by Victor Serge
By one of those strokes of irony that are so frequent in Russia [he later recalled], the Soviet Press was, quite appropriately, commemorating an anniversary of the Ukrainian national poet Taras Shevchenko, who in 1847 had been exiled for ten years to the steppes of Orenburg, “forbidden to draw or to write.” He did, all the same, write some clandestine poetry that he concealed in his boots. In this report I had an overwhelming insight into the persistence in our Russian land, after a century of reform, progress, and revolution, of the same willful determination to wipe out the rebellious intelligence without mercy. Never mind, I told myself, I must hold on: hold on and work on, even under this slab of lead.[4]
The theme of eternal heresy and eternal persecution is omnipresent in Midnight in the Century. It broods over Chernoe (Black-Waters), Serge’s fictional town on the steppe, which has hosted generations of exiles, refugees, sectarians, and heretics. The town, we are told, was founded by the semilegendary patriarch Seraphim Lack-Land, a seventeenth-century religious schismatic who led his people into the wilderness to escape the unholy power of the centralizing Orthodox hierarchy only to be dragged back to Moscow and a martyr’s fate. The image of the righteous, unrepentant old man chained in his dungeon, repeating, “Lord, I will never deny thee, I will never deny thy people,” reverberates through the entire novel.
Next in Serge’s line of apostolic succession is Lebedkin, the political deportee from Petersburg. Exiled under the tsarist regime, he welcomes the cleansing hurricane of the 1917 revolution in Chernoe—one thousand miles from the capital—and contemplates his lonely fate on the same hilltop where Seraphim had earlier meditated his martyrdom. Seventeen years pass and Chernoe is again populated by deportees, martyrs, and schismatics. Although the foreground of Serge’s novel is occupied by the Left Oppositionists, the heretics of the new Stalinist orthodoxy, the background is crowded with persecuted schismatics—religious sectarians, Old Believers, Zionists—who are also suffering for their faith. In the novel’s climactic scene, Rodion’s break from jail, there is a translucent moment of silent communion between the young Trotskyite and an Old Believer, which epitomizes the theme of eternal heresy and eternal persecution in the tortured Russian land. This epiphany, for which Serge has carefully and lovingly prepared, takes place under streaming stars in a mystical atmosphere of biblical simplicity. It is a Marxist materialist’s homage to spirituality.
Nature, too, is intimately related to Serge’s theme of suffering and resistance. Although primarily a man of cities—Paris, Barcelona, Moscow, and Petrograd were his places of predilection and the setting of much of his fiction—Serge had a deep awareness of man’s place in the natural order. For him, the dialectic of human history is an outgrowth of the dialectic of nature, and in Midnight in the Century the rhythms of nature are at once the physical setting and the consistent metaphor against which the action develops.
The Chernoe section of the novel opens with a heartrendingly bittersweet evocation of the return of spring to the frozen steppe. The breakup of the ice on the river, greeted with joy by the villagers after the long, barren winter, is emblematic of the renewal of human hopes. The exiled Trotskyites are also touched by the spectacle. Their clandestine meeting on the riverbank becomes the occasion for a lyrical celebration of the northern spring on the part of the granite-faced Old Bolshevik, Ryzhik, and even the sarcasms of the cynical Elkin fail to dampen his ardor:
“Ryzhik, you missed your calling. You should be turning out octosyllables at three roubles a line. Why did you have to get mixed up in the Revolution? Today, you would be an official of the Pastoral Poets’ Division of the Union of Soviet Writers. You would be inundating the gazettes with organized, ideologically correct, and profitable lyricism. Pushkin would turn green with envy on his pedestal.”
“Go to Hell. I would never have seen the amazing flowers of the North. And you see, nothing in the world would make me want to cross them out of my life.”
The joy of nature’s renewal is more deeply undercut by the irony of the political situation: “Spring . . . means sowing-time. Sowing time means repression.” The logic of events demands that in order to squeeze a grain surplus out of the sullenly resisting, newly collectivized peasantry, Stalin will take a new political tack, necessitating a new purge. The political exiles understand this process as a sign of the weakness of the regime. They have predicted it. The villagers, equally prescient in their resignation, accept it as one more seasonal cataclysm to be endured. Yet such is the power of nature’s spectacle of death and rebirth that neither group can resist the temptation to embrace life and hope. Life is struggle. Life goes on.
