One of the Ukrainians led in the handcuffed man. He wore a tank crewman’s short yellow jacket, oily, its right sleeve torn at the seam; his face was completely flayed on one side, as if peeled open; on the other, a bluish bruise almost closed his eye; but he must have shaved right before he was captured. The Ukrainian brutally sent him flying into a little classroom chair in front of my desk. “Take off his handcuffs,” I ordered. “And go wait in the hallway.” The Ukrainian shrugged his shoulders, undid the handcuffs, and went out. The Commissar massaged his wrists. “Nice guys, our national traitors, aren’t they?” he said pleasantly. Despite his accent, his German was clear. “You can keep them when you leave.”—“We’re not going to leave,” I replied curtly.—“Ah, all the better. That will save us the task of running after them to shoot them.”—“I am Hauptsturmführer Dr. Aue,” I said. And you?” He made a slight bow on his chair: “Pravdin, Ilya Semionovich, at your service.” I took out one of my last packs of cigarettes: “Do you smoke?” He smiled, revealing two missing teeth: “Why do cops always offer cigarettes? Every time I’ve been arrested, they’ve offered me cigarettes. This being said, I won’t refuse.” I handed him one, and he leaned over so I could light it. “And your rank?” I asked. He exhaled a long puff of smoke with a sigh of contentment: “Your soldiers are dying of hunger, but I see that the officers still have good cigarettes. I’m a Regimental Commissar. But recently they gave us military ranks and I was made a Lieutenant-Colonel.”—“But you’re a member of the Party, not an officer in the Red Army.”—“That is correct. And you? You’re also from the Gestapo?”—“From the SD. It’s not quite the same thing.”—“I know the difference. I’ve already interrogated enough of your own.”—“And how could a Communist like you let himself be captured?” His face darkened: “During an assault, a shell exploded next to me and I was hit in the head by some rubble.” He pointed to the scorched part of his face. “I was knocked out. I suppose my comrades left me for dead. When I regained consciousness, I was in the hands of your people. There was nothing I could do,” he concluded sadly.—“A high-ranking politruk who goes up to the front line, that’s pretty rare, isn’t it?”—“The commanding officer had been killed and I had to rally the men. But in general, I agree with you: the men don’t see enough Party leaders under fire. Some abuse their privileges. But these abuses will be corrected.” With his fingertips, he delicately felt the purplish, wounded skin around his swollen eye. “Is that from the explosion too?” I asked. He gave a gap-toothed smile: “No, that’s from your colleagues. You must be quite familiar with that sort of method.”—“Your NKVD uses the same.”—“Absolutely. I’m not complaining.” I paused: “How old are you, if I may?” I finally asked. “Forty-two. I was born with the century, like your Himmler.”—“So you witnessed the Revolution?” He laughed: “Of course! I was a Bolshevik activist when I was fifteen. I was a member of a workers’ soviet in Petrograd. You can’t imagine what a time that was! A great wind of freedom.”—“It’s changed a lot, then.” He became pensive: “Yes. That’s true. Probably the Russian people weren’t ready for such an immense, immediate freedom. But that will come, little by little. They must be educated first.”—“And your German, where did you learn that?” He smiled again: “On my own, when I was sixteen, with some prisoners of war. Afterward, Lenin himself sent me to the German Communists. Can you believe that I knew Liebknecht, Luxemburg! Extraordinary people. And after the civil war, I returned to Germany many times, secretly, to keep up contacts with Thälmann and others. You don’t know what my life has been like. In 1929, I acted as an interpreter for your officers who came to train in Soviet Russia, to test your new weapons and your new tactics. We learned a lot with you.”—“Yes, but it didn’t do you any good. Stalin liquidated all the officers who had adopted our concepts, beginning with Tukhachevsky.”—“I miss Tukhachevsky. Personally, I mean. Politically, I can’t judge Stalin. Maybe it was a mistake. The Bolsheviks make mistakes too. But the important thing is that we have the strength to purge our own ranks regularly, to eliminate those who deviate, who let themselves be corrupted. It’s a strength that you lack: your Party is rotting from within.”—“With us, too, there are problems. In the SD, we know it better than anyone, and we’re working to make the Party and the Volk better.” He smiled softly: “In the end, our two systems aren’t so different. In principle at least.”—“That’s an odd statement, for a Communist.”—“Not really, if you think about it. What difference, at bottom, is there between National Socialism and socialism in a single country?”—“In that case, why are we locked together in such a death struggle?”—“You’re the ones who wanted it, not us. We were ready to make compromises. But it’s as once before, with the Christians and the Jews: instead of joining forces with the People of God with whom they had everything in common, to form a united front against the pagans, the Christians preferred, no doubt out of jealousy, to let themselves be paganized and to turn against the witnesses of truth, to their own misfortune. That was a huge waste.”—“I’m guessing that in your comparison, the Jews are you?”—“Of course. After all, you took everything from us, even if only to caricature it. And I’m not talking about symbols, like the red flag and the First of May. I’m talking about the concepts that are dearest to your Weltanschauung.”