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The Case of Comrade Tulayev

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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.

It is almost criminal that a book this beautiful and this important is unread, and almost forgotten. Some of Serge's fiction barely qualifies as such, written more as an essay than as a novel. Not so this. It does have an unusual structure, with each chapter focusing on a seperate character caught up in an absurd -- but utterly terrifying -- purge under Stalin. Yet each character is exquisitely drawn, with even the most despicable people rendered human and sympathetic in some way. The scenes, from a snowy Moscow night to a vast Siberian plain to a Spanish civil war hideaway, are stunningly evoked.

This should be read with the best fiction of the last century, not consigned to the back shelves with cold war historical documents and Soviet oddities. Serge speaks to terror and freedom of thought, existential choices and the ability to reconcile oneself to imperfect realities. Utterly inspiring.

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.

in time the mind will make chains snap." Victor Serge.

Victor Serge's novel "The Case of Comrade Tulayev" is set in the Soviet Union in the late 1930s, long before "the chains wore out." It is a classic and haunting look at Soviet society during an era of party purges, show trials, and executions that deserves a place of honor on any reading list that also includes Arthur Koestler's "Darkness at Noon", George Orwell's "1984" and Vasily Grossman's "Forever Flowing" .

Serge, born in Brussels in 1890 to Russian emigre parents, returned to Russia early in 1919 in order to support the newly created Soviet Union. He served as both a writer and journalist. However, Serge was one of the first of the old-line revolutionaries to oppose Stalin's concentration of power. He was arrested, expelled from the party, released, and arrested again. Finally, in 1936 after a public campaign by leading European political and literary figures, Serge was released and deported to France. He eventually found his way to Mexico where he died, penniless, in 1947.

The Case of Comrade Tulayev mirrors in some respects the murder of Sergei Kirov that set off Stalin's first great purge beginning in 1934. The story begins with the almost accidental murder of a leading member of the Central Committee, Comrade Tulayev by a disaffected clerk. The Chief (Serge's allusion to Stalin) immediately commences a round of purges, investigations, show trials and executions. The rest of the book takes us on a chapter-by-chapter account of a group of individuals caught up in the aftermath of the murder. Each individual represents a different component of Soviet society, from the lowly clerk to the high-ranking party functionary to the `oppositionist' already living in exile in Siberia.

Serge paints an intimate, vivid picture of each individual as they meet their fate. Like a storm at seas these people can see the storm on the horizon but they all seem powerless to either flea. They are swept up and prepared for show trials. The only option available to each is their ability to fight the omnipotent forces that want them to admit to crimes they did not commit and to implicate others in these same acts. The power of Serge's writing lies in his examination of the inner lives of his protagonists and their reasons for either accepting this fate or fighting to retain some shred of inner dignity. The outcome of each protagonist's story provides a cross section of human responses ranging from cringing supplication to death-defying resistance. The story of Ryzshik, the exiled oppositionist is particularly haunting. As with the others, he knows what is expected of him but he chooses to starve himself to death rather than confess to some non-existent crime.

The Case of Comrade Tulayev is most often compared to Koestler's Darkness at Noon. Although the comparison is very apt there are some critical differences in approach that bear mentioning. Darkness at Noon focuses on the self-reflection of one key player in the creation of the Soviet state, Rubashov. Koestler took one life, Rubashov's, and reflected on his own role (or guilt) in creating the state that was about to murder him. The emotional heart of Darkness at Noon (for me) is whether and why Rubashov would perform one last act for `The State". Serge, takes a broader look at the questions of individual guilt and collective responsibility. I think that by taking this broader look both Serge and the reader begin to think about, if not find a rational explanation for, how a society based on egalitarian ideals can allow itself to be transformed into a compliant, totalitarian state in less than a generation.

