Lessons from a Dark Time and Other Essays

by Adam Hochschild

  Serge’s opposition to Soviet tyranny meant that his work could never be published in Stalin’s USSR, but his radicalism long kept much of it out of print in the United States as well. George Orwell felt akin to Serge and tried unsuccessfully to find him a British publisher. Today, however, he has won increasing recognition. Recent decades have seen books and articles about him by many writers, a biography, and the translation of a number of his novels into English for the first time. Older editions of other Serge books have been reprinted, and some admirers founded a Victor Serge Library in Moscow.

  Serge was part of the generation that, at first, believed the Russian Revolution was an epochal step forward. Millions of people in many countries were ready to see it that way after the First World War, which took the lives of more than nine million soldiers, wounded twenty-one million, and left millions of civilians dead as well. His great hopes make all the more poignant his clear-eyed picture of the gathering darkness as the Revolution turned slowly into the equivalent of a vast, self-inflicted genocide. It was the era when, as a character in his novel Conquered City says, “We have conquered everything, and everything has slipped out of our grasp.” A poem Serge wrote captures the same feeling:

  If we roused the peoples and made the continents quake,

  . . . began to make everything anew with these dirty old stones,

  these tired hands, and the meager souls that were left us,

  it was not in order to haggle with you now,

  sad revolution, our mother, our child, our flesh,

  our decapitated dawn, our night with its stars askew . . .

  Serge’s eyewitness account of this decapitated dawn is nowhere more tragic than in his Memoirs of a Revolutionary, a book that ranks with Orwell’s Homage to Catalonia, Koestler’s Darkness at Noon, and Primo Levi’s Survival in Auschwitz as a great act of political witness. He describes, for example, coming back to Russia in 1926 after a trip abroad: “A return to Russian soil rends the heart. ‘Earth of Russia,’ wrote the poet Tyutchev, ‘no corner of you is untouched by Christ the slave.’ The Marxist explains it in the same terms: ‘The production of commodities was never sufficient.’” In the countryside, the hungry poor have taken to the roads. The streets of Leningrad are filled with beggars, abandoned children, prostitutes. “The hotels laid on for foreigners and Party officials have bars that are complete with tables covered in soiled white linen, dusty palm trees, and alert waiters who know secrets beyond the Revolution’s ken.” One after another, people Serge knows and admires—labor organizers, poets, veteran revolutionaries—commit suicide.

  In 1933, Serge was arrested again. He asked friends to take care of his wife and young son if he were executed. Instead, however, he and his family were exiled to the remote city of Orenburg in the Ural Mountains. People were starving; children clawed each other in the streets for a piece of bread. Serge became fast friends with the other political exiles there, a small group of men and women who shared food and ideas, nursed one another through illnesses, and kept each other alive.

  Fluent in five languages, Serge did almost all his writing in French. By the time of his exile in Orenburg, his books and articles had found him a following among independent leftists in the West who were alarmed by both fascism and Stalinism. In 1936, protests by French intellectuals finally won him the right to leave Russia. This was the year that the Great Purge began in earnest, with mass arrests and executions on a scale unmatched in Russian history, indeed, in almost any country’s history. Serge’s release from the Soviet Union almost certainly saved his life. The secret police seized all copies of the manuscripts of four books he had written, including the novel he thought his best. Thanks to his exile, Serge said wryly, these were “the only works I have ever had the opportunity to revise at leisure.” Since the collapse of the USSR, people have searched repeatedly for these manuscripts in Russian archives, but with no success.

  When he arrived in western Europe, Serge’s politics again made him an outsider. Neither mainstream nor communist newspapers would publish his articles, and the European communist parties attacked him ferociously. His primary forum was a small labor paper in Belgium. There, and in a stream of new books, pamphlets, speeches, and defense committees, he railed against the Great Purge, defended the Spanish Republic, then in the midst of a losing war against Francisco Franco and his Nationalists, and spoke out against the Western powers for accommodating Hitler. These ideas were not popular. To make ends meet he went back to work at a trade he had first learned in his youth. As a typesetter and proofreader, he now found himself sometimes correcting the galleys of newspapers that would not publish his writing.

  Meanwhile, Stalin’s agents roamed Europe, on occasion assassinating members of the opposition in exile. Back in the Soviet Union, things were still worse: Serge’s sister, mother-in-law, two brothers-in-law, and two sisters-in-law disappeared into the Gulag. His wife, Lyuba Russakova, became psychotic and had to be put in a French mental hospital. The Germans invaded France; when Nazi tanks reached the suburbs of Paris and shells were falling on the Fontainebleau woods, Serge fled the city. He was stranded for many months in Marseille, then under the control of the Vichy government, sharing a house with others in flight, including his friend the French surrealist André Breton, while American sympathizers lobbied desperately to find countries across the Atlantic that would accept them as refugees. As always, he was writing, now, even in these circumstances, working on the novel that would be his best-known, The Case of Comrade Tulayev. The United States refused him a visa. The Nazis burned his books. It was, Serge wrote, “a world with no possible escape.” Just ahead of the Gestapo, he and his teenage son were at last able to leave Marseille on a ship to Mexico. When it stopped in Martinique, Vichy French officials grilled the passengers, wanting to know who was Jewish. “I do not have that honor,” Serge told them.

