Midnight in the Century (NYRB Classics) (32 page)

“Drink fast! If the brigade-leader catches us we’re sure to get fined. . . .”

Rodion, racked with fatigue, avidly absorbed that liquid fire. His legs never stopped shaking under him, but he felt savagely strong and lucid: he saw reality with the intensity of a dream. The woman was flat-chested and the hard, deep-lined features of her face expressed wear and resistance. Her eyes were sunken and surrounded by dark shadows.

“Feeling better?” she asked. The corners of the grey kerchief knotted under her chin were fluttering in the breeze. Her tall form stood out over the scaffolding, and behind her there was nothing but airy space, plains, and Russian earth, the tortured earth of the Revolution, its black waters, its clouded waters, its clear waters, its frozen waters, its deadly waters, its invigorating waters, its enchanted forests, its mud, its impoverished villages, its countless living prisoners, its countless executed ones in graves, its construction sites, its masses, its solitudes and all the seeds germinating in its womb. Rodion saw it all, ineffably. All—even the germinating seeds, since they too are real. And that the woman drinking brandy from the bottle at that instant was truly, totally, a human being. He was entranced to see it so clearly.

“Listen,” he said softly, “do you know what we are? Have you ever thought about it?” She considered him with astonishment. And her direct iron-blue gaze was tinged with fear.

1936–38

Dedication:
Serge dedicated
Midnight in the Century
to his comrades in Spain—dissident Communists like the novel’s heroes and, like them, victims of Stalinist persecution. By the time the book appeared, in 1939, the Spanish Republic had succumbed to Franco’s fascist legions, having been undermined by Stalin’s machinations.

Readers familiar with George Orwell’s
Homage to Catalonia
will recognize the name of
ANDRES NIN
, founder of the Spanish Communist Party and later leader of the POUM (Independent Marxist Party), who was kidnapped and murdered by Stalin’s agents in 1937 in Spain. The Austrian socialist,
KURT LANDAU
, and the Czech,
ERWIN WOLF
(a former Trotsky secretary), were revolutionary internationalists who had come to Spain to fight fascism and suffered a similar fate.

JOAQUIN MAURIN
founded the Communist Party in Barcelona in 1921. He broke with the Comintern in 1931 to create the Workers’ and Peasants’ Block, which merged with Nin’s Communist Left in 1934 to become the POUM. Elected to Parliament in 1936, he was the first to warn that if the fascists in the military were not neutralized they would overthrow the Republic. He was taken prisoner behind the fascist lines at the outbreak of the Civil War and remained a prisoner of Franco until after World War II.

ANDRADE
and
GORKIN
were younger POUM leaders who were arrested by the Republican government on the basis of trumped-up charges fabricated by the GPU on the model of the Moscow Trials (“Trotsky-fascist”
etc
.) They were saved, in part thanks to Serge’s campaigns of solidarity in Paris, and it was Gorkin who in turn saved Serge in 1941 by securing him a refuge in Mexico.
KATIA LANDAU
was similarly arrested and led a hunger-strike in the Barcelona prison. She and Russian-born
OLGA NIN
were the widows of the two murdered militants previously mentioned.
↩

Directory:
Name given to the reactionary bourgeois government that ruled France from 1795 to 1799 and paved the way for the dictatorship of Napoleon Bonaparte. Stalin is referred to as an “Asiatic Bonaparte” later in the novel.
↩

Thermidorians:
Name given to the plotters (among them Barras, Tallien and Bourdon) who engineered the overthrow of Robespierre on July 27, 1794 (the 9th of the month of “Thermidor” in the Year II of the French revolutionary calendar). Thermidor marked the end of the democratic phase of the French Revolution, which had been based on the power of the masses, and marked the triumph of the authoritarian bourgeois reaction. In Russian Marxist circles, “Thermidor” was a synonym for the counter-revolution from within, and Left Communists like Serge’s Kostrov often used it to characterize the Stalinist dictatorship. Kostrov’s remark about “Left” or “bad” Thermidorians is probably an allusion to those revolutionaries who allied themselves with Stalin (e.g. Zinoviev and Kamenev) only to be devoured by him later on.
↩

