Books: Everybody Did It

THE CASE OF COMRADE TULAYEV (306 pp.)—Victor Serge—Doubleday ($3).

Author Victor Serge's novel is a murder story, Russian style. One crisp February night, a shot slapped echoes in a narrow Moscow street and Comrade Tulayev, member of the Central Committee of the Communist Party, fell to the sidewalk dead. His murderer, a young office worker disgruntled with the regime, got clean away. The time was just after the Moscow trials of 1937-38, and Comrade Tulayev had handled the university purges and mass deportations. Plenty of people had reason to kill him. But to the jittery big shots, from Stalin down, such a murder could spell only plot. Stalin himself demanded scapegoats, and a new purge was born.

The Case of Comrade Tulayev slows down at this point, but it remains one of those novels whose subject matter outweighs its ungainly technique and tedious ideological asides. Like Arthur Koestler's more artful Darkness at Noon, it fishes in the turgid waters of Russian revolutionary idealism and in the swifter, darker current of Stalinist suspicion and ruthlessness. Like Koestler, Author Serge was fascinated by the tortuous mental processes which led sincere old revolutionaries to acknowledge their guilt for crimes they never committed. Serge, who died in Mexico in 1947, knew at firsthand the ins & outs of his blood-pudding subject. A Bolshevik and a member of the Communist International's first congress, he was exiled to Siberia in 1933, was released three years later and went to live in France. Some of the best passages in his book are descriptions of the bleak Siberian landscape.

In Comrade Tulayev, Author Serge draws the best picture yet of a full-blown Stalinist investigation. In the first three days after the murder there were 67 arrests. Tulayev's chauffeur got a brutal 60-hour grilling by relays of inquisitors. Tulayev's secretary and the sentry at his house were gone over without result. As Stalin's suspicion and dissatisfaction grew, the need for a scapegoat became more imperative, and the "plot" took on widening and terrifying ramifications.

Old friends dared not be seen together, powerful officials began to fear their assistants. Ideological skeletons rattled in long-forgotten closets. High Commissar Erchov, in charge of the investigation, became a victim. So did old Communist heroes who had been devoted to Lenin. For Stalin and his henchmen, the "plot" became a perfect excuse for wiping out those who still had independent thoughts, who stood between him and secure power or objected to the new totalitarianism.

Comrade Tulayev has none of the tense economy of Darkness at Noon, smothers all its potential suspense in the rambling jabberwocky of Communist shoptalk. At its best, it achieves a Dostoevskian flavor in its dialogue and characterization. Its greatest weakness lies in the error that many an old Bolshevik foe of Stalin has fallen into: the notion that Communism is fine but that it has been distorted by that old deviationist, Stalin.