainty of a revolution in flux, an answering of questions of a sufficient finality to erase them from the mind—and this reaction accepted the liquidation of a sizable portion of the populace as the price of enforcing this peace-of-mind. Serge certainly did not absolve Stalin of his primacy in the creation of the despotic communist police state; but neither would he do so for the populace of the Soviet Union. To him, people were individuals, responsible for the decisions they made and the actions they undertook; the self-justificatory claims to being a pawn caught in the inescapable determined destiny of Historical Necessity simply did not cut the mustard with this author.



It is thus a fascinating ironical inversion that Serge performs at the outset of TCOCT; the titular Comrade Tulayev, a powerful but little known member of the Bolshevik Central Committee, is shot dead on a cold Moscow night during the waning period of the Great Purges. His murder was the spontaneous act of a disaffected proletarian worker with no agenda outside of his own personal immolations and spiritual disfigurements; however, the reality of Tulayev's death is an impossibility in the Soviet State: and so the dead bureaucratic bigwig will serve as the conspiratorial foundation for a final wide-reaching prosecution that, in its execution of important Bolshevik personages, will provide the closure that such murderous effrontery to the Party demands. The principal victims of this judicial fiction—Erchov the High Commissar of the Interior; Makeyev the Regional Party Secretary for Kurgansk; and Rublev, an involuntarily retired and precariously existing Old Bolshevik and former Central Committee member—are innocent of this particular crime; but each is implicated in the creation and subsequent turning of the very state system that is determined to have them put to death to answer for the shadowy demise of Comrade Tulayev and the spreading ripples his shooting created. None can claim a lack of guilt in such a state-of-affairs; even those who initially function as zealous prosecutors live in never-abiding fear that the relentless and merciless eye of the State will fall upon them; the tension of living under such a tautened ideological machine is never allowed a moment to be relaxed or eased. And though each individual caught in the net of this required conspiracy is certain of his own personal innocence as regards the murder of Comrade Tulayev, the State understands the weak points within these citizens, the precise screws with which to apply the pressure that will convince each individual to accept their state-sanctioned fate and enact their required part in the legal mummery to be paraded before the world; and yet, we discover that some of the cast, having long observed the workings of Stalinist Bolshevism, are themselves aware of the weak points in the state; and what happens when such are exploited form the turn the story takes as it works its way towards closure. Throughout it all runs the awareness, by all save the most rigidly constrained in ideological bindings, that the revolution has been betrayed, that what was a pure and fulgent eruption in its initial stages has become a corrupt and criminal enterprise, a failure that—with its head-collision with Fascism and Capitalism looming in the immediate future—will undertake a brutal test that its rotten edifice, in all likelihood, will find impossible to withstand. The poignant despair in this knowledge yet serves at the same time as a source of strength for the revolutionaries in enduring the decimation of their ranks by the Chief-directed reaction; the ghosts of confessions elicited during the Purge will endow a select few amongst the Tulayev conspiracy's intended sacrificial victims to seize the reins of their life back from the purposeful course desired by the State.



I have now read two of the novels written by Serge—both of them published posthumously—and I've loved 'em both; for even more than his penetrating understanding of human psychology and our motivational levers does he possess a rich comprehension of the human spirit, its capacity for nobility, for heroic actions, the strength of the human will even during its most crucial periods of being tested, and an innate grasp of our linkage with nature, the earthly ties, the cosmic bonds that unite our conscious existence with the natural theater in which the latter operates. The period he spent in exile in the vast emptiness of Central Asia and Siberia clearly marked him; at nothing does he excel so much as his ability to conjure the overwhelming, near mystical grandeur and fecundity to be found in these continental stretches—dwarfing the European nation states—with their feeble human presence but abundant natural potency. When Serge was describing the reindeer-sled journey of a fallen Old Bolshevik and his solitary guard companion down through a wintertime Yenisei wilderness awash in the play of ghostly light between snow-draped flatland and star-sprayed oceanic darkling sky, I found myself wholly and utterly absorbed in the descriptive experience.



He expresses all of this in a language of immense power and beautiful imagery, graced with a compassion borne from a hard life lived in near-permanent exile that endowed him with the ability to be just even when measuring injustice, to grasp the fact that every life is lived from its own unique viewpoint, and that if we are to ever understand the reasoning behind the actions of a particular individual we must enter as closely as we can into how their vision processes the affairs of the world operating in the spatial breadth and temporal depth of unfolding history. His portrayal of Stalin—known only as the Chief throughout the tale—is an especially finely etched and nuanced depiction. The reader can feel the burden imposed upon this figure, filled as he is with his own limiting insecurities and jealousies that blacken his mind, of being the incarnation of a Party supposedly driven to realization by inexorable history. It is not offered as an excuse, but as a vital component of his behavior; the sudden switch from smiling bonhomie to frozen menace as he conducts an interview with a longtime companion back from a delicate, perhaps intentionally incriminating trip to civil-war riven Spain, is a superbly realized portrait of this benighted captain of the communist vessel trying to navigate through waters he is simply not qualified for without doing irreparable violence to the ship in his furious tacking. Combined with his sparkling wit and flair for mining the comedy, however black, from the veins of tragedy that marble the rock of human existence, Serge crafts the kind of fictional art that was immanent within the Socialist revolutionary experience, had not Bolshevik Zhdanovism forced the output of Soviet authors into the narrow and vitiating channels of propagandistic conformity with the state's tunnel vision. Those ensconced within the party hierarchy produced pablum; Serge, forever in search of a place to settle down in and be able to call home, the flames of social justice ever sparking up and ablaze within to empower his creative energies, produced these wonderful fictive masterpieces that have, and will, long outlast the pallid output of his far more comfortable and less honest contemporaries.