Tulpanov for the four years of the Soviet occupation of Germany between 1945 and 1949 dominated the scene in the Eastern march much as one of Caesar’s commanders in Sicily or an Augustan imperial consul in North Africa. He seemed to be at every political meeting from Leipzig and Dresden to Chemnitz and Rostock; and the official Red Army newspaper, the Tägliche Rundschau, reported what he had said on the next day (and a complete text across a full page followed a few days later). He explained why Marxism was an irrefutable science; how Lenin and Stalin were destined to enrichen political theory; where the German people could find peace and security (in opting for a Communist alliance with the USSR); when they would be genuinely free and reunited (the day the revolutionary mass pressure would get the Americans out of Europe). He was a tribune for Stalin’s victory, and a man to be deferred to and feared in his own right.

He was standing at a kind of a bar in the Russian Club, Die Möwe. Named after Chekhov’s Seagull, the ramshackle reconstruction in the Wilhelmstraße had been built in the heart of East Berlin to win over the German intelligentsia to the “progressive cause”. Artists, writers, actors and their friends flowed in. Beer and vodka were cheap (and, above all, available); the Borschtsuppe was thick and tasty; the hot dogs were almost of pre-War Würstchen quality. The whole affair was a reception for Carl Zuckmayer, the famous Weimar playwright who had returned from his Vermont exile in the USA “to look around”. Zuck was delighted with the way the Russians received him and had invited many of his old friends from all parts of the city as well as the cultural officers of the Western Allies. It was a high-spirited evening at which much was imbibed. Zuck said, many years later, “Could you imagine that evening, with just about everybody there, that it would all split into two halves?” I said I could.
Tulpanov was a large man with an absolutely bald head that shone brilliantly even in the dim lights of the club room. He spoke German fluently, if with a somewhat harsh Eastern accent. This time he was in uniform with colored ribbons holding down bronze and silver medals; but very often he would surprise by turning up in civvies, and the East Berlin journalists would dutifully report, as if it had a deeper social significance: “Der Oberst erschien im hellgrauen Anzug (the Colonel arrived in a light-grey suit)…”

On the most memorable occasion to which I was a witness he was actually in a brown-colored suit, although even out of uniform he was to flash the full authority of his absolute command. I was taken again to the club, Die Möwe, in the still ruined Wilhemstraße, by an actor friend of mine, Wolfgang Lukschy, who had been a romantic-musical matinée idol in German films before the War but thought it was time for him, after everything had collapsed, to become “somewhat political”. He was subsequently to get into a bewildering agit-prop cross-fire; for he was given a starring role in the East, and it happened to be in the Konstantin Simonov’s ill-fated The Russian Question (Die russische Frage), which had its première in the Deutsches Theater, May 1947. Its savage anti-Americanism alarmed Western opinion and caused a frightened and bewildered Wolfgang Lukschy to “defect to the West” (and, thereafter, to return to rather more glamorous roles in the movies).

Lukschy and I sat together, sipping borscht along with O. E. Hasse and Kurt Meisel, and as the hour grew late the conversation grew more serious and even more organized. I thought I recognized this accelerated earnestness from scenes in Turgenev and Dostoyevsky. But to Russian intensity at midnight was added a heavy German concern to come away with a “message”, or at least, something to think about. Lesser Russian film- and theatre-officers began to move chairs and tables, for the Colonel was evidently in fine and full voice and everybody was straining an ear to catch what was being said.

Tulpanov, who had a touch of Stanislavski about him, kept talking at his table, carefully modulating his voice for the moment to come. With him were his close friends from the days when he stalked the Communist emigrés in the German colony of Moscow, Wolfgang Langhoff and Willi Bredel.

When that moment did come, what emerged was one of the most extraordinary brief pieces of oratory I have ever heard, a mixture of his own Russian hauteur and German deference to the voice of command. Some say that the beer and vodka (not to mention the music) heightened the occasion. We may have heard Volga notes that weren’t there; he may have uttered Neva tones that were not quite intended. But the Colonel was a man of such consistent ideological fastness that not even a lapse into in vino veritas could induce truths out of him that were not somehow part of the disciplined Party-line.