’26–’27 Opposition:
(Also known as the “United Opposition” because Stalin’s former allies, Zinoviev and Kamenev, joined forces with the 1923 Trotskyist Left Opposition during this period.) The organized faction within the Russian Communist Party which, under the leadership of Trotsky, opposed Stalin’s policies after 1926. Its members were expelled from the Party in 1927, and many were arrested and deported. Some, like Kostrov here, capitulated to Stalin and abjured their oppositional views in order to survive or to serve the Revolution or both. Trusted neither by the ruling Stalinists (who doubted their sincerity) nor the persecuted Trotskyists (on whom they were obliged to inform in order to prove their loyalty to the Party), the “capitulators”, as they were known, lived in a political no-man’s land until they were liquidated in the mid-1930s.
↩

Solovietsky Islands:
Island group in White Sea, with monasteries; used as place of exile for rebellious priests in Middle Ages; forced labour camp after 1917 Revolution.
↩

State Political Administration (GPU);
Also:
Cheka, NKVD, State Security
(including
Special Committee, Collegium, Control Commission,
etc
.) All these terms refer to the Russian political police, which changed its name several times in the course of its history and was organized into various branches. Since the political police plays an important role in Serge’s novel, a brief history of this institution may be useful.

Soon after the October 1917 Revolution, an Extraordinary Commission to combat Counter-revolution and Sabotage (known by its Russian acronym, CHEKA) was created under the nominal control of the Council of People’s Commissars with emergency powers to arrest, try, and execute suspects in secret with minimal judicial control. During the long and bloody Civil War, the CHEKA became the principal instrument of the Red Terror in the defence of the Revolution against the White Terror, which was backed by the Western democracies.

Serge considered the creation of the CHEKA to be the single worst blunder committed by Lenin and the Bolsheviks. He objected to the CHEKA’s procedure of condemning suspects on the sole basis of written reports without allowing them to confront their accusers or to cross-examine witnesses, and he felt that public revolutionary tribunals would have been just as effective and far less dangerous to political freedom. Serge nonetheless respected the heroism, sincerity, and revolutionary probity of many of the militants who served in the CHEKA during the heroic years of the Civil War. Two of the heroes of
Midnight in the Century
are former Chekists (a younger Ryzhik appears as a member of the Petrograd Cheka in
Conquered City
, Serge’s 1929 novel about the Civil War) and the contrast between these grizzled veterans and their persecutors—the careerist henchmen of the Stalinist repression—is an ironic theme in
Midnight in the Century
.

In 1922, at the end of the Civil War, the CHEKA was reorganized as the State Political Administration (
Gosudarstevennoe Politichesko Upravlenie
or GPU—later OGPU) under the People’s Commissariat for Internal Affairs, or NKVD. (The later MVD, MGB, and KGB are the results of further reorganization.) The NKVD was again reorganized (ostensibly in recognition of the “victory of socialist construction”) in 1934, the year in which the action of
Midnight in the Century
takes place. It was subdivided into various departments, including State Security, the Militia, Civic Registration, Collective Labour Camps and Settlements (the GULAG in its Russian acronym), an Administrative Department, and Special Committees empowered to take action against “dangerous individuals”. Serge’s novel is probably the first fictional portrayal of life in the land of GULAG and many of these administrative terms are scattered across its pages.

It should be noted that, although local GPU officials were in many ways a law unto themselves, they were nonetheless (in 1934 at least) subject to review by a Collegium and by the Central Control Commission of the Party, and formal proof of guilt (usually in the form of a confession) was required in most cases. Serge, who was interrogated at the GPU’s Moscow headquarters (the Lubianka prison) for eighty days in 1933, was convinced that it was his firm refusal to “confess” in the face of fabricated evidence that ultimately saved him. Had there been any admission or formal proof of guilt in his file, he would never have been allowed to leave Russia in 1936. Within the novel, Serge depicts a local Security chief, Fedossenko, who is caught between the need to demonstrate his zeal by unmasking a Trotskyist “conspiracy”, and the contradictory need to produce a solid “case”.