Victor Serge's Case of Comrade Tulayev is an excellent piece of writing. Highly recommended. L. Fleisig

Generally, historical novels leave me dissatisfied as real history provides enough dramatic tension. However, every once in a while a novel comes along that illuminates a historical situation better than a history and begs for some attention. Victor Serge's political parable falls in that category. His subject is a fictional treatment of the Great Terror highlighted by the Moscow Trials in the Soviet Union of the 1930's. This Great Terror liquidated almost the whole generation of those who made the October Revolution of 1917 and administered the early Soviet state as well as countless other victims. Adding a personal touch, as an official journalist of the Communist International Serge knew many of that generation. The political and psychological devastation created by this catastrophe is certainly worthy of novelistic treatment. In fact it may be the only way to truly comprehend its effects. Serge is particularly well placed to tell this story since he was a long time member of the Trotsky-led Left Opposition in the Soviet Union and barely got out of there at the height of the Terror as a result of an international campaign of fellow writers to gain his freedom. The insights painfully learned from his experiences in the Soviet Union place his book in the first rank.


The plot line is rather simple- a disaffected Russian youth of indeterminate politics, as an act of hubris, kills a high level Soviet official in the then Stalinized Soviet Union and sets in motion a whirlwind of governmental reaction. As if to mock everything the Russian Revolution had stood until that time this youth ultimately goes free while a whole series of oppositionalists of various tendencies, officials investigating the crime and other innocent, accidental figures are made to `confess' or accept responsibility for the crime with their lives in the name of defending the Revolution (read Stalinist rule).


While the plot line is simple the political and personal consequences are not, especially for anyone interested in drawing the lessons of what went wrong with the Russian Revolution. The central question Serge poses is this- How can one set of Communists persecute and ultimately kill another set of Communist who it is understood by all parties stand for the defense of the same revolution? Others such as Arthur Koestler in Darkness at Noon, Andre Malraux in Man's Fate and George Orwell in several of his books have taken up this same theme of political destruction with mixed success and ambiguous conclusions. In any case, aside from the tales of bureaucratic obfuscation in turning a simple criminal matter into a political vendetta which Serge treats masterfully the answer does not resolve itself easily.


What Serge concludes, based I believe on his own personal trial of fire in that same period, and makes his novel more valuable than the others listed above is that one must defend ones revolutionary integrity at all costs. His personal conduct bears this out. The history of the period also bears this out not only in the Soviet Union but in Spain and elsewhere. For every Bukharin, Zinoviev or out of favor Stalinist factionalist who compromised himself or herself there were many, mainly anonymous Left Oppositionalists and other such political people who did not confess, who did not abandon their political program and went to exile and death rather than capitulate. History being a cruel and at times, arbitrary master may have not honored them yet. However, those courageous fighters need no revolutionary good conduct certificate before it, the reader of these lines or me.

To begin with, Victor Serge (1890-1947) is an anomaly. He is a Russian revolutionary and political agitator who just happened to be born in Belgium and who wrote most of his books in French. He is not widely read today because most of his books fall under the heading of politics, yet he wrote seven novels of which THE CASE OF COMRADE TULAYEV is perhaps the best known. He comes from a family of socialists, one of whom was involved in the assassination of Tsar Alexander II in 1881. During the Russian Revolution, he took part in the siege of Petrograd and knew Lenin personally. (His wife was one of Lenin's stenographers.) He ran afoul of Stalin, who had him arrested for being a Trotsykite. After years of imprisonment, he was one of the few writers ever released by Stalin in response to international pressure from André Gide and other European cultural figures. Later, he was also "excommunicated" by the exiled Leon Trotsky as an anarchist. Always on the edge of poverty and now on the outs with the Communist Party in all its many flavors, he wound up in Mexico after Trotsky's assassination and worked on a biography of the slain leader. In the end, the high altitude proved too much for his heart, and he died in 1947 while in the back seat of a Mexico City taxicab.

