A review by quercus707
The Case of Comrade Tulayev by Victor Serge

4.0

This is an amazing book, hard to classify - it is literary fiction, historical fiction, but it feels incredibly real. It's hard not to see it as a true witness of Stalin's Great Terror. Yet it isn't remotely autobiographical. There is no single protagonist, it's an ensemble cast of characters, but each feels fully realized and you experience the events of the book through each set of eyes, through each experience. The book it reminds me of most is Orwell's 1984, but with all the horrors and deception set in the real world, describing events that actually happened to real people. Most profoundly it helps one to understand why people could actively participate in their own destruction in service of a higher goal.