![]() ![]() This kind of black irony is characteristic of Serge’s writing. You who seemed to know the need for loyal collaboration so well.” He is classified into Category A - “undesirable” - then taken to be shot. Instead, he is told: “You had suspicions, Flotte, you even had precise evidence, yet you kept silent. On the brink of being released, it strikes Flotte that he might strengthen his case by informing on his neighbor, who, he says, sympathizes with “the Reds in Spain and with the English - in short a man capable of any crime.” Thinking that he will be rewarded, he omits nothing and embellishes much. Genrikh Yagoda, Stalin’s head of the NKVD, orchestrated the Great Terror only to himself be “liquidated.” In a marvelously funny scene in Victor Serge’s Last Times, set in the early moments of the Nazi occupation of France, the hapless hotelkeeper Anselme Flotte is interrogated by Lt. It relies on the fear that even abject servility might not save one from the secret police. ![]() Dictatorial repression is often called “systematic,” but its main hallmark is caprice. ![]()
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