THE CASE OF COMRADE TULAYEV has been reprinted in the excellent Willard R. Trask translation by New York Review Books, with an introduction by Susan Sontag. Although there have been other novels about Stalin's purges of the 1930s--most notably Arthur Koestler's DARKNESS AT NOON--nothing comes close to Serge's treatment. His story begins with two bachelors in Moscow who share adjacent rooms in an apartment building. On a sudden whim, one of them, the fusty Romachkin, buys a pistol and takes to carrying it around on his nocturnal rambles through the city. One day, just outside the Kremlin, he is shocked to find himself within a few feet of Stalin himself. Realizing that he could have taken out and shot the dictator before his bodyguards could intervene, he goes home and hands the gun over to his neighbor, Kostia, who also takes to walking around at night with it. When Kostia sees one of the more repressive members of the Central Committee, one Comrade Tulayev, getting out of a chauffeured limo to walk the extra few blocks for a clandestine tryst with his mistress, he shoots and kills him and gets away.

In the chapters that follow, the murder of Comrade Tulayev, whom we never really get to know, extends like a ripple through the upper levels of the Russian leadership. It is said that the character of Tulayev was inspired by Sergei Kirov, who was reportedly murdered at the instigation of Stalin. As in the case with Kirov, Stalin puts unrelenting pressure on his political bosses to find the culprit or culprits, even if they have to manufacture them:

"The case ramified in every direction, linked itself to hundreds of others, mingled with them, disappeared in them, re-emerged like a dangerous little blue flame from under fire-blackened ruins. The examiners herded along a motley crew of prisoners, all exhausted, all desperate, all despairing, all innocent in the old legal meaning of the word, all suspect and guilty in many ways; but it was in vain that the examiners herded them along, the examiners always ended up in some fantastic impasse."

Each of the major figures thus framed gets a chapter to himself in Serge's novel. Some of these chapters, such as the ones on party boss Artyem Makeyev ("To Build Is to Perish") and the character known only as Deportee Ryzhik ("The Brink of Nothing"), almost rise to the level of poetry. Makeyev is one of those talentless people who rise to the top through sheer consistency and brute strength. One day, he is visited by an old comrade, who for the first time plants the seeds of doubt in his friend's mind:

"Artyemich, I have been thinking things over. Our plans are 50 to 60 percent impossible to carry out. To carry them out to the extent of the remaining 40 per cent, the real wages of the working class will have to be reduced below the level they reached under the Imperial Government [i..e., the Tsar]--far below the present level even in backward capitalist countries... Have you thought about that? I fear not. In six months at most, we will have to declare war on the peasants and begin shooting them down--as sure as two and two makes four...."

As he goes backstage at a Moscow theater, Makeyev is picked up by the security services and whisked off, uncomprehending.

At the beginning of his chapter, Ryzhik is a prisoner in exile in a tiny hamlet in a godforsaken part of Siberia:

"Incomparable dawns rose for Ryzhik from the profound indifference of desert lands. He lived in the last of the five houses which made up the hamlet of Dyra (Dirty Hole), at the junction of two icy rivers lost in solitude. The houses were built of unhewn logs which had come down in the spring drives. The landscape had neither bounds nor landmarks. At first, when he still wrote letters, Ryzhik had named the place the Brink of Nothing ... He felt that he was at the extreme limit of the human world, at the very verge of an immense tomb. Most of the letters he wrote never reached any destination, of course, and none came from anywhere. To write from here was to shout into the emptiness which he sometimes did, to hear his own voice...."

Even so, the long arm of Stalin's prosecutors reaches him as a possible person to frame for the Tulayev murder, and he is whisked off to Moscow. He escapes having to admit his guilt only by cleverly going on a hunger strike unknown to the guards. He slowly feeds all his meals to the toilet until he is too weak to confess to anything and escapes further interrogation by his suicide.

In the end, three of Stalin's former associates are framed and executed. After a candid confrontation with the whimsical Stalin, one suspect is assigned to supervise a gold extraction operation in Siberia. As in the French Revolution, even the prosecutors and their stooges are picked off one by one and ground up in the mills of what passed for justice during those perilous times.