The central action of the novel unfolds in this brief moment between the breakup of the winter ice and the onset of the political freeze that will deprive Serge’s heroes of the semi-freedom of deportation and send them back to prison. During this interval there is time to take stock of their lives, to choose how they will resist the inevitable, to exchange significant messages, to fall in love, and to pass the living flame of revolution from one generation to the next. Thus the seasonal pattern of death and rebirth, destruction and continuity is intimately related to the theme of the generations, of the human forces who will carry on the struggle against oppression from one generation to the next.
Serge the Marxist believed that the Russian Revolution was not dead but only sleeping. He felt that as industry developed and Russia emerged from backwardness, the socialized system of production would inevitably come into contradiction with the oppressive system of bureaucratic privilege and control. A new proletariat, self-confident and schooled in this new industry, would then pick up the struggle where the vanquished vanguard of the 1920s and ’30s had gone down in defeat. This, however, might take generations (especially if war intervened, which it did) and until then the germ of revolutionary thought would be kept alive by minorities. Serge found a metaphoric expression for this vision in the related natural images of the spring thaw and of seeds germinating beneath the soil and in the traditional Russian theme of “fathers” and “sons.” A concrete, historically grounded political perspective thus develops as a structuring element in the novel.
The final section of Midnight, significantly entitled “The Beginning,” focuses on the character of the youngest of the political exiles, Rodion, a semi-educated, semi-alcoholic worker whose brain is befuddled by half-understood quotes from Hegel and whose spirit is obsessed with the problem of fate. As for so many before him, jail and exile have been the “universities” in which the revolutionary traditions of the “fathers” have been passed down to this rather unpromising “son.” It is Rodion who represents the new generation that will carry on the revolutionary idea and assure the continuity between the great but doomed generation of Old Bolsheviks and the unknown future.
Yet, to do this, he must break with a central element in that tradition: the idea of the Party as the incarnation of the proletarian vanguard. He alone dares to break the tie of Party unity that binds the older Trotskyite dissidents to their Stalinist persecutors, their refusal to appeal to the masses outside the Party, to even imagine creating a “second party.” “Listen to me,” he tells the comrades: “It’s no longer true: something has been lost forever. Lenin will never rise again in his mausoleum. Our only brothers are the working people who no longer have either rights or bread. They’re the ones we must talk to. It is with them that we must remake the Revolution and first of all a completely different Party . . .”
As he wanders the night streets of Chernoe, troubled and alone, his intuition becomes a certainty. The sight of GPU headquarters, lights blazing into the night, inspires him with a vision of that new revolution as an inevitable spring tide: “Work! Work night and day, you’ll still be swept away . . . The ice breaks up after the long winter, the spring floods sweep it away . . . It will be beautiful when they overflow . . . Your files, your papers, all your dirty little typewritten verdicts, and your prisons, all of them, the old wooden barracks, sealed with barbed wire,
the modern American-style concrete buildings, all of that will be blown sky high . . .”
Rodion’s escape into the starry night across the silent forest and the icy river is a symbolic flight into nature as well as a return to life, to the common destiny of the masses, who are part of nature and part of history. If Stalinist totalitarianism represents the negation of the revolution, then the masses represent what Hegel called “the negation of the negation.” Rodion, the least educated of the novel’s heroes, is also the most philosophical:
“History,” said Hegel . . . “History is something we make, we are historical, too, like all the poor devils . . .” There is no certainty that this machine will stop and crumble one day all by itself. It must be destroyed. Another revolution. We will make one, and in a very different way. I don’t know how, but it will be very different. But first, escape from them . . .