—“In what sense?” He began to count on his fingers, in the Russian way, folding them down one by one, starting with the little finger: “Where communism aims for a classless society, you preach the Volksgemeinschaft, which is basically strictly the same thing, reduced to your borders. Where Marx saw the proletariat as the bearer of truth, you decided that the so-called German race is a proletarian race, incarnation of Good and morality; consequently, for class struggle, you substituted the German proletarian war against capitalist governments. In economy too your ideas are just deformations of our values. I know your political economy well, since before the war I translated articles from your specialized newspapers for the Party. Where Marx posited a theory of value based on labor, your Hitler declares: Our German mark, which is not backed by gold, is worth more than gold. This rather obscure phrase was glossed by Goebbels’s right-hand man, Dietrich, who explained that National Socialism had understood that the best foundation for a currency is confidence in the productive forces of the nation and in the leadership of the State. The result is that for you, money becomes a fetish that represents the productive power of your country, hence a total aberration. Your relations with your great capitalists are grossly hypocritical, especially since your minister Speer’s reforms: your leaders continue to advocate free enterprise, but your industries are all subject to a plan and their profits are limited to six percent, with the State appropriating the rest in addition to the production.” He fell silent. “National Socialism also has its deviations,” I finally replied. I briefly explained Ohlendorf’s theses to him. “Yes,” he said, “I know his articles. But he too is mistaken. Because you didn’t imitate Marxism; you perverted it. The substitution of race for class, which leads to your proletarian racism, is absurd.”—“No more than your notion of the continual war of classes. Classes are a historical given; they appeared at a certain moment and will likewise disappear, harmoniously dissolving into the Volksgemeinschaft, instead of tearing each other to pieces. Whereas race is a biological given, natural, and thus undeniable.” He raised his hand: “Listen, I won’t argue with you, since it’s a question of faith, and so logical demonstrations, reasoning, won’t serve any purpose. But you can at least agree with me on one point: even if the analysis of the categories at stake is different, our ideologies have this basic thing in common, which is that they are both essentially deterministic; racial determinism for you, economic determinism for us, but determinism all the same. We both believe that man doesn’t freely choose his fate, but that it is imposed on him by nature or history. And we both draw the conclusion that objective enemies exist, that certain categories of human beings can and must legitimately be eliminated not for what they’ve done or even thought, but for what they are. In that, we differ only in the definition of the categories: for you, the Jews, Gypsies, the Poles, and, even I believe, the mentally ill; for us, the Kulaks, the bourgeois, the Party deviationists. At bottom, it’s the same thing; we both reject the homo economicus of the capitalists, the egotistical, individualistic man trapped in his illusion of freedom, in favor of a homo faber: Not a self-made man but a made man, you might say in English, or a man yet to be made, since communist man must still be constructed, educated, just like your perfect National Socialist. And this man-to-be-made justifies the pitiless liquidation of everything that is uneducable, and thus justifies the NKVD and the Gestapo, gardeners of the social body, who tear out the weeds and force the good plants to follow their stakes.” I handed him another cigarette and lit one for myself: “You have broad ideas, for a Bolshevist politruk.” He laughed, a little bitterly: “That’s because my old relations, German and otherwise, fell into disfavor. When you are sidelined, it gives you time, and especially a perspective, to reflect.”—“Is that what explains why a man with your past holds such a modest position?”—“No doubt. At one time, you know, I was close to Radek—but never to Trotsky, which is why I’m still here. But my lack of advancement doesn’t bother me, you know. I have no personal ambition. I serve my Party and my country, and I’m happy to die for them. But that doesn’t keep one from thinking.”—“But if you believe our two systems are identical, why are you fighting against us?”—“I never said they were identical! And you’re much too intelligent to think so. I tried to show you that the ways our ideologies function are similar. The contents, of course, differ: class and race. For me, your National Socialism is a heresy of Marxism.”—“How, in your opinion, is Bolshevik ideology superior to National Socialism?”—“In that it wants the good of all humanity, whereas yours is selfish, it just wants the good of the Germans. Not being German, it’s impossible for me to adhere to it, even if I wanted to.”—“Yes, but if you were born a bourgeois, like me, it would be impossible to become a Bolshevik: you would remain, whatever your innermost convictions, an objective enemy.”