Penguin continue their policy of releasing [illegible] series of books around one topic within the [illegible] month. November saw the publication of [illegible] books about Russia. They are both written [illegible] Russian authors who suffered under Stalin, [illegible] the differences are enormous.
Solzhenitsyn describes a concentration camp for political prisoners in the early 1950's. The prisoners have been swept up in the petty purges that included every ex-prisoner of war, and a host of minor offenders. They know they are not guilty but prison life has almost become natural life. There is an acceptance of the system tempered with a few jeers at Stalin as "Old Whiskers". The ironies exist. The worst working area has been named by the camp authorities 'The Socialist Way of Life'. The sole reference to socialist ethics is made by the prisoner Buinovsky when he addresses the guards - "You are not behaving like Soviet people.... You are not behaving like communists". Buinovsky got ten days in the cells.
Victor Serge was a professional revolutionary who - in the early years of the revolution - edited the newspaper "Communist International". He was active in the Left Opposition until his deportation to Siberia in 1933 and his subsequent exile. Serge does not write with the taut, authoritative austerity of Solzhenitsyn, but he brings into his novel a well-honed political intellect. In Serge we see the process whereby the deadening 'natural' order of life that operates in Solzhenitsyn's book has been born. His story is hinged around the assassination of comrade Tulayev - the Great Pilot's friend. It is a repeat of the Kirov assassination in that it brings in its wake a new purge. Those accused, however, are no longer the top leadership of Lenin's Bolsheviks. An old Bukharinite is roped into the 'plot' but the principal 'plotters' are now from Stalin's faction. The Comrade Chief has turned his attention on to his own followers.
These victims are sufficiently politically experienced to understand the processes that are taking place. The story is not just a political tract, because Serge has managed to present the conflicting theories in convincing human form. By proxy, Bukharin, Trotsky and Stalin live out their ideas in thousands of other bodies and minds. It is possible, via Serge, for us to understand the stalinist bureaucrat Mabeyev, who was later purged. He is a simple, ordinary man, who played a heroic role during the civil war. After the war was won, all he wanted was to build socialism in Russia. They needed to overtake the U.S.A. economically and to hell with the theorists who wanted a world revolution. He accumulated some perks and had to do some unpleasant things, but omelettes aren't made without cracking eggs. Through his progress we see the rise of a social grouping - the Soviet bureaucracy. It was their rise, over the dead bodies of the Old Bolsheviks, that opened the doors to the bleak and desolate landscape that Solzhenitsyn charts for us.
* Alexander Solzhenitsyn, "One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovitch", Penguin 1/-.
Victor Serge, "The Case of Comrade Tulayev", Penguin [illegible].