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One cold Moscow night, Comrade Tulayev, a high government official, is shot dead on the street, and the search for the killer begins. In this panoramic vision of the Soviet Great Terror, the investigation leads all over the world, netting a whole series of suspects whose only connection is their innocence—at least of the crime of which they stand accused. But The Case of Comrade Tulayev, unquestionably the finest work of fiction ever written about the Stalinist purges, is not just a story of a totalitarian state. Marked by the deep humanity and generous spirit of its author, the legendary anarchist and exile Victor Serge, it is also a classic twentieth-century tale of risk, adventure, and unexpected nobility to set beside Ernest Hemingway's For Whom the Bell Tolls and André Malraux's Man's Fate.
| 1 | Comets are born at night | 1 |
| 2 | The sword is blind | 32 |
| 3 | Men at bay | 64 |
| 4 | To build is to perish | 93 |
| 5 | Journey into defeat | 128 |
| 6 | Every man has his own way of drowning | 169 |
| 7 | The brink of nothing | 213 |
| 8 | The road to gold | 249 |
| 9 | Let purity be treason | 293 |
| 10 | And still the floes came down ... | 327 |
SamKaplan
Posted April 24, 2010
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If you heard the barest outline of the plot, you might think of The Case of Comrade Tulayev as a comedy. An obscure Russian angry at the Stalinist terror murders a high official almost by accident and the response of the regime is so inept, so foolish, that you can't help but marvel at its incompetence. But rapidly it turns out that the author has used this incident to show in one brilliant and distressing chapter after another how the state exploits its own failure to solve the crime to widen the reach of its terrorist apparatus. Each chapter demonstrates that if Stalin's government couldn't solve major crimes it was remarkably inventive at creating them. The result in this completely readable book is an unforgettable portrait of the mechanics of totalitarian terror.
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Posted November 22, 2010
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Overview
One cold Moscow night, Comrade Tulayev, a high government official, is shot dead on the street, and the search for the killer begins. In this panoramic vision of the Soviet Great Terror, the investigation leads all over the world, netting a whole series of suspects whose only connection is their innocence—at least of the crime of which they stand accused. But The Case of Comrade Tulayev, unquestionably the finest work of fiction ever written about the Stalinist purges, is not just a story of a totalitarian state....