Of his term in prison (1912–17), Serge wrote: “It burdened me with an experience so heavy, so intolerable to endure, that long afterward, when I resumed writing, my first book [Men in Prison, a novel] amounted to an effort to free myself from this inward nightmare, as well as the performance of a duty toward all those who will never so free themselves.”
Released from prison at the height of World War I and banned from France, Serge made his way to Barcelona, a city “at peace,” busily turning out weapons for both sides in the great conflict. It was there that he abandoned individualism, and began to agitate in the ranks of the syndicalists. In Barcelona, he wrote his first article signed “Victor Serge,” and Barcelona on the eve of insurrection (twenty years before the great Spanish Revolution and Civil War) is the setting for the first half of Birth of Our Power.
Involved as he was in Spain, it was the Russian Revolution, which had just erupted at the other end of Europe, that was for Serge “my” revolution, the end of that “world without possible escape.” He left Barcelona and attempted to join the Russian Army in France in order to be repatriated to the homeland, as it were. But he succeeded only in getting himself thrown into a French concentration camp as a “Bolshevik suspect.” After the Armistice, he was sent to Russia as a hostage in exchange for some French officers interned by the Soviets. He arrived in Red Petrograd (the setting for the final chapters of Birth of Our Power and for Conquered City) in January 1919, at the height of the Civil War and famine. It was here that the evolution from Victor Kibalchich, homeless exile and anarchist-individualist, to Victor Serge, spokesman for Soviet power, was completed.
Serge’s libertarian sympathies made him, from the start, wary of the authoritarian nature of Bolshevik rule. But, as a revolutionary, only one course was open to him: he threw himself, body and soul, into the work of defending and building the Soviet Republic. During the Civil War, he served as a machine gunner in a special defense battalion, collaborated closely with Zinoviev the founding congresses of the Communist International, became a Commissar in charge of the czarist secret police archives (under Krassin), and eventually a member of the Russian Communist Party. At the same time, however, he openly criticized Bolshevik authoritarianism, frequented anarchist, Left-Menshevik, and Left-Socialist circles, and interceded in favor of many prisoners of the Cheka (predecessor of the GPU and the NKVD). At this time, too, Serge was translating into French the works of Lenin, Trotsky, and Zinoviev. Among poets and writers, he was friendly with Yessenin, Mayakovsky, Pilnyak, Pasternak, Panait Istrati, and Maxim Gorky (a distant relative on his mother’s side).
By 1923, he was a confirmed member of the Left (Trotskyist) Opposition; at that date it was still possible to be simultaneously “loyal” and an “oppositionist” in Soviet Russia. But his presence in Russia was troublesome; he was made editor of the International Communist Bulletin and sent off to Germany and the Balkans to agitate, a task which he performed with perfect loyalty and discipline.
When Serge returned to Moscow in 1926 to take part in the inner-Party struggle against Stalin, however, the political climate was greatly changed. A little over a year later, he was expelled from the Party and held in prison for several weeks; his relatives, including many who had no political affiliations, were also made to suffer. It was during this period (1928–33) that, relieved of all official functions and systematically deprived of any means of earning a living because of the Stalinist “blacklist,” Serge turned to serious writing. Already known in France for his pamphlets and political articles, he soon attracted a larger audience there as an historian (Year One of the Russian Revolution, 1930) and novelist (Men in Prison, 1930; Birth of Our Power, 1931; Conquered City, 1932).
Surely no writer has ever produced under more difficult conditions, and the vivid tension and rapid episodic style of his works may well have been dictated in part by his personal situation. “I knew that I would never have time to polish my works properly. Their value would not depend on that. Others, less involved in struggle, would perfect a style; but what I had to tell, they could not tell. To each his own task. I had to struggle bitterly for my family’s daily bread [Serge had married soon after arriving in Russia] in a society where all doors were closed to me, and where people were often afraid to shake my hand in the street. I asked myself every day, without any particular feeling, but engrossed by the problems of rent, my wife’s health, my son’s education, whether I would be arrested in the night. For my books I adopted an appropriate form: I had to construct them in detached fragments which could each be finished separately and sent abroad posthaste; which could, if absolutely necessary, be published as they were, incomplete; and it would be difficult for me to compose in any other form.”