You will not find Victor Serge filed under Russian literature. You will not find him under French literature. You are not likely to find him at all unless you are extraordinarily fortunate. Reading The Case of Comrade Tulayev has whetted my appetite to hunt down other works by this most elusive of writers.

Within the first chapter, Comrade Tulayev, a Central Party Committee member of some importance is shot dead on the streets of Moscow by a person of nearly no importance and on the spur of the moment. For the rest of the book, Serge introduces the reader to a disparate group of Communist personalities who ultimately have in common only their unsought candidacy for `guilt' or their role in the persecution of the accused, or both - the two categories were far from mutually exclusive. None of the accused actually had anything to do with the murder, but that was entirely beside the point. The system demanded victims.

Serge develops convincing and intriguing portrayals: of the (for-now) Party security chief Erchov; Gordayev, his grasping underling; the brilliant economic historian Kiril Rublev; Makeyev, the voraciously ambitious and brutal rural chief; Kondratiev, the Soviet agent assigned to do a status report on the Spanish Civil War and then called home rather abruptly; and others equally compelling.

The confessed guilt of the accused is compelled, which has nothing at all to do with finding the murderer of Comrade Tulayev. However, one of the accused escapes trial and execution by the caprice of The Chief, another by deceiving the seemingly indomitable interrogator, Zvyeryeva. Having done time in Stalin's gulag, Serge transfers some of his experiences to the book's characters (for example, his refusal to confess).

Serge paints a picture of a dark land where the rulers have been abandoned true aims of the Revolution to a desire for power that would be naked but for its clothing in revolutionary jargon. The ruling elite consume one another seriatim as needed to maintain their status. And yet there are those who retain their humanity, remain true to their revolutionary ideals, and their individuality.

[A minor quibble: The NYRB Classics series usually benefits from excellent introductions. Susan Sontag's introduction left this reader feeling slightly dull and poorly-read after attempting to grasp Sontag's brilliance. Others will no doubt have greater success in that effort. ADDENDUM: I should point out that Sontag identifies the assassination of Party leader of Sergei Kirov as the real-life model for Tulayev's murder and the pretext for begin the purges. She does not add that Ivan Kondratiev is surely based on Jan Berzin, a high-ranking Soviet intelligence officer who, like Kondratiev, was sent to Spain in 1936 and suddenly recalled to Moscow when he complained that purges were harming operational success. He met a predictable end. In any event, Serge claimed the book belonged solely to 'literary fiction' and not a roman a clef.]

The Case of Comrade Tulayev deserves a place in the first rank of books on Stalin's totalitarian prison state, along side Darkness at Noon: A Novel and Judgment on Deltchev. Highest recommendation. Simply brilliant.

I can only echo the five star reviews already on this list. I first read Arthur Koestler's "Darkness at Noon" 40 years ago and it made a profound impression on me. I re-read it this year for a book club and still found it powerful if somewhat dated. "The Case of Comrade Tulayev" is a greater book. I have read a fair amount about the early Soviet Union, including Stephen Cohen's brilliant biography of Nicholas Bukharin and Bukharin's own fiction written in prison. Victor Serge ranks at the very top of European writers. No one who is the least interested in this era can afford not to have read him. He is the equal of Vassily Grossman, who's "Life and Fate" is also essential 20th century testimony.

Serge penetrates in the most vivid manner the society in which the purges took place and the outward behavior and inner workings of the players' minds and their rationalizing philosophy. Highest possible praise for one of the heros of modern Russia and a truly great writer.