It should also be noted that if the early Bolsheviks at times abused the powers of the CHEKA to neutralize or eliminate rival political parties (Mensheviks, anarchists, Social-revolutionaries), Serge believed that it was Stalin’s original contribution to turn the GPU-NKVD into an instrument of personal power, using it both to purge recalcitrant factions
within
the ruling Communist Party (including rivals within his own following) as well as to enforce his unpopular policies on the country at large, which he turned into a vast concentration camp. This system of rule by terror reached its apotheosis in the great blood purges of 1936–1939 during which Stalin liquidated thousands of prominent Communists, including most of Lenin’s original 1917 Central Committee. Having used the secret police to liquidate his rivals in the Party and to terrorize the country, Stalin then proceeded to liquidate his chief accomplice, GPU head Yagoda, during the second Moscow Trial.

The action of
Midnight in the Century
takes place during a brief period of relative relaxation on the eve of the great purges. Serge recreated the atmosphere of the Moscow Trials in a later novel,
The Case of Comrade Tulayev
.
↩

Trotskyists:
Members of the Left Opposition. The basic platform of the Trotskyist Left Opposition in the 1923–1927 fight against Stalinism can be summarized in three points: democratization, internationalism, and industrialization.

Democratization:
The fight against the privileges of the bureaucracy and the power of appointed officials of the apparatus. Return to the norms of inner-Party democracy of the Lenin era (freedom of opinion,
etc.
). End police-state methods directed at fellow-Communists. (In 1936, at the urging of Victor Serge, Trotsky revised his programme to include a declaration of freedom for all political parties accepting the Soviet system.)

Internationalism:
Whereas Stalin and the Right of the Party stood for the gradual construction of “socialism in a single country” (Russia) and promoted opportunistic alliances with bourgeois powers in order to gain “time to breathe”, the Left saw world revolution both as a practical necessity (Russia was too backward and isolated to build socialism alone) and as the ultimate goal of the Communist movement—a goal which could only be achieved through solidarity with revolutionary workers’ movements abroad. Stalin caricatured the Left’s policy as “adventuristic”, but the foolishness of his own “realism” became disastrously obvious during the 1927 Chinese Revolution, in which Stalin allied Russia with Chiang Kaishek. When the workers of Shanghai rose and took over the city, Stalin directed the Chinese CP to disavow the insurrection and order the workers to lay down their arms and submit to the leadership of Chiang Kaishek. The resulting massacre of tens of thousands of Chinese workers (vividly described in Malraux’s
Man’s Fate
) set the Chinese revolution back twenty years and left Russia even more isolated.

Industrialization:
Whereas Stalin and the Right (Bukharin, Rykov) tried to maintain social peace by conciliating the peasantry and encouraging landowners to enrich themselves, the Left feared the power of the new rural bourgeoisie and foresaw that unless the cities could produce industrial goods in exchange for grain, the wealthy peasants (
kulaks
) would restrict production and leave the city workers to starve. For the Left, gradual industrialization, financed by taxing the richer peasantry, would promote exchange and close the gap between city and country. Moreover, the Left saw mechanization and modernization of agriculture as an incentive to woo the peasants away from their primitive private holdings and into efficient collective farms. During the 1923–1927 faction fight, Stalin and the Right castigated Trotsky and the Left as “super-industrializers” and “enemies of the peasant”. When, however, the crisis long predicted by the Left broke out in 1928, Stalin did an about-face, broke with the Right, and began “applying” the programme of the Left with a vengeance. (It was at this point that many Leftists “capitulated”). The result was a forced collectivization campaign in which millions of peasants starved or were shot and a forced industrialization campaign (the Five Year Plan) which effectively reduced the Russian worker to the status of an industrial slave. The bureaucratic haste and police-state methods with which Stalin implemented collectivization and industrialization led to forced labour and a decline of Russian living standards to pre-revolutionary levels.