Serge was arrested again in 1933, and this time sent to Orenburg where he was joined by his young son, Vlady. He might well have perished there, like so many other Soviet writers, during the period of the great purges, had it not been for his reputation in the West. A group of young Parisian intellectuals campaigned openly for his freedom, and his plight was brought to the attention of pro-Soviet luminaries like Romain Rolland, André Gide, and Audré Malraux, some of whom may have interceded in his favor with Stalin. In 1936 he was removed from Orenburg, but he was also deprived of Soviet citizenship, relieved of his manuscripts (both actions in violation of Soviet law), and expelled from the Soviet Union. His return to Europe was heralded by a vicious slander campaign in the Communist press.
Serge settled first in Brussels, then in Paris, where he continued to battle for the ideals of Soviet democracy and against the rising tides of Stalinism and fascism. His next novel, S’il est minuit dans le siècle, 1939, told the story of the heroic resistance of the Oppositionists and Old Bolsheviks in Stalin’s concentration camps, and he analyzed the Stalinist counterrevolution in books like From Lenin to Stalin, 1937, and Destiny of a Revolution, 1937. Serge was one of the few to recognize the outrage of the Moscow frame-up trials (which deceived a whole generation of Leftist intellectuals and even the U.S. Ambassador in Moscow) and to raise a voice against them.
Revolution had again broken out in Spain, and long before his contemporary and admirer, George Orwell (cf. Homage to Catalonia), Serge saw through Stalin’s machinations there. While the workers and farmers were dying valiantly for the Spanish Republic, the Communists were quietly “eliminating” their political rivals in the rear. In spite of Serge’s efforts, by the end of 1937, the Stalinists had murdered Serge’s comrade Andrès Nin, the leader of the Spanish POUM (independent Marxist party) and jailed and killed countless others. “We are building a common front against fascism. How can we block its path with so many concentration camps behind us?” he wrote to André Gide (with whom he was later associated) on the eve of the latter’s voyage to Russia.
World War II soon put an end to the limited possibilities for action that had remained open to Serge and his friends. As if reluctant to admit the catastrophe he hid long predicted and fought against, Serge was one of the last to leave Paris before the advancing Nazis in 1940, although he was clearly marked for death by the Gestapo. Arriving penniless in Marseille, with the Gestapo at his heels, he fought for months to get a visa while the great “democracies” closed their doors to him. At the last moment, he found refuge for himself and his family in Mexico.
Isolated as he now was from the European socialist movement that had been his life, forced to be an impotent witness to the debacle of Europe under Hitler, menaced by NKVD assassins (who had recently murdered his friend Trotsky, also in Mexico), deprived of a journalistic platform by his Stalinist opponents, Serge might well have been thoroughly demoralized by his years in Mexico. But he continued to write, though without hope of publication, and produced some of his finest works (The Case of Comrade Tulayev and Memoirs of a Revolutionary) “for the desk drawer.” At the end of the war, in spite of failing health and financial difficulties, he made plans to return to France. But his many projects for new books and new struggles were cut short by his
death on November 17, 1947.
Even at the lowest ebb of his fortunes (in 1943), Serge had found the courage to write: “I have undergone a little over ten years of various forms of captivity, agitated in seven countries, and written twenty books. I own nothing. On several occasions a press with a vast circulation has hurled filth at me because I spoke the truth. Behind us lies a victorious revolution gone astray, several abortive attempts at revolution, and massacres in so great number as to inspire a certain dizziness. And to think that it is not over yet. Let me be done with this digression; those were the only roads possible for us. I have more confidence in mankind and in the future than ever before.”
The Writer as Witness
Serge’s dedication to absolute political honesty and clear-sightedness (probité and lucidité) as the only bases for building a genuine revolutionary movement had its corollary in his devotion to artistic truth.