—“That’s true, but that’s because of education. A child of bourgeois parents, a grandchild of bourgeois parents, educated from birth in a socialist country, will be a good, a true Communist, above suspicion. When classless society becomes a reality, all classes will be dissolved within communism. In theory, this can be extended to the whole world, which isn’t the case of National Socialism.”—“In theory, maybe. But you can’t prove it, and in reality you commit atrocious crimes in the name of this utopia.”—“I won’t answer that your crimes are worse. I’ll simply tell you that if we can’t prove the validity of our hopes to someone who refuses to believe in the truth of Marxism, we can and we will concretely prove to you the inanity of your own. Your biological racism postulates that the races are unequal among themselves, that some are stronger and more valid than others, and that the strongest and the most valid of all is the German race. But when Berlin looks like this city”—he pointed his finger at the ceiling—“and when our brave soldiers are camping on your Unter den Linden, you’ll at least be forced, if you want to save your racist faith, to acknowledge that the Slavic race is stronger than the German race.” I didn’t let myself be intimidated: “You sincerely believe, when you’ve just barely held Stalingrad, that you’re going to take Berlin? You’re joking.”—“I don’t believe it, I know it. You just have to look at the respective military potentials. Without counting the second front that our allies are going to open in Europe soon. You’re finished.”—“We’ll fight to the last man.”—“No doubt, but you’ll perish all the same. And Stalingrad will remain as the symbol of your defeat. Wrongly, too. In my opinion, you already lost the war last year, when we stopped you in front of Moscow. We lost land, cities, men; all that can be replaced. But the Party didn’t collapse, and that was your only hope. Without that, you could even have taken Stalingrad, it wouldn’t have changed anything. And you could have taken Stalingrad, too, if you hadn’t made so many mistakes, if you hadn’t underestimated us so much. It wasn’t inevitable that you’d lose here, that your Sixth Army would be completely destroyed. But if you had taken Stalingrad, then what? We would still have been in Ulianovsk, in Kuibyshev, in Moscow, in Sverdlovsk. And we would have ended up doing the same thing to you a little farther along. Of course, the symbolism wouldn’t have been the same, it wouldn’t have been Stalin’s city. But who is Stalin, really? And what does his hubris and his glory mean to us Bolsheviks? We, here, who are dying every day, what do his daily telephone calls to Zhukov mean to us? It’s not Stalin who gives the men the courage to rush in front of your machine guns. Of course, you need a leader, you need someone to coordinate everything, but that could have been any other man of ability. Stalin is no more irreplaceable than Lenin, or me. Our strategy here has been a strategy of common sense. And our soldiers, our Bolsheviks, would have shown as much courage in Kuibyshev. Despite all our military defeats, our Party and our people have remained unvanquished. Now things are going to go the other way. Your troops are already beginning to evacuate the Caucasus. There’s no doubt whatsoever about our final victory.”—“Maybe,” I retorted. “But at what price for your communism? Ever since the beginning of the war, Stalin has appealed to national values, the only things that truly inspire men, not to communist values. He reintroduced the czarist orders of Suvorov and Kutuzov, as well as golden epaulettes for the officers, which your comrades in Petrogad used to nail to their shoulders in ’seventeen. In the pockets of your dead soldiers, and even of superior officers, we find hidden icons. Better yet, we know from our interrogations that racial values are appearing in broad daylight in the highest spheres of the Party and the Red Army, a Great Russian, anti-Semitic spirit that Stalin and the Party leaders cultivate. You too are beginning to mistrust your Jews; but they’re not a class.”—“What you say is certainly true,” he acknowledged sadly. “Under the pressure of the war, atavisms are resurfacing. But you can’t forget what the Russian people were before 1917, their state of ignorance, of backwardness. We haven’t even had twenty years to educate and correct them; that’s not very long. After the war we’ll resume that task, and little by little all those mistakes will be corrected.”—“I think you’re wrong. The problem isn’t the people: it’s your leaders. Communism is a mask stuck onto the unchanged face of Russia. Your Stalin is a czar, your Politburo are boyars, or greedy and egotistical aristocrats, your Party cadres, the same chinovniki as the ones under Peter or Nicholas. It’s the same Russian autocracy, the same permanent insecurity, the same paranoia of the foreign, the same fundamental inability to govern correctly, the same substitution of terror for the common consensus, and thus for real power, the same unbridled corruption, in other forms, the same incompetence, the same drunkenness. Read the correspondence between Kurbsky and Ivan, read Karamzin, read Custine. The crucial given of your history has never been changed: humiliation, from father to son. Ever since the beginning, but especially since the Mongols, everything humiliates you, and all the politics of your ruling class consists not of correcting this humiliation and its causes, but of hiding it from the rest of the world. Peter’s city is nothing but another Potemkin village: it’s not a window opening onto Europe, but a theater