Rodion’s experiences in the forest are spiritual as well as physical trials, rites of passage that include a symbolic death by drowning and a rebirth. He is rescued by a nameless, solitary wolf hunter who represents the temptation of a life of self-sufficiency in nature but outside of society. This Rodion also rejects. Purified and tested, nameless now like the wolf man and the natural objects that surround him, he enters a nameless town and rejoins the ranks of the proletariat from which he had sprung. Rodion’s escape is, I assume, the muted “note of hope” with which Serge wanted to end his novel.
Significantly, the edifice on which he gets a job as a construction worker is the new headquarters for the secret police, the only concrete building in a desert of mud and wood. It is Serge’s ironic symbol for the paradox of “socialist construction” under the Stalinist system where the labor of the proletariat can only serve to increase the power of those who oppress it—until such time as the proletariat is ready once again to take destiny into its own hands. Until then, Serge seems to be saying, Rodion’s revolutionary vision will persist like “seeds germinating in the womb” of the Russian soil ready to bear fruit at the next thaw.
III. MESSAGES
History does not move in straight lines. It moves in waves. Those waves are revolutions. Serge’s Communist heroes in Midnight in the Century have ridden on the crest of the great revolutionary wave of 1917 to 1923—a height from which they have caught a glimpse of what might be, of humanity’s power to reshape society in its own image. Now, with Hitler and Stalin in the ascendant, they are in the trough, about to be engulfed in the sea of counter-revolutionary reaction. Yet through the wreckage of their lives and hopes they affirm the vision of what they have seen from the crest, the dangerous secret whose exposure their captors fear most—mankind can be free: What happened once can happen again. Others will succeed where we have failed. The next wave (or the one after that) will reach the shore. As Serge puts it in Birth of Our Power, “Nothing is ever lost.”
This continuity is the central political message of Serge’s novel for today’s readers. Like a shipwrecked explorer who places the log of his voyage in a bottle and consigns it to the waves, Serge epitomized the experience of a whole revolutionary generation in the form of a novel and set it afloat on the troubled seas of history. By 1939 his Russian comrades, the models for the heroes of Midnight in the Century, had all perished and, like Melville’s shipwrecked Ishmael, Serge might well have said with Job’s messenger, “I only am escaped alone to tell thee.”
Messages are an important theme in the novel. Indeed, its key chapter is entitled “Messages.” In its most dramatic scene, Varvara furiously tears apart a beautifully bound book she has received in the mail and removes from its binding sheets of ultrathin paper containing the “theses” of her Oppositionist comrades in the prison of Verkneuralsk concerning the “state-capitalist” nature of the Stalinist regime, which Trotsky still considered a “deformed workers state.” Serge was referring here to an authentic document, which was discovered and analyzed by the Moscow historian Alexei Gusev when the GPU archives were opened to scholars in the 1990s. Another “message,” this one from the exiled Trotsky, reaches the deportees by an even more circuitous route. An apolitical technocratic Soviet economist on a mission to Paris comes across a copy of The Bulletin of the Left Opposition and reads it before carefully tearing it up and flushing it down the toilet. Arrested later in a purge of economists, he passes Trotsky’s ideas on to the Oppositionists in the prison who pass it on to the deportee in Chernoe. These messages—the “mail” in prison jargon—are the ideas that nourish the novel’s heroes with information, ideas, and hope, reminding them that they are not alone.
Nor is it merely a poetical conceit on my part to present Serge’s novel as a kind of message. Serge himself, dedicating the book to his comrades in Spain, speaks of it as “messages from their brothers in Russia.” Like the messages transmitted from prison to prison within the novel, the book is first of all a kind of report, a balance sheet, an insider’s description of the economic and political situation and a firsthand account of the physical, moral, and intellectual health of the surviving Russian Opposition—including its hesitations and internal factional divisions. “The truth of men and things.” It is also the message to the world from the comrades Serge left behind in Russia. For Serge, “he who speaks, he who writes is essentially someone speaking for all those who are voiceless,” the persecuted, the oppressed, the gagged, the fallen. Serge was literally haunted by the memory of the fallen, of the dead comrades behind him, and his fiction was both the acquittal of a debt and an attempt to give them a kind of immortality.
