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Drawing from Andrei Platonov's Chevengur, I present the figure of the comrade as the zero-level of communism. Platonov's comrades persist in a postrevolutionary zone without workers, without classes, where the remainders of the old order have nothing but each other. Their condition of deprivation, where the persistence of each depends on the persistence of all, supplies the ground upon which to build communism. The comrade is the zero-level of communism because it designates the relation between those on the same side of the struggle to produce a new set of free, just, and equal social relations, relations without exploitation. Their relation is political, divisive. And it is intimate, intertwined with the sense of how desperately each depends upon the other if all are to persevere. I test this account of the comrade through the counter-intuitive case of the