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 term “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 Panaït 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 retorted, “All right, I can see the broken eggs. Where’s this omelet of yours?” When the honest old Bolshevik diplomat 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.
The Case of Comrade Tulayev (1948), which opens with the murder of a high Communist official by that name, makes an enormous sacrifice as a work of suspense by giving away the ostensible “plot” almost at once. We see a righteous and somewhat disturbed young man as he acquires a weapon by chance, takes to carrying it with him everywhere, and to his immense surprise runs into a senior “target of opportunity” on a darkened street. Pulling the trigger on impulse, to relieve his general feelings of alienation, he makes an easy escape, because there is absolutely nothing to connect him to the crime and he did nothing to prepare for it. But this apparently naive device actually imparts a considerable tensile strength to the ensuing chapters, as we see from the reaction of the Party and its leader that nothing in the Soviet Union can be admitted to happen by accident.
The papers briefly announced “the premature death of Comrade Tulayev.” The first secret investigation produced sixty-seven arrests in three days. Suspicion at first fell on Tulayev’s secretary, who was also the mistress of a student who was not a Party member. Then it shifted to the chauffeur who had brought Tulayev to his door—a Security man with a good record, not a drinker, no questionable relations, a former soldier in the special troops, and a member of the Bureau of his garage cell. Why had he not waited until Tulayev had entered the house, before driving off? Why, instead of going in immediately, had Tulayev walked a few paces down the sidewalk?
(The subsequent fate of the chauffeur is more than you want to contemplate.) We all now understand that dictatorship depends to an unusual degree on sheer caprice rather than predictable or systematic enforcement, but it was Serge’s early insight that those Marxists who had prided themselves above all on their cold and objective lucidity had become “fuddled with a theoretical intoxication bordering on delusion … enclosed within all the tricks and tomfooleries of servility.” (This remark is from his Memoirs.)
The best novel of the postwar Stalinist purges—the ones that spread to Eastern Europe—is Eric Ambler’s Judgment on Deltchev (1951). Here, the purge takes the form of isolating an inconvenient dissident (or potential dissident) and destroying his reputation before framing him. There’s nothing of this glacial cynicism in Serge’s novel. The post-1934 spy fever may have had a core of rationality when it began, or was inaugurated, but its special feature was the sheer mania and panic in which it engulfed society, becoming an exhausting, unstoppable thing in itself. At one point (Doris Lessing describes it somewhere in her account of abandoning communism) medieval instruments of torture were taken from Russian museums and deployed in the cellars and interrogation pits of Stalin’s police. The image is perfect for evoking the choking medieval nightmare of plague-dread, xenophobia, and persecution that enveloped the Soviet Union and destroyed the last remnants of its internationalism. If the characters and automatons of The Case of Comrade Tulayev understand any one thing, it is the idea that the enemy is everywhere, and everyone. Poor old Makeyev, one of Serge’s better-drawn minor characters, is a plebeian mediocrity with some physical courage who becomes a regional commissar by dint of brute force and sterling loyalty. He is the negation of the Bolshevik cosmopolitan—a figure from Chekhov. He at first feels himself “integrated into the dictatorship of the proletariat like a good steel screw set into its proper place in some admirable, supple, and complex machine.” But Stalin—“the man of steel”—was at the helm of a locomotive determined to go off the rails, and who can redeem a Makeyev from a catastrophe like that?
As in the most intricate and sadistic courts of antique Oriental despotism, the thing to be feared almost as much as being “out of favor” was the special terror of sudden advancement. (Many later personal reminiscences of Stalin were to record that it was in genial mood that he was most to be feared.) I shall have to be forgiven for quoting at length here, since Serge captured this mental and moral atmosphere so faultlessly.
Erchov, recalled from the Far East, where he had thought himself happily forgotten by the Personnel Service, had been offered an unparalleled promotion: High Commissar for Security in conjunction with Commissar of the People for Internal Affairs, which practically carried with it the rank of marshal—the sixth marshal—or was it the third, since three of the five had disappeared? “Comrade Erchov, the Party puts its confidence in you! I congratulate you!” The words were spoken, his hand shaken, the office (it was one of the Central Committee offices, on the same floor as the General Secretariat) was full of smiles. Unannounced, the Chief entered quickly, looked him up and down for a split second—a superior studying an inferior; then, so simply, so cordially, smiling like the others and perfectly at ease, the Chief shook Maxim Andreyevich Erchov’s hand and looked into his eyes with perfect friendliness. “A heavy responsibility, Comrade Erchov. Bear it well.” The press photographer flashed his magnesium lightning over all the smiles … Erchov had reached the pinnacle of his life, and he was afraid.