As a matter of fact a year later the speech he tried out on us after midnight was re-worked into a major State-of-the-Class-Struggle message. It then caused a nation-wide sensation for it was, at some higher level, cut, revised, bowdlerized, censored, and marked the low-point of his four-year reign as the whip of the revolution in Germany.

When the music stopped and they ceased serving drinks the Colonel turned to the subject that was on his heart. What was on his mind was obvious from the tortuous difficulties he had been having in the Sovieting the German province. Explanations were many—among them being how could Stalin ease them back to a totalitarian harness when the wounds of Hitler’s controls were so fresh. Excuses were ready-to-hand—such as the devastation had been so extensive that no real results, even with the application of vaunted German efficiency, could be managed within the short term.

One other factor remained, and historians have often maintained that this was the basic reason why in the duel for power in Central Europe the Russians could not make headway—the shock of the Red Army in the conquest of the Eastern German territories.

All military defeat is cruel and humiliating. But the rapine and the looting in this case was felt to be beyond the call of comprehension and forgiveness. I, and innumerable others, heard the dismal stories a hundred times: of the Vergewaltigung, the rape of women, young and old, from seven-to-seventy; the stripping of every household article from door-knobs to toilet-seats and bowls, etc…. If this were so, and it was, the deep resentment would cause a barrier which two or three generations would not be able to forget. Re-organize political parties as you will; go in for police intimidation on the chance that people will be terrorized into polite conformity; tinker with the economic system and the planning thereof. Would it all prove to be any avail? No, it would not. That smart the Colonel was.

As best as I can recall the gist of his remarks (and later, as I mentioned above, he tried to put some of it on the record), he said:

There was a hush, and there was no further talk. All the guests shuffled out and homewards. And I felt at the time that he had done it, had hit the right note; that he might have found the point to stand—between “Russian soul” and “German sentimentalism”—to bring together the battered and embittered psyches of the two powers that could easily dominate Europe. Even in perspective it appears to me that he had almost captured the tone of the tragedy and could possibly have used it to reverse the fortunes of his hard-pressed cause.

Rhetoric need not be mere empty words. Colonel Sergei Tulpanov, the soldier-intellectual, might have turned the trick. If he went on like this, and from this, there would be nothing that could stop the onset of a new order, still marked by deceit and deception, poverty and persecution, but embraced with a tear in the eye and the warm beginnings of a small friendly smile.

Ruined antagonists and cynical collaborators had come together before, making common cause in the surprising Rapallo Treaty of 1922 and in the melodramatic Hitler-Stalin Pact of 1939. Now the Germans, still shell-shocked by the Katastrophe wherein civilized time appeared to sink back to the Year Zero, were again groping, learning to count again on their fingers, still uncertain (in the stock Goethe phrase) which of the two souls that dwelt in their breast would make a Faustian deal.Underneath the formal mechanical ideology which bored the already alienated millions, Tulpanov may well have sensed a shared trauma and a last hope for his cause which lay in a breakthrough to a more natural language used by common men.

The Colonel made, as I have said, an attempt to make it all official, if tentatively and hesitantly as befits an imaginative apparatchik. In a formal speech a year later—in May 1948, on the eve of the Blockade of Berlin—he tried to break into the same aria, going on about the horrors of Berlin’s house-to-house fighting, the corpses rotting in the streets, and (in his words) “consequently the embitterment and the excesses of some of our soldiers in those days. These were offenses of men who went through four years of war full of atrocities, committed against their families…. Only reactionaries and war-mongers, attacking the Soviet Union, can still talk of ‘Uhri! Uhri!’ etc.”
I heard these words on Radio Berlin which broadcast Col. Tulpanov’s message, but the Tägliche Rundschau (presumbly on orders from the highest echelon in Karlshorst or the Kremlin) edited the text. The most unusual passage, with its rare touch of self-criticism, hitting an almost humane note systematically missing in the ukase tone of all Russian pronouncements, failed to appear the next morning in his own official Red Army newspaper. The chief censor was censored, and the consul was counseled not to go that far, too far. His experiment in rhetoric had failed. A handful of “mere words” are not enough, especially when they don’t even get to be printed.

