The Case of Comrade Tulayev by Susan Sontag, Victor Serge, Willard R. Trask

with Frossia who resells cigarettes, with Niucha who … Her intolerable and endless chatter was being patiently recorded by a young officer in a tight uniform and eyeglasses, with a medal bearing the Chief’s profile on his chest — he wrote it all down rapidly on long sheets of paper. He was so occupied that he did not look up at the High Commissar, who stood framed in the door and who left without uttering a word.
    On his own desk the High Commissar found a red envelope from the Central Committee, General Secretariat, Urgent Strictly Confidential … Three lines, ordering him to “follow the Titov matter with the greatest attention and report to us personally on it.” Very significant, that! Bad. So the new Deputy High Commissar was spying without even trying to save appearances. Only he could have informed the General Secretariat (and without the knowledge of his superior) of the Titov matter — the mere mention of which made you want to spit with disgust! An anonymous denunciation, in big schoolboy handwriting, which had arrived that morning: “Matvei Titov said that it’s Security that had Comrade Tulayev killed because there’s a long reckoning between them. He said: Me, I feel it in my bones that it’s the Gepeous, I tell you. He said that in front of his servant Sidorovna, and Palkin the coachman, and a clothes seller who lives at the corner of Ragman Alley and Holy Field Street, at the end of the court, one flight up, on the right. Matvei Titov is an enemy of the Soviet government and our beloved Comrade Chief and an exploiter of the people who makes his servant sleep in the hall with no fire and has got the poor daughter of a collectivized peasant pregnant and refuses to pay the food allowance for her child who will come into this world in pain and misery …” And twenty more lines of the same. Deputy High Commissar Gordeyev was having this document photographed and typewritten for immediate transmission to the Political Bureau!
    At that moment, Gordeyev came in: stout, blond, his hair pomaded, round face, a suspicion of downy mustache, big tortoise-shell spectacles. There was something porcine about him, and with it the servile insolence of the domestic animal too well fed by its human masters.
    â€œI fail to understand you, Comrade Gordeyev,” the High Commissar said carelessly. “You have communicated this absurd statement to the Political Bureau? To what end?”
    Gordeyev looked offended. “But, Maxim Andreyevich,” he protested, “there is a C.C. circular which prescribes that all complaints, denunciations, and even allusions to which we are subjected shall be submitted to the P.B. Circular dated March 16 … And the Titov matter is hardly to be called absurd — it reveals a state of mind among the masses of which we should be more fully informed … I have had Titov arrested, together with a number of his acquaintances …”
    â€œPerhaps you have even interrogated him yourself by now?”
    The High Commissar’s mocking tone appeared to escape Gordeyev, who thought it his best tactics to appear stupid:
    â€œNot personally. My secretary was present at the interrogation. It is extremely interesting to trace the origins of the myths which get into circulation about us. Don’t you think so?”
    â€œAnd have you found the origin of this one?”
    â€œNot yet.”
    On the sixth day of the investigation, High Commissar Erchov, summoned by telephone to present himself at the General Secretariat immediately, waited in an anteroom there for thirty-five minutes. Everyone in the Secretariat knew that he was counting the minutes. At last the tall doors opened to him, he saw the Chief at his desk, before his telephones — solitary, graying, his head bowed. It was a massive head; and seen, as Erchov saw it, against the light, it looked somber. The room was large, high-ceilinged, and comfortable, but almost