In the ensuing sentences, Serge transcends Gogol and anticipates Nineteen Eighty-four:
Three thousand dossiers, of capital importance because they called for capital punishment, three thousand nests of hissing vipers, suddenly descended like an avalanche upon his life, to remain with him every instant. For a moment the greatness of the Chief reassured him. The Chief, addressing him as “Maxim Andreyevich” in a cordial tone, paternally advised him “to go easy with personne
l, keeping the past in mind yet never failing in vigilance, to put a stop to abuses.”—“Men have been executed whom I loved, whom I trusted, men precious to the Party and the State!” he exclaimed bitterly. “Yet the Political Bureau cannot possibly review every sentence! It is up to you,” he concluded. “You have my entire confidence.” The power that emanated from him was spontaneous, human, and perfectly simple; the kindly smile, in which the russet eyes and the bushy mustache joined, attested it; it made you love him.
Erchov, as you will have intuited from the above passage, doesn’t last long in the job and is soon humiliated and purged in his turn. But by then he has helped to set in motion a machinery of inquisition, supported by a Borgesian labyrinth of bureaucratic incrimination, that assumes a horrific autonomy. Men who were miles away at the time, or who had already been exiled or jailed, are put through the mill again and compelled to answer impossible questions. In faraway Spain, in the death throes of the republic and the last gasp of the Catalan Revolution, with Franco’s and Hitler’s forces at the very gates, random Trotskyists are kidnapped and forced to confess their part in the murder of Comrade Tulayev.
Or not to confess it. Serge was a friend to Andrés Nin, the leader of Catalonia’s left-opposition POUM (and the translator of Dostoyevsky into Catalan), and he always had a special regard for the old revolutionaries who never “broke.” In many ways, placed next to Midnight in the Century, this novel is their memorial. There’s inevitable speculation about the influence exerted, by means of both title and subject matter, on Koestler’s Darkness at Noon. It is certainly true that in Tulayev we meet the figure of Kiril Rublev, an old Bolshevik who is strenuously (and eloquently) pressed to admit to inconceivable offenses because he can perform a last service to the Party by abasing himself in this way. But unlike Koestler’s Rubashov, many of Serge’s characters stubbornly decline the logic of the grand inquisitor.
Serge himself was one of the few to refuse it, and this probably saved his life. There came a time when the agitation abroad in his behalf became too much to overlook, and when a campaign for his release—led by Romain Rolland—had embarrassed even the intellectual prostitutes of the French fellow-traveling classes. Stalin decided to examine the case in person, but before doing so he asked his police chiefs what crimes Serge had confessed to while in the Orenburg camp. He must have been somewhat startled to be told that the prisoner had confessed to nothing at all (a distinct rarity in those times), and this made it easier to release and deport Serge without too much loss of face.
Given this standard of fortitude, and given the contempt Serge always felt for Stalin’s collaborators, a remarkable feature of The Case of Comrade Tulayev is its chiaroscuro. In one passage the monstrous figure of “The Chief” is represented as a prisoner of fate, only pretending to arbitrate the destiny of a sixth of the earth’s surface and of every one of its inhabitants. That Serge intended no lenience here we may be sure, but we may likewise be sure that he would never have swallowed the later euphemisms and half-truths of Khrushchev, putting blame for all the enormities of an epoch on the evil of a single individual. One of the most despicable engineers of the Tulayev witch-hunt, a creepy old time-server named Popov who trades on a reputation for staunch service, is limned not like an Iago but like a modern Polonius, full of pathetic advice and mumbling rhetoric. And this old wreck has his Ophelia—a daughter in Paris whose spontaneity and generosity will not allow her to take part in the lie. The freshness and honesty of Xenia Popov are eventually suicidal, but deadly also to her father’s sordid compromise with the usurper’s court. In its remorseless emphasis on the ineluctable along with its insistence on the vitality of individual human nature, The Case of Comrade Tulayev is one of the most Marxist novels ever written—as it is also one of the least.
(The Atlantic, December 2002)
André Malraux: One Man’s Fate39
ISAIAH BERLIN once described someone whom I will not name as “that very rare thing: a perfect charlatan.” Admit that this ostensibly lethal criticism contains a note of reluctant admiration, and you have the tone of Olivier Todd’s newest biography, Malraux: A Life (which has been translated from the French by Joseph West). André Malraux was one of the most prolific self-inventors of the twentieth century, and it is “the Malrucian legend,” as much as the life itself, that is Todd’s subject.
This is perhaps a pity, since it causes Todd to devote more space to the succeeding stages of Malraux’s dazzling metamorphoses—from marginal arriviste to major cultural impresario of Charles de Gaulle’s Fifth Republic—than to the novels by which he is chiefly remembered. One might make that “the novel”: La Condition Humaine, or Man’s Fate. Published in 1933, it did for fiction what Harold Isaacs’s Tragedy of the Chinese Revolution did for scholarship. It pointed up the increasing weight of Asia in world affairs; it described epic moments of suffering and upheaval, in Shanghai especially (it was nearly filmed by Sergei Eisenstein); and it demonstrated a huge respect for Communism and for Communists while simultaneously evoking the tragedy of a revolution betrayed by Moscow. Somewhat lushly Orientalist in its manner, the novel was ridiculed for its affectation by Vladimir Nabokov and hailed as prescient by Arthur Koestler.