set put up to mask from the West all the poverty and endless filth stretching out behind it. But one can humiliate only those who can be humiliated; and in turn, only the humiliated humiliate. The humiliated of 1917, from Stalin down to the muzhik, have done nothing since then but inflict their fear and their humiliation on others. For in this country of the humiliated, the czar, whatever his strength may be, is powerless, his will is lost in the muddy swamp of his administration, and he is soon reduced, like Peter, to ordering his minions to obey his orders; in front of him people bow, but behind his back, they steal from him or conspire against him; everyone flatters his superiors and oppresses his subordinates, everyone has a slave mentality, raby as you say, and this slave spirit rises to the top; and the greatest slave of all is the czar, who can do nothing against the cowardliness and humiliation of his people of slaves, and who thus, in his powerlessness, kills them, terrorizes them, and humiliates them even more. And every time there’s a real rupture in your history, a real chance to get out of this infernal cycle to begin a new history, you blow it: faced with freedom, the freedom of 1917 you were talking about, everyone, people and leaders alike, recoils and goes to the old tried-and-true methods. The end of the NEP, the declaration of socialism in a single country, is nothing but that. And since hope wasn’t completely extinguished, there had to be purges. The present Great Russianism is only the logical outcome of this process. The Russian, the eternally humiliated man, can never escape from this humiliation except by identifying himself with the abstract glory of Russia. He may work fifteen hours a day in a freezing factory, eat nothing his entire life but black bread and cabbage, and serve a fat boss who calls himself a Marxist-Leninist but who rides around in a limousine with his high-class hookers and his French Champagne—none of that matters to him, so long as the Third Rome is at hand. And this Third Rome can call itself Christian or communist, it’s not important. As for the factory boss, he will constantly tremble for his position, he will flatter his superior and offer him sumptuous gifts and, if he’s demoted, another one identical to him will be appointed in his place, just as greedy, ignorant, and humiliated, and full of scorn for his workers, because after all he serves a proletarian State. One day, no doubt, the communist façade will disappear, with or without violence. Then we’ll discover that same Russia, intact. If you ever do win this war, you’ll emerge from it more National Socialist and more imperialistic than us, but your socialism, unlike ours, will be nothing but an empty name, and you’ll have nothing but nationalism left to cling to. In Germany, and in the capitalist countries, everyone says communism ruined Russia; but I believe it’s the opposite: it’s Russia that ruined communism. It could have been a fine idea, and who can say what would have happened if the Revolution had taken place in Germany rather than Russia? If it had been led by self-assured Germans, like your friends Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht? For my part, I think it would have been a disaster, since it would have exacerbated our specific conflicts, which National Socialism is trying to resolve. But who knows? What is certain is that having been attempted here, the communist experiment could be nothing but a failure. It’s like a medical experiment conducted in a contaminated environment: the results can go straight in the trash.”—“You are an excellent dialectician, and I congratulate you; you sound like a trained Communist. But I am tired and I am not going to argue with you. In any case, all this is nothing but words. Neither you nor I will see the future you describe.”—“Who knows? You’re a high-ranking Commissar. Maybe we’ll send you to a camp to interrogate you.”—“Don’t play with me,” he replied harshly. “Seats in your planes are much too limited for you to evacuate small fry. I know perfectly well I’ll be shot, in a short while or tomorrow. It doesn’t bother me.” He went on in a cheerful voice: “Do you know the French writer Stendhal? Then you’ll certainly have read this phrase Only a death sentence truly distinguishes a man. It’s the only thing that cannot be bought.” I couldn’t help laughing; he too laughed, but more quietly. “But where did you dig that up?” I finally got out. He shrugged his shoulders: “Oh. I’ve read more than just Marx, you know.”—“It’s too bad I have nothing to drink,” I said. “I’d have gladly offered you a glass.” I became serious again: “It’s also too bad we’re enemies. In other circumstances, we could have gotten along.”—“Maybe,” he said pensively, “but also maybe not.” I got up, went to the door, and called the Ukrainian. Then I went back behind my desk. The Commissar had gotten up and was trying to straighten his torn sleeve. Still standing, I offered him the rest of my pack of cigarettes. “Oh, thanks,” he said. “Do you have any matches?” I gave him the box of matches too. The Ukrainian was waiting in the doorway. “Allow me not to shake your hand,” the Commissar said with a little ironic smile.—“Of course,” I replied. The Ukrainian took him by the arm and he went out, putting the pack of cigarettes and the box of matches into his jacket pocket. I shouldn’t have given him the whole pack, I said to myself; he won’t have time to finish it, and the Ukrainians will smoke the rest.