It is these comrades, the dead and the living, who form the collective hero of Serge’s novel cycle. They are the “men” of Men in Prison, the “we” of Birth of Our Power, the defenders of besieged Civil War Petrograd in Conquered City, the defeated yet defiant Oppositionists of Midnight in the Century. Together they form a kind of “invisible international” whose messages of solidarity cross the barriers of guarded frontiers and prison walls, the barriers of blood, lies, and slanders, and the barriers of time as well. These messages represent the accumulated experience, wisdom, and sacrifice of millions, distilled into truthful fiction through the alchemy of literary creation. They are a precious heritage for those who choose to receive them.
Today, seventy-five years after these messages were set down by the hand of a unique survivor who was also an incomparable novelist, the bottle containing them has washed up on our shores. They illuminate a past which is the origin of our present and tell us that the future may yet be a new beginning.
—RICHARD GREEMAN
October 2014
[1] On January 30, 1940, Serge devoted one of his weekly columns in La Wallonie, the independent, union-sponsored daily paper in Liège, Belgium, to answering questions about Midnight, his recently published novel. A collection of two hundred of Serge’s weekly columns has recently been published in France under the misleading title Retour à l’Ouest (Marseille: Agone, 2010). It is a brilliant introduction to European and world politics from the triumph of the Popular Front (June 1936) to the fall of France (June 1940) and should be published in English.
[2] Serge’s son, Vlady, who as a teenager shared his father’s exile and knew “the comrades” well, has also recorded his memories. See Claudio Albertani, Los Camaradas Eternas. Remarkably, Lisa Senatskaya, one of the Left Opposition deportees who shared Serge and Vlady’s years in Orenburg, survived, remained true to her convictions, and was reunited with Vlady in 1990. Serge’s sister-in-law and co-accused, Anita Russakova, also survived the camps. When I visited her in her Leningrad apartment in 1991, a Russian review with Trotsky’s picture on the cover (probably the first to be published in sixty years) was lying on her coffee table.
[3] Since 1997, the Praxis Research and Education Center in Moscow (www.praxiscenter.ru) has been publishing Julia Guseva’s Russian translations of Serge’s novels and memoirs along with other formerly forbidden classics of anarchism and antitotalitarian socialism. Praxis, of which I am a co-founder, maintains the Victor Serge Lib
rary in Moscow, with more than eight thousand works in various languages, holds annual international conferences, and is active on the democratic left in Russia and Ukraine.
[4] Victor Serge, Memoirs of a Revolutionary, translated by Peter Sedgwick with George Paizis (New York: New York Review Books, 2012).
MIDNIGHT IN THE CENTURY
To the memory of
Kurt Landau, Andrés Nin, Erwin Wolf,
who disappeared in Barcelona and
whose very death was stolen from us,
to Joaquin Maurin, in a Spanish prison,
to Juan Andrade, Julian Gorkin, Katia Landau, Olga
Nin and through them to all those whose valour they
incarnate,
I dedicate these messages from their
brothers in Russia.
I. CHAOS
Mikhail Ivanovich Kostrov, who was not at all superstitious, had a feeling that things were about to happen in his life. They were heralded by almost imperceptible signs. So it was for his arrest. There had been the peculiar tone of voice with which the Rector had told him: “Mikhail Ivanovich, I’ve decided to suspend your course for the moment . . . You’re up to the Directory, * aren’t you?” Fear, obviously, of allusions to the new political turn. “So,” the Rector continued, “prepare me a very short course on Greece.” A shift of about two thousand years. Here, Kostrov felt he was making a mistake, but he made it joyfully, for the sheer pleasure of alarming this comfortably-established pussy-footer who put on a special voice whenever he telephoned the Committee Secretary.
“An excellent idea,” Kostrov replied. “I’ve had a lecture-series on the class struggle in the ancient city-state in my mind for a long time . . . There’s room for a whole new theory of tyranny.” The Rector avoided Kostrov’s eyes by keeping his head lowered over his papers. The bald-spot on the top of his skull made him look tonsured. “All the same, not too many new theories,” he muttered through his thick lips. “Goodbye.” It was when he noticed that tonsure that Mikhail Ivanovich sensed that things were going to happen.