Erik Reger, the authoritative editor of the West Berlin Der Tagesspiegel in those days, rubbed it in by publishing the discrepancies in the two versions of Colonel Tulpanov’s remarks.*

But when I discussed it all with Erik Reger he did not seem to be aware that in the whole incident lay “a road not taken”, and that it could have been a fatal turning-point in the struggle for “the minds and hearts” of the Germans if the Russians had not taken a mindless and heartless approach to the problems of maintaining their Empire in Central Europe. Reger took a formalistic approach, and seemed oblivious to the propaganda dangers; he wanted to concentrate on the everyday here-and-now and not with the phantoms of what he called “the Tauroggen complex”. (He was referring to the treaty between the Prussians and the Russians in 1812 which induced the German forces, now declared “neutral”, to defect from the Napoleonic alliance. “Tauroggen” and “Rapallo” were the twin ghosts that have always haunted a German foreign policy which was tempted to stay loyal and true to a Western alliance.)

Well, that made three of us. The lines of the struggle had been established, the basic Cold War positions embattled, and no single desperate inspiration by the belated dialectics of a Leningrad Commissar could alter the sandbox. The dream of a second Soviet victory in Berlin came to an end in 1949, when Stalin’s blockade failed and the technical feat of the Air Lift gave the West a first and decisive victory in the Cold War.

Tulpanov escaped being purged by a hair, and he returned to take up a University chair in political theory. Academic speculation was safer, and he was a Professor for another twenty-five years, dying in the Brezhnev era of comfortable stagnation, unperturbed in his own bed. A few years later he might have been denounced, in the Gorbachov period of glasnost, as a Stalinist blunderer who adventurously over-estimated the historical opportunity—and clumsily created an alarmed powerful and united West which would rush to contain a previously unresisted revolutionary expansionism.
I do not intend to suggest more than that, within the manifest limits of conventional discipline, Tulpanov was impulsive, contradictory, adventurous. Some of the German journalists who served in East Berlin under his régime in the first year of the Soviet occupation were (so they told me) surprised, if not bewildered. Eager as they were to toe some clear and consistent line, they became out-of-sorts in trying to accommodate themselves to unpredictable Russian improvisation.
The first copies of the Red Army newspaper were printed during the summer of 1945 in the old Nazi Franz-Eher-Verlag, and looked chillingly like Goebbels' Völkische Beobachter. Under the distasteful Gothic masthead, as if one propaganda machine had displaced another, there worked a hand-picked Tulpanov team of Soviet control officers who were…mostly Jews. To be sure there were technical reasons: command of the language among the sons of Volga-German families, familiarity with Berlin among some Muscovite emigrés, and the like. Still, it was an astonishing line-up in the Tägliche Rundschau editorial offices, featuring (as one German editor ruefully recorded) “the Gimselbergs, Epsteins, Rosenfelds, Weisspapiers, Neudorfs und so fort….” I heard from the same journalist later on—after Tulpanov’s transfer out of Berlin, and with Stalin going into his last phase of paranoic anti-semitism—that one fine day (in 1950) the Rundschau staff was suddenly depleted. “The Jewish officers had been taken out of their billets during the previous night and transported to a destination unknown….”**

Of such dark and bitter ironies was the legendary reputation of Sergei Tulpanov made. Tulpanov by now was back in Leningrad, still alive and in good graces; but no word of protest or even of private sadness was ever recorded coming from any member of the old Stalinist establishment. Like Schiller’s Mohr, Tulpanov’s Jews did what they had to do and were brusquely discarded.