Victor Serge's "The Case of Comrade Tulayev" is perhaps the finest fictional account of the horrors of the Soviet Thermidorian Terror in the 1930s. Apart from the superb work itself, the author Serge has tremendous credence by the mere fact that he was no ordinary writer of fiction, but an active internationalist revolutionary (whatever one thinks of his politics) who had lived through and participated in some of the events that defined the twentieth century, the Russian Bolshevik Revolution of 1917, the Russian Civil War (1918-1921) and the cataclysmic Second World War (1939-1945). In addition, Victor Serge himself was saved from certain death at the hands of the Thermidorian regime in 1936 by the collective intercession of André Gide, André Malraux, Romain Rolland and countless other individuals and organizations. Therefore, as one of the fortunate few to have escaped the Reaction Serge knew very well what he wrote of in "The Case of Comrade Tulayev."
How did the Russian Revolution degenerate in the late 1920s? In the first instance, the revolution envisioned by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels was supposed to have taken place in the most industrialized country in Europe, in post-World War One Germany, not in the industrially backward and agrarian Russia. It was due to prevailing conditions in immediate post-Tsarist Russia, still mired in the Great War, that V.I. Lenin and the Bolsheviks decided to seize the opportunity in 1917 to initiate the revolution. What Lenin and Leon Trotsky never lost sight of was the fact that unless the German Revolution (1918-1923) succeeded the Bolshevik Revolution was doomed to failure. The survival of the German Revolution would have ensured a vital lifeline in every sense of the word to the Soviet Union. In the event, the German Revolution was defeated, and the USSR stood alone and isolated despite emerging victorious after an apocalyptic civil war against the White counter-revolution. Furthermore, to make matters even worse, the survival of the Russian Revolution had come at a staggering cost, in the vast numbers of lost industrial workers who were supposed to have formed the core of the new state, and the general devastation visited upon all spheres of life.
Lenin and the Bolshevik Party thus had to start building the new workers' state without being able to bank on what was supposed to be the real bastion of the Socialist Revolution.
The cracks in the USSR were already apparent in the Kronstadt Sailors' Uprising of 1921, when in brutal fratricide soldiers of the Red Army fought and eventually and ruthlessly suppressed sailors demanding the greater autonomy promised by the Revolution (a situation perhaps somewhat akin to the purge of the Hébertists & Enragés during the Year II of the French Revolution).
After the death of Lenin in 1924 the mantle of the leadership was expected to pass to Leon Trotsky. A major figure of both the Russian Revolution and the failed Revolution of 1905, Trotsky was unrivaled in his capabilities and worthiness as a successor, in both intellectual and organizational terms, to Lenin. Indeed, Trotsky had already played a pivotal role as the Lazare Carnot of the Russian Revolution, being the organizer of the Red Army that defeated the Whites and their allies. Yet, almost inexplicably Trotsky remained remarkably silent after the death of Lenin about the next stage of Soviet leadership, and was very soon in short order outmaneuvered by the ambitious Georgian I.V. Djugashvili (the so-called "man of steel"), and was gradually stripped of his various and powerful posts. Of course, Djugashvili would not be satisfied with the mere removal of one Bolshevik of the Leninist Old Guard; in order to pervert the aims of the Revolution and create an obscene and repellent self-glorifying cult and one-man dictatorship using the Russian Revolution as a veneer he would initiate a full-scale Thermidorian Reaction to remove any and all possible opponents, especially those who remained loyal to the ideals of the Revolution. Serge's novel is based on that Thermidorian Terror as it gained momentum in the 1930s.
"Comrade Tulayev" of the title stays for a very short time and is clearly a stand-in for Sergei Kirov, the extremely popular Bolshevik leader of Leningrad whose assassination in 1934 was the trigger and the ostensible reason given for the start of the wider Soviet Thermidorian phase (no points for guessing, despite the murkiness surrounding the event, on whose orders the popular Kirov had been conveniently murdered and brushed aside from the scene). The canvas on which Victor Serge draws is very broad, and through the stories we see how the net traps everyone, regardless of rank, character & even more importantly without any regard for their innocence, which was the whole point and intent of the Soviet Thermidorian regime in the 1930s. The air of desperation, fear & helplessness is rank throughout the book and is completely devoid of any ray of hope or survival. Each of the stories is told with intricacy & detail, adding additional dimensions to the counter-revolution's purge and suffocation & urgency to the destruction it illustrates with brutal clarity. Another credit to the author is the way in which historical facts and figures are naturally brought into the novel, amongst others, for example, a precise reference to Vladimir Antonov-Ovseyenko, an ex-chief political commissar of the red army and a close ally of Leon Trotsky who was recalled from his duties in assisting democratic Republican Spain, against the forces of fascist-imperialism, only to disappear into the dark bloody night of Thermidor. The sense of powerlessness is especially very acute in the novel, for there are no protests, let alone organized resistance. The Soviet Thermidorian Reaction would only be ended in 1956 with the denunciation of Djugashvili (the "chief" in the novel). As with the Revolution that had initially inspired it, after the Reaction the USSR would limp on thereafter, until its inevitable demise in 1991. "The Case of Comrade Tulayev" is a decidedly grim novel, but which raises numerous issues, amongst others about the consequences of absolute and blind obedience to the state, especially when the state turns against its very own raison d'ętre. A truly monumental novel that stands alongside, if not above, other works addressing the same subject, a most poignant view of how the Russian Revolution went horribly wrong.

