The Sheila Variations

On the essays shelf:

Arguably: Essays by Christopher Hitchens

Considering my long-standing fascination with all things Stalin, the fact that I had never read Victor Serge’s work was a major disconnect. I know his name came up in everything I read. Why didn’t I follow that through and pick up his damn books? I don’t know. No excuse! Finally, last year, John – a commenter here – recommended Victor Serge’s novel The Case of Comrade Tulayev, and I read it. Within two pages, I was thinking, “Why has this book not been in my life all along? What is WRONG with me??” At the moment, I have read both Comrade Tulayev and Serge’s memoir, Memoirs of a Revolutionary, which was almost equal to Comrade Tulayev in brilliance and clarity. My chapbook entry here. Anyway. I’m on the Serge bandwagon now. Finally.

Victor Serge wrote so much in his lifetime, and it ran the gamut in both genre and style. He wrote novels and reportage and history books and memoirs. Half the time, he was on the run, in prison, or in exile. He would lose manuscripts along the way and have to rewrite the whole thing. He would have to smuggle manuscripts and hide them so the authorities wouldn’t find them. And he never stopped. You would think someone would get exhausted, or disheartened. Especially since Victor Serge, working for the new Bolshevik government in the early 1920s, saw which way the wind was blowing early. Many people “got the memo” in the 1930s that Bolshevism was gonna be the biggest most monstrous bureaucracy the world had ever seen (and that’s not even mentioning the state-sponsored Terror), but to perceive that in the 20s, from the inside of said bureaucracy, is vision of a kind rarely seen in such situations. Serge had that. He was a believer, he was not cynical, he obviously wanted to “walk the walk” and so returned to Russia in the early 1920s to get himself where he needed to be. Yet almost immediately he sensed what was wrong with the whole thing. He continued to work in the government, until, naturally, he ran into trouble, was sent into exile, imprisoned, blah blah, the regular drill. In many respects, I am amazed that they “let” Victor Serge live at all. His books are devastating to the Bolshevik story, and devastating towards Stalin. All 15, 20 years before Orwell, before Arthur Koestler, before everyone.

It is mind-blowing.

The Case of Comrade Tulayev is the story of the murder of a high-ranking Party member in Russia (obviously meant to be a stand-in for Kirov, whose murder in 1934 is now generally believed to have been engineered by Stalin as an excuse to launch the Terror). The murder of Kirov is still swathed in mystery, and as far as I know, there still hasn’t been a “smoking gun” discovered (i.e. something that directly ties Stalin to the act.) Stalin never left his fingerprints on anything. People who were looking on knew that he was behind everything, but he was smart enough to not leave a trace. Kirov was well-loved and popular. One could perhaps theorize that he had been killed for that reason. But it seems that the reality is actually far more sinister. Stalin needed an “excuse” to terrorize the entire population of Russia and institute Terror as the natural state of things. He still faced resistance from within the ranks of his own party, old Bolsheviks who didn’t understand yet, who under-estimated Stalin. So he needed a reason to terrorize the whole. Kirov’s murder gave him that reason. The more you know about Stalin, the more you realize that that CAN’T have been a coincidence.

Vast interlocking conspiracies were “discovered” in every industry, in academia, in the student population, in the world of chemists and engineers and the railway industry, the mining industry … Russia had been infiltrated by “saboteurs”, all of whom were somehow inadvertently involved with the murder of Kirov. (I mean, they weren’t at all, these were completely innocent people, there were no “conspiracies.”)

Anatoly Rybakov’s great novel The Children of the Arbat tells the story of the “Arbat” neighborhood in Moscow, known for its artists and cafe culture and liberality. It tells of the impact of the 1917 revolution on that neighborhood, and how things changed. How some were revolutionized, others not so much, how friendships were impacted, and as the 1920s went on, things got more and more serious. People disappeared into the night. Where did they go? Where was their glorious revolution? The entire masterful novel ends with the chilling words: “Comrade Kirov has been murdered.”

1934. The beginning of the REAL terror, everything else being just a preamble.

Serge, with meticulous attention to detail, shows us how the murder of his fictional “comrade” became the excuse to put the entire nation in a vice. It’s a great great novel.

This 2002 essay for The Atlantic is a review of both Serge’s memoirs and The Case of Comrade Tulayev. It’s quite an in-depth piece, and long. Here’s an excerpt.

Arguably: Essays by Christopher Hitchens, ‘Victor Serge: Pictures from an Inquisition’, by Christopher Hitchens

Nonetheless, and fortunately for us if not for him, he resolved to stay on within the Party and to do what he could. Dispatched to Berlin to help with the Communist International, he discovered that Bolshevism was becoming as bureaucratic and intolerant beyond the borders of the USSR as it was within them. But he also learned about the mounting threat of the madness of fascism, and this produced in him a sort of dual consciousness: First, this new enemy needed to be defeated; second, it needed to be understood. The apparatchiks of communism, however, both underestimated the danger and helped to provoke it. Indeed, it could be said of fascism, as Serge was to write with an acuity that makes one almost dizzy, that “[this] new variety of counterrevolution had taken the Russian Revolution as its schoolmaster in matters of repression and mass-manipulation through propaganda … [and] had succeeded in recruiting a host of disillusioned, power-hungry ex-revolutionaries; consequently, its rule would last for years.”

Attempting to synthesize these apparent opposites but latent collaborators, Serge came up with the word “totalitarian.” He believed that he had originated it himself; there are some rival claimants from the period of what was then called “war communism,” but it is of interest that the term has its origins within the Marxist left, just as the “Cold War” was first used by George Orwell in analyzing a then looming collision of super-powers in 1945. Incidentally, when Serge was later seeking to have his Memoirs of a Revolutionary (1951) published in English, it was to Orwell that he wrote asking for help.

Indeed (not that it did him much good), Serge had a knack for nosing out the right acquaintances. He met Antonio Gramsci and Georg Lukacs during his years outside Russia, and received a warning from Lukacs not to go back. He later not only escorted Nikos Kazantzakis and Panait Istrati around the USSR but also was present when Istrati let fall the remark that made him famous: To the old saw “One can’t make an omelet without breaking eggs,” Istrati mordantly replied, “All right, I can see the broken eggs. Where’s this omelet of yours?” When the honest old Bolshevik diploma at Adolf Joffe committed suicide in 1927, to call attention to the “Thermidor” that was engulfing the revolution, Serge assisted in organizing a mass turnout for Joffe’s funeral; he later realized that he had helped to lead the last legal anti-government protest to be held in Moscow. Within a short time he himself was in one of Stalin’s prisons.

Released after some grueling experiences, he remained – despite his misgivings about the personality of Leon Trotsky – a partisan of the left opposition. Had he not been re-arrested in 1933 and deported to internal exile in Orenburg, he might well have been swept up and discarded forever in the period of even more hysterical persecution that followed the assassination of Sergei Kirov, on December 1, 1934. Kirov had been a popular leader of the Party in Leningrad; most historians now agree that his murder was the signal for the true frenzy of the purges to begin. It was the Soviet equivalent of the Reichstag fire.

Most historians also now agree on another important point: that the murder was organized by Stalin himself, either to remove a well-liked man who could have become a rival, or simply to help justify the political pogrom that he had long had in mind. (See in particular Robert Conquest’s Stalin and the Kirov Murder [1989] and Amy Knight’s Who Killed Kirov? [1999].) Some time before the assassination Serge had been overheard to say that what he most feared was the killing of some high Party satrap and the consequent licensing of a more comprehensive terror. Thus what is most interesting about his novel on the subject is that it begins by apparently exculpating Stalin from the main charge.