For Todd, the author of several works, including a biography of Camus, all this is of less importance than the knowledge that Malraux had spent almost no time in China itself. Toward the end of this book, he hits on a near-perfect Left Bank encapsulation for his subject. Malraux was, we learn, “autonomous in relation to facts.” That is to phrase it mildly. One of the characters in Flaubert’s Sentimental Education is described as being so corrupt that he would happily have paid for the pleasure of selling himself. Malraux was such a fantasist that he would have paid handsomely for a forged narrative that was designed to deceive himself. He invented a relationship with Mao. He exaggerated his role in the Spanish Civil War. He fabricated a glorious past in the French Resistance.
Like all supreme con artists, he did possess the knack of being in the right place at the right time, and of scraping acquaintance with the great. As I turned the pages, I was put in mind of a Gallic version of Harry Flashman: fast-talking and protean, covered with unearned glory and full of embellished traveler’s tales from many plundered colonies. (Malraux preferred to imagine himself as T. E. Lawrence. Either analogy would be imperfect in one respect: Malraux was a heterosexual but seems often to have preferred food and drink to sex.)
He was born in 1901 in Paris, the son of a small-time stockbroker. His first overseas adventure was the one that made him notorious: an expedition in 1923 to French-ruled Cambodia, during which he amputated priceless bits of sculpture and statuary from some ancient temples. Arrested and charged for this, he managed to induce quite a number of Parisian intellectuals and aesthetes, including André Gide and André Maurois, to take up his case as if it were an injustice being committed by the colonial authorities. Going even further than his fellow Andrés on behalf of another André, the Surrealist André Breton added, with magnificent condescension to the Cambodians, “Who in their homeland really cares about the preservation of these works of art?” The price for all this chutzpah was that Malraux then had to take up the cause of the colonial indigenes as if it really mattered to him. Moving to Saigon in the mid-1920s, he helped to produce a troublemaking newspaper, L’Indochine, which ventilated the many complaints of the Vietnamese about forced labor, land expropriation, and police brutality.
It was at this point, Todd dryly notes, that Malraux began to speak of his admiration for Gabriele D’Annunzio. As a model for emulation, this freebooting soldier and aviator might not seem so obvious. His freelance attack on Fiume at the end of the First World War was the inspiration for the thuggish Mussolini and his later march on Rome. Why or how should it have appealed to the sensitive Malraux, with his delicate features and his nervous facial tic—diagnosed by Todd as a symptom of Tourette’s syndrome? But the later development of the Malraux myth makes it clear that D’Annunzio was in fact the near
-perfect emblem for his vicariousness and ambition. Above all, he wished to be a hero, and the price in bombast and pretension and attitude-striking was one that he thought well worth paying. D’Annunzio was essentially a Nietzschean rhetorician who tried to dissolve the difference between word and deed. Malraux was to become a writer of fiction, and of quasi-fictional memoirs that he hoped would be taken literally.
One of those who stood aside from this division—Raymond Aron—regarded himself as prose and Malraux as poetry. In the meltdown and ferment of culture and civilization that succeeded the First World War, how banal it must have seemed to favor mere liberal democracy. But Aron’s later judgment of Malraux (“one third genius, one third false, one third incomprehensible”) would be remarkably useful in evaluating the novels with which Malraux made his reputation. These adaptations of his Asian travels, Les Conquerants (1928), La Voie Royale (1930), and La Condition Humaine (1993), amounted to a trilogy on the Chinese Revolution. In tone, they swung awkwardly between a sort of vulgar Marxism and a Bonapartist invocation of la gloire. Indeed, Malraux never lost his admiration for Napoleon, and produced a potboiling biography of him at the same time.
By this stage, Malraux had been compelled to confront the figure of Trotsky, who was a special synthesis of the cosmopolitan intellectual, man of action, and wielder of power. His expulsion from Stalin’s Soviet Union in the late twenties had been partly the result of a furious debate on the future of the Chinese Revolution. (The first edition of Isaacs’s Tragedy of the Chinese Revolution actually bore Trotsky’s preface.) Todd devotes a brief chapter to Malraux’s fascination with this epic figure. As ever, the Frenchman was torn between an admiration for a historic personality and a queasy consciousness that he himself had debts to pay and credit to keep in the Parisian leftist milieu. He did not waste all that much time in making up his mind. After an absurd, melodramatic proposal to mount a rescue team of intellectuals to snatch Trotsky from his place of exile in Alma-Ata, Malraux simmered down a bit and later read Trotsky’s rather flattering critique of Les Conquerants in La Nouvelle Revue Francaise. When Trotsky’s long exile wanderings brought him through France in the 1930s, Malraux went to call upon him and the two men discussed everything from Celine to cinema. But by then, the cultural ascendancy of the French Communist Party was making life distinctly tough for dissenters on the left, and Malraux seems to have decided that the old Bolshevik was just another loser. He began to pitch his tent with that most tiresome of the intellectual factions of the 1930s: the regulars at international conferences of writers and scholars.