The case of Comrade Tulayev; (Penguin modern classics) (1968)

One killing in Stalinist Moscow becomes the occasion for an investigation that manufactures a much larger political explanation. Serge follows the officials, committed revolutionaries and vulnerable people made to fit it. The absorbing question is how loyalty to a revolution becomes available for use against its believers. A strong institutional counterpoint to heroic accounts of taking power, with arrests, coercion and executions extending far beyond the originating act.