The noun “witness” is a rough English equivalent of the Greek martus, from which our word “martyr” is also derived. The idea of being a witness to one’s faith implies not only testifying to a creed, but also participation and active suffering, freely accepted, in the name of something larger than one’s personal ego. It also implies a privileged situation. Poets and other creative artists have long claimed this kind of status for themselves. Whether they chose to suffer in the name of the forward march of Humanity (Hugo and the social romantics) or for the purity of Art and the Ideal (Baudelaire and the symbolists), they have regularly assumed that the greater the risk and the deeper the plunge into the mysteries of existence, the richer will be the prize with which the artist returns and which he offers up to an often uncomprehending humanity.
Victor Serge was such a martyr-witness. He felt that “artistic detachment” was not a means of being objective about reality, but only a fashionable means of avoiding a confrontation with it. And he plunged headlong into a maelstrom of social destruction and revolutionary upheaval. His commitment to revolution was made long before Communist state power made it easy and at times profitable for writers to become engagé, and it continued long after many of them had returned to their ivory towers proclaiming that their new-found god had failed. At the time of his death, Serge was one of the only survivors of three revolutionary generations. He had occupied a unique position, a position from which he, perhaps better than any other writer, was able to render both the heroism and the tragedy of a whole age of revolution.
For Serge, “He who speaks, he who writes is above all one who speaks on behalf of all those who have no voice”; he wrote out of a bond of solidarity with the men whose often tragic destinies fill the pages of his works—the heroes and the victims, the brave and the cowardly, the anarchists, Bolsheviks, bandits, madmen, poets, beggars, and the common workers. He defined the need to write as a need “first of all to capture, to fix, to understand, to interpret, to recreate life; to liberate, through exteriorization, the confused forces one feels fermenting within oneself and by means of which the individual plunges into the collective unconscious. In the work itself, this comes across as Testimony and Message …” He goes on to say, “Writing becomes a search for poly-personality, a means of living several destinies, of penetration into others, of communicating with them. The writer becomes conscious of the world he brings to life, he is its consciousness and he thus escapes from the ordinary limits of the self, something which is at once intoxicating and enriched with lucidity” (Carnets, Paris, 1952).
This attitude made it possible for Serge fully to appreciate the experiences of his turbulent life and to distill them into the concrete characterizations in his fiction. His life as an activist was unique in that he managed to be in virtually every revolutionary storm center during the first part of this century. But his experiences were nonetheless typical for a man of his times; individually, they recapitulated the experiences of millions of men caught up in the struggles of European society.
In the solitude of his Mexican exile, after a chance meeting with Trotsky’s widow, Natalia Sedova, Serge wrote sadly in his diary: “[We are] the sole survivors of the Russian Revolution here and perhaps anywhere in the world … There is nobody left who know what the Russian Revolution was really like, what the Bolsheviks were really like—and men judge without knowing, with bitterness and a basic rigidity.” That ineffable quality, “what things were really like”—the aspect, tone of voice, emotional context of a human event, personal or historical—that is what the novelist’s ear and eye can catch and what makes of his social or historical fiction a truer record of living reality than the historian’s data or the theoretician’s rational frames.
Richard Greeman
New York, 1966
Serge in English
FICTION
Men in Prison (Les hommes dans la prison, 1930). Translated and introduced by Richard Greeman. Garden City, NY: Doubleday & Co., 1969; London: Victor Gollancz Ltd., 1970; Middlesex: Penguin Books Ltd., 1972; London and New York: Writers and Readers, 1977; Oakland: PM Press, 2014. A searing personal experience transformed into a literary creation of general import.
Birth of Our Power (Naissance de notre force, 1931). Translated by Richard Greeman. Garden City, NY: Doubleday & Co., 1967; London: Victor Gollancz Ltd., 1968; Middlesex: Penguin Books Ltd., 1970; London and New York: Writers and Readers, 1977; Oakland: PM Press, 2015. From Barcelona to Petersburg, the conflagration of World War I ignites the spark of revolution, and poses a new problem for the revolutionaries’ power.
Conquered City (Ville conquise, 1932). Translated and introduced by Richard Greeman. New York: NYRB Classics, 2009. Idealistic revolutionaries cope with the poison of power as the Red Terror and the White struggle for control of Petrograd during the Civil War.