  • • •

  Although Serge’s novels provide a vivid picture of the tumultuous era he lived through, his greatest work is his Memoirs of a Revolutionary. The book he thought he was writing, however, is not exactly the one we admire him for today. In both this volume and some twenty others—fiction, nonfiction, biography, history, and poetry—his driving passion was to rescue the honor of the idealists who participated in the Russian Revolution from the Stalinists, who turned it into a horror show. “The scrupulous and the just, the noble, humane, and devoted . . . the unselfish and the intelligent may begin a movement,” Joseph Conrad wrote in his prescient Under Western Eyes, “—but it passes away from them. They are not the leaders of a revolution. They are its victims.” Serge wanted to celebrate just those people.

  Noble and humane some of the Bolsheviks may have been, but looking back on those times today, it is hard to believe that anything promising could have emerged from a movement that so early made clear its contempt for democracy. It was January 1918, after all, only two months after their coup, that Bolshevik soldiers with fixed bayonets broke up the first day’s meeting of the Constituent Assembly, the national legislature chosen in the first reasonably free election Russia had ever had. Nor can we share Serge’s hope that the fractious Left Oppositionists who loosely coalesced around Leon Trotsky in the following decade could have created the good society in Russia, even though surely none of them would have constructed a charnel house as murderous as Stalin’s. Once again, Serge’s revolutionary dreams were in conflict with his shrewd assessment of the people around him, for the brilliant capsule portrait of Trotsky in his memoirs shows both the man’s wide-ranging intellect and his harsh, authoritarian streak.

  What moves us now in this book, and Serge’s others, is not so much his vision of what the Revolution might have been. It is, rather, two qualities of the man himself. The first is his ability to see the world with unflinching clarity. In the Soviet Union’s first decade and a half, despite arrests, ostracism, theft of his manuscripts, and the near starvation he faced for a time, he bore witness. This was rare. Although other totalitarian regimes,
left and right, have had naïve, besotted admirers, never has there been a despotism praised by so many otherwise sane intellectuals. George Bernard Shaw traveled to Russia in the midst of the man-made famine of the early 1930s and declared that there was food enough for everyone. Walter Duranty, the Pulitzer Prize-winning New York Times correspondent in Moscow, whitewashed the famine as well. In Soviet Russia the great muckraking journalist Lincoln Steffens saw, in his famous phrase, a future that worked. An astonishing variety of other Westerners, from the Dean of Canterbury to the U.S. ambassador, Joseph E. Davies (see p. 181), saw a society full of happy workers and laughing children. By contrast with all these cheerful visitors, Victor Serge had what Orwell, in another context, called the “power of facing unpleasant facts.”

  Serge’s other great virtue is his novelist’s eye for human character. He never lets his intense political commitment blind him to life’s humor and paradox, its sensuality and beauty. You can see this in photographs as well, which show his kindly, ironic eyes, behind steel-rimmed glasses, that seem to be both sad and amused by something, set in a modest, bearded face. “I have always believed,” he writes, “that human qualities find their physical expression in a man’s personal appearance.” In what other revolutionary’s autobiography could you find, for example, something like this thumbnail sketch of a French communist Serge knew in Russia?

  [Henri] Guilbeaux’s whole life was a perfect example of the failure who, despite all his efforts, skirts the edge of success without ever managing to achieve it. . . . He wrote cacophonous poetry, kept a card index full of gossip about his comrades, and plagued the Cheka [the Soviet secret police] with confidential notes. He wore green shirts and pea-green ties with greenish suits; everything about him, including his crooked face and his eyes, seemed to have a touch of mold. (He died in Paris, about 1938, by then an anti-Semite, having published two books proving Mussolini to be the only true successor of Lenin.)

  In The Case of Comrade Tulayev, three members of the Trotskyist opposition meet on skis in the woods outside Moscow. They talk of the injustices around them, agree that things are hopeless and that what probably awaits them is prison and early death; then they have a snowball fight. In Memoirs of a Revolutionary, Serge describes fighting White saboteurs on the rooftops of Petrograd in 1919, during the “white night” of the far northern summer, “overlooking a sky-blue canal. Men fled before us, firing their revolvers at us from behind the chimney pots. . . . The men we were after escaped, but I treasured an unforgettable vision of the city, seen at 3 a.m. in all its magical paleness.”

  • • •

  After I first discovered Serge’s writing, I tried to look for traces of him in Russia. In the summer of 1978, some dozen years before the Soviet Union began to crumble, I visited what he had called “this city that I love above all.” When he first arrived there it was Petrograd, then Leningrad, and later once again it would become, as it was more than a century ago, St. Petersburg. I began at the Smolny Institute. Before the Revolution, the Smolny was Russia’s most exclusive girls’ finishing school, under the personal patronage of the tsarina. In 1917, the Bolsheviks took it over as their headquarters and planned their coup d’état from classrooms where daughters of the aristocracy had once studied French and Latin. Serge had his office here, as the infant Revolution defended itself against the attacking White armies. In one of his novels, he describes how the barrels of cannons poked out between the Smolny’s majestic neoclassical columns.