It is one thing to read Kafka's nightmare tales of alienation and paranoia and Orwell's grim fantasies of political dystopia. Victor Serge has written merely from the truth of Stalin's Terror and in doing so has gone more deeply into the heart of the struggle of the individual against the state then either of these masters whose names precede his in reputation and readership.

One hundred thousand Old Bolsheviks got a bullet in their heads thanks to Stalin's political frenzy of death and destruction in the late 1930's. Serge tells the story of a handful of men who were caught up in the Terror. It is a commonplace of history that "revolutions devour their young," but the human stories and their deep ironies that Serge teases out of that commonplace are so specific and individual that the revolution comes to life in a way that is rarely if ever experienced in literature or history.

The truer their belief, the more brutal their punishment. Leave aside the irony that it was their own brutality that created the monster that killed them. Leave aside the question of whether Stalin chose to kill off the old guard because of a simple amoral desire to clean the stables, a paranoid fear of potential enemies disheartened by his failures or an extended period of unchecked madness. Serge does not concern himself with the cause, he concentrates on the result. A generation of men, deeply flawed by their anger and by their innocence, their almost mystical cultural belief in freedom and the perfectibility of man created the monster of the Russian Revolution in their own image, a revolution that became the apotheosis of the imperfection, the corruption, and the imprisonment of the human spirit by the state. They said "Workers of the world unite", and they lost everything but their chains.

Serge takes his theme from the true story of Comrade Kirov whose murder was the match that Stalin used to start the fire of his Great Terror of the mid thirties. In The Case of Comrade Tulayev Serge has created a second murder, the murder of Commissar Tulayev, a murder that sets in motion a series of paranoid persecutions of Old Bolsheviks which are the narrative spine of the novel. In fact Tulayev's murder is a random unplanned act of opportunity by a disillusioned worker. It is just one more irony that Kirov was widely believed by historians (and probably Serge) to have been murdered by a lone fanatic, whereas in fact we now suspect quite strongly he was assassinated on Stalin's orders to set his purges in motion. Always the truth is more perverse than the fiction. Even more perverse than Serge can picture with his considerable imagination.

That the Old Bolsheviks suffered so terribly at the hands of their revolution is the irony that is at the core of this relentless story. In particular the story of the Old Bolshevik Ryzhik does battle in the mind with the stories of K. and Winston Smith for narrative supremacy and wins on sheer human truth. The struggle of Ryzhik the individual against the state he created and in which he still believes is the fierce moving centerpiece of this novel.

The power of the state to crush the individual, the power of the revolution to demand the allegiance of those it has betrayed, the purity of the motives from which it sprung and the despotic evil that prompted its birth, all of these themes are told as the particular stories of individual men sleepwalking through the great nightmare of twentieth century political theory and practice in Victor Serge's The Case of Comrade Tulayev.