Midnight in the Century (S’il est minuit dans le siècle, 1939). Translated and introduced by Richard Greeman. London and New York: Writers and Readers, 1981; New York, NYRB Classics, 2014. On the eve of the great Purges, convicted anti-Stalin oppositionists in deportation attempt to survive, resist the GPU, debate political solutions, ponder their fates, and fall in love.
The Long Dusk (Les derniers temps, 1946). Translated by Ralph Manheim. New York: Dial Press, 1946. The fall of Paris (1940), the exodus of the refugees to the Free Zone, the beginnings of the French Resistance.
The Case of Comrade Tulayev (L’Affaire Toulaèv, 1951). Translated by Willard Trask. Introduction by Susan Sontag. New York: NYRB Classics, 2007. A panorama of the USSR (and Republican Spain) during the Purges, with a cast of sharply etched characters from provincial policemen to Old Bolsheviks and the Chief himself.
Unforgiving Years (Les années sans pardon, posthumous, 1973). Translated and introduced by Richard Greeman. New York: NYRB Classics, 2010. Tormented Russian revolutionaries in Paris on the eve of World War I, Leningrad under siege, the last days of Berlin, and Mexico.
POETRY
Resistance: Poems by Victor Serge (Résistance, 1938). Translated by James Brook. Introduction by Richard Greeman. San Francisco: City Lights, 1972. Most of these poems were composed in deportation in Orenburg (1933–36), confiscated by the GPU, and reconstructed from memory in France.
PM Press plans to publish James Brook’s new translation of Serge’s complete poetry in 2016.
NONFICTION
Revolution in Danger: Writings from Russia 1919–1921. Translated by Ian Birchall. London: Redwords, 1997; Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2011. Serge’s early reports from Russia were designed to win over his French anarchist comrades to the cause of the Soviets.
Witness to the German Revolution (1923). Translated by Ian Birchall. London: Redwords, 1997; Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2011. A collection of the articles Serge wrote in Berlin in 1923 under the pseudonym R. Albert.
What Every Militant Should Know about Repression (Les Coulisses d’une Sûreté Générale: Ce que tout révolutionnaire doit savoir sur la répression, 1925). Popular pamphlet reprinted in a dozen languages. Serge unmasks the secrets he discovered working in the archives the Czarist
Secret Police, then explains how police provocateurs operate everywhere and gives practical advice on security to activists.
The Chinese Revolution (1927–1928), Online at http://www.marxists.org/archive/serge/1927/china/index.html.
Year One of the Russian Revolution (L’an 1 de la révolution russe, 1930) Translated by Peter Sedgwick. London: Pluto Press; Chicago, Haymarket Books. Written soon after Stalin’s takeover in Russia, this history presents the Left Opposition’s take on the October Revolution and early Bolshevism.
From Lenin to Stalin (De Lénine à Staline, 1937). Translated by Ralph Manheim. New York: Monad and Pathfinder Press, 1973. A brilliant, short primer, on the Russian Revolution and its degeneration, with close-ups of Lenin and Trotsky.
Russia Twenty Years After (Destin d’une Revolution, 1937). Translated by Max Shactman (Includes “Thirty Years After the Russian Revolution,” 1947). Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press, 1996. Descriptive panorama and analysis of bureaucratic tyranny and chaos in Russia under Stalin’s Five-Year Plans, based on statistics and economic, sociological, and political analysis.
The Life and Death of Leon Trotsky (Vie et Mort de Léon Trotski, 1951), by Victor Serge and Natalia Sedova Trotsky. Translated by Arnold Pomerans. London: Wildwood, 1975; Chicago: Haymarket Books, forthcoming. Still the most concise, authentic, and well-written one-volume Trotsky biography, based on the two authors’ intimate knowledge of the man and his times and on Trotsky’s personal archives (before they were sealed up in Harvard).
Memoirs of a Revolutionary (Mémoires d’un révolutionnaire, 1901–1941) Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1951. Translated by Peter Sedwick. New York: NYRB Classics, 2012. Originally titled “Souvenirs of Vanished Worlds,” Serge’s Memoirs are an eyewitness chronicle of the revolutionary movements Belgium, France, Spain, Russia, and Germany studded with brilliant portraits of the people he knew. This is the first complete English translation and comes with a glossary.
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