  Now the building was closed to the public; the grounds were a park. Fountains played and a warm breeze rustled the trees. Two old men talked on a bench. There was no suggestion of the history that had taken place at this spot; it felt ghostly by its absence. By 10 p.m. the sun had just set, but the sky still glowed with the same mysterious “magical paleness” that had caught Serge’s eye, even while he was being shot at, so many decades before.

  In October 1919, when the Revolution was menaced from all sides, Serge took up arms in defense of the city. He fought in the decisive hillside battle that turned back the White Army at Pulkovo Heights, site of an old observatory on the outskirts of the city. Some sixty years later, a puzzled cabdriver waited while my wife and I climbed the hill at Pulkovo. A beech grove shaded us from the hot sun. A woman in a red kerchief walked slowly around the edge of a field, in search of something—wildflowers? mushrooms? From the hilltop we could see the distant city. On the horizon was a gleam of gold from the towers of the Fortress of St. Peter and St. Paul. This hill was as far as the White Army advanced. When the Whites fell back, the tide of the Russian Civil War turned, the battles died away, but the Russia that took shape was not the one that Serge had risked his life for.

  On another day we went in search of the apartment where he and his family had lived. It was on a street lined with weathered stone buildings where gates to enclosed courtyards seemed to open onto another century. I found the right building and mounted marble steps still lined by a prerevolutionary wrought-iron railing and banister. Outside the large wooden door on the top floor, there was no telling which bell to ring, because it was a communal apartment, with seven doorbells for the seven families who lived there. I picked one, and the woman who answered said, “Wait. I’ll get someone. She has lived here many years.”

  We remained on the landing. Finally, a woman came out: stocky, broad-faced, with gold teeth and slightly suspicious eyes. She said she was sixty years old and that she had lived in this apartment since she was seven. No, she said, defying my arithmetic, she did not remember the man I was asking about in my clumsy Russian—although, oddly, she did recall the Russakovs, Serge’s wife’s family. But when asked about Serge, she shook her head firmly, arms crossed on her chest. Another nyet came when I asked if we could come in. Evidently she feared getting into trouble if she allowed a foreigner into the apartment. Anyway, she added, the whole place has been remodeled, so it is not the same as when this man—is he a relative of yours?—lived here.

  Despite the noes, she was happy to talk, and we chatted on the landing for more than half an hour. I peered past her, trying to glimpse inside. According to Serge, the apartment had been hastily abandoned by a high tsarist official and still had a grand piano. In the bookcase had been the many volumes of Laws of the Empire, which, savoring the symbolism, Serge burned for heat one by one in the winter months of early 1919.

  I brought up his name again, and suddenly her eyes narrowed. “This man—was he an anarchist?”

  “Aha, so you do remember him!”

  “No.” Her arms crossed again firmly and she shook her head. “Absolutely not.”

  That evening, back at our hotel, I checked some dates in his memoirs. If she told me her age correctly, this woman was ten when the police knocked on that same door at midnight and arrested Serge the first time. And she was fifteen when, in front of a pharmacy still standing on a nearby corner, he was arrested again and sent into exile in the Urals. Fifteen years old. A family she shared a kitchen with. Could she really have forgotten? Did she only remember the “anarchist” from some later denunciation? Then I noticed another passage in the memoirs. Serge says that in the mid-1920s, the Soviet authorities moved a young secret police officer “plus his wife, child, and grandmother” into the communal apartment to keep an eye on him. The dates fit. Was this woman the child?

  • • •

  Even crossing the Atlantic to Mexico, on the final flight of his exile-filled life, sleeping on a straw pallet in the airless hold of a freighter hastily converted to hold several hundred refugees, Serge never allowed himself to feel exiled. An internationalist always, he was at home wherever there were people who shared his beliefs. He recorded the clenched-fist salute his shipload of anti-Nazi refugees got from Spanish fishermen; he organized political discussions even at sea: “Out in the Atlantic, past the Sahara coast, the stars pitch up and down above our heads. We hold a meeting on the upper deck, between the funnel and the lifeboats.”

  In Mexico he stayed true to his vision
as both a radical and a believer in free speech, and again met resistance. Communist Party thugs at one point shot at him; on another occasion they attacked a meeting where he was speaking, injuring some seventy people. His young daughter was covered with blood from stab wounds to a man who had bent over her to protect her. At the same time, even though he was denied entry to the United States, the FBI kept him and his children under surveillance and copied his correspondence with Americans. His FBI file—or at least as much of it as the agency was willing to release to his biographer Susan Weissman—is 331 pages long. Serge’s politics cut off his access to both the mainstream and pro-Soviet Mexican press. Book publishers were no better. He wrote anyway, finishing both his panoramic novel of the Purge, The Case of Comrade Tulayev, and Memoirs of a Revolutionary. He tried and failed to find an American publisher for the memoirs; neither book appeared before he died of a heart attack, in the back seat of Mexico City taxi, in 1947. He was fifty-six years old.