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

or next week, on one pretext or another, they would finish the process of removing the last colleagues in whom he could trust: Gordeyev would replace them by men of his own … For years this same office had been occupied by someone else — a man whose figure and voice, whose peculiarities of speech, whose trick of clasping his hands, of frowning and holding his pen suspended over a document he was to sign, Erchov knew intimately; a man who had worked zealously and conscientiously ten or twelve hours a day … Around that obedient, skillful, and implacable man, too, the net had closed; he had struggled in its inextricable meshes, refusing to understand, to see, yet feeling more defeated day by day, growing visibly older; in a few weeks he had acquired the look of a little clerk who had taken orders all his life; he had let his subordinates make his decisions for him; he had spent his nights drinking with a little actress from the Opera, his days thinking of blowing out his brains — until the evening when they had come and arrested him … But perhaps he was actually guilty, whereas I …
    Gordeyev said:
    â€œI have made a selection from the list of seventeen hundred — some forty names for the present. Some of them are very highly placed. Do you care to go over it?”
    â€œHave it brought to me immediately,” said the High Commissar in a tone of authority, while an uncomfortable chill crept through his limbs.
    Alone in his huge office, communing with the dossiers, with suspicion, fear, power, powerlessness, the High Commissar became his simple self — Maxim Andreyevich Erchov, a man forty years old, in vigorous health, prematurely wrinkled, with puffy eyelids, a thin-lipped mouth, and uneasy eyes … His predecessors here had been Henri Grigoryevich, who had breathed the air of these offices for ten years and was executed after the trial of the Twenty-one; then Piotr Eduardovich, who had disappeared — that is to say, who was confined on the second floor of the subterranean prison under the particular supervision of an official appointed by the Political Bureau. What admission did they want from him? Piotr Eduardovich had been fighting for five months — if “fighting” was the proper term for turning gray at thirty-five and repeating “No, no, no, it is not true,” with no hope except to die in silence — unless solitary confinement had driven him mad enough to hope for anything else.
    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. 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