by Victor Serge
And then let those who have not lived through these hours of civil war, let those who—workers and “revolutionaries”—are living peacefully in bourgeois servility, cast the first stone!
End of June 1919
In his office in Kronversky Prospect, furnished simply with a writing desk overflowing with books and manuscripts and a few tall bookcases, in this austere study, its only decoration a few valuable Chinese ornaments, a Buddha and some vases, Alexis Maximovich—the first and greatest of the masters of Russian culture at the present time—Maxim Gorky,c is frowning; his features are apparently harder than usual and his complexion more ashen. Beneath his toothbrush mustache, you can sense that he is muttering with sadness, and beyond that, with suffering. Alexis Maximovich is the great witness of this epoch: a human consciousness who sees everything, knows everything, understands everything about the revolutionary tragedy and obstinately peers into the future. He is on the sidelines of the immediate action, but the great suffering of the civil war evokes many echoes in him. Perhaps nobody feels more devastated than he does by the sensation of terror, of dictatorship, of war, three aspects of humanity. His whole life has been that of an observer, a thinker, and, though he denies it, a sensitive person. And that is what is truly terrible: to preserve the profound sensitivity of an artist who loves humanity at a time when men are hurling themselves at each other in the trenches and in the streets. But this witness, whose speech is stern, sometimes so much so that a dark veil seems to pass in front of the clear kindly gaze of his grey eyes, this witness is on our side, the side of the Reds, with his whole heart. Because he is with the future, distant, vast, “planetary” to use his term, the future which will eventually be born of the immense present suffering.
There was an excellent woman comrade from Hungary there. We spoke about Soviet Hungary, where a marvelous peaceful social transformation is being carried out. At its dawning, this Soviet Republic did not shed a single drop of blood. Gorky’s face lit up when this was referred to. “Yes, certainly, with great joy I will write something for Hungary! Over there, things are turning out quite differently than with us. That’s Europe, over there!” And he smiled. The peaceful revolution, the new society being born almost painlessly, after the abdication of a bourgeoisie crushed under the weight of its own guilt; what a magnificent and beautiful dream! Maxim Gorky’s face lit up.
The executive of the Third International seems to have less confidence in such an idyll, although to an outsider’s eyes no cloud seems to darken the perspective of a Red Hungary. A message addressed to it by Zinoviev on June 12 ended with the repeated appeal: “Take arms! Organize!—Organize! Take arms!” The future will judge as to who was right—the distrustful orator or the thinker touched by a magnificent hope.
End of June 1919
“The Red forces have just gone onto the attack outside Petrograd. They have advanced some seven to ten miles, captured machineguns and artillery, taken prisoners. Hundreds of Whites have come over to our side, most of them with their weapons.” This dispatch, dated June 24, was signed by a member of the Revolutionary Council of the Tenth Army, W. Shatov.
Between two operations at the front, Shatov makes brief appearances among us in Petrograd. This warm, cheerful young man, large and burly with a round, florid face, always clean shaven, with the calm, good-natured expression of a man who enjoys the pleasures of life, has a special position here. He is, in short, our “general,” after having spent several months as the “governor” of Red Petrograd—and after having in the first months of the soviet regime been the “transport dictator” of the Northern Commune. The strange thing in all this—at least in the eyes of people accustomed to traditional judgments—is that William Shatov is an anarchist.
Just after the October revolution, he found himself, by force of circumstance, “governor” of the city, since the Red Guards—among whom there were many libertarians—constituted in fact the only real power and they elected him unanimously. His liveliness, his convinced optimism, his resolve, his overflowing energy have since made him quite naturally into one of the leaders of the Red Army. One day he was asked: “But how can you, as an anarchist, exercise authority?” He replied with a question: “Should we not have defended Petrograd?”
I know what terrible experiences he has passed through. During the questionable negotiations at Brest-Litovsk, the German offensive made Petrograd, still the Soviet capital at this time, more and more clearly a target; it was necessary to start the evacuation of the huge city, in order to save its main art treasures, its stocks of arms, ammunition, and gold, and the main departments of the revolutionary government. But there was no obstacle to the activity of selfish desires. In a city where three hundred thousand Red proletarians were making sacrifices every day, there were three times that number of bourgeois, petty bourgeois, workers who had adopted bourgeois attitudes or who were backward, in short, people of the old regime, steeped in its mentality and its customs, grasping, unscrupulous and lacking in revolutionary idealism, who thought only of their own personal interests and didn’t mind what they did to pursue them. Out of this crowd, the majority, panic-stricken, wanted to flee Petrograd. Even before the trains arrived in the station they were besieged. Sometimes the drivers and stokers were killed; men emerged from the crowd who knew how to drive a train and got it going. On the roofs of the carriages, on the tenders, everywhere that there was room for a human being carrying a bundle or a bag, men and women piled up. On the footboards there were bitter fights for a place. Knives and revolvers pierced anonymous flesh. As the locomotive set off, it crushed those whom the general pushing and shoving had made fall beneath its wheels. Every boarding was a ferocious rush followed by scuffles. A train almost always left a trail of blood behind it. These trains had no more windows, hardly any seats or doors. The anarchist William Shatov took on the job of organizing the evacuation. He took many measures and certainly his persuasive energy, which made an impact on the railway workers, was not the least important factor in his success. But he had no hesitation in lining the tracks with a row of machine-guns, and if necessary emptying several coaches under fire from Maxim guns. At this price, the evacuation was carried out and the transport system of the Northern Commune was re-established despite the famine and the foreign and civil wars. Otherwise it would have been a total disaster.
Shatov relates these things—and many others—with the energy and zest of a free man, one free even from ideological traditions and preconceptions. His great merit is that he is unable to sacrifice action to abstract ideas. For this profoundly Americanized Russian worker action comes before any theory because it is life. Anarchy is not an ideal formula; it must be life and can be born only from action. Does the revolution not need violence, authority, constraint? Is not the evil facing us at present the evil of civil war? Shatov considers it is better to win at this price than to be defeated for—and by—the ideal. Although working in complete agreement with it, he does not join the Communist Party. “Sooner or later,” he says, “we shall find ourselves enemies again.” But if you watch him at work, it seems as if this eventuality is still quite a long way away. For him, and for a certain number of clear-sighted spirits, anarchy cannot arise today from the chaos of violence and unrestrained desires, but it must come later as the product of a new culture and a new organization of production in communist society.
Other anarchists have criticized him bitterly. They bravely got themselves killed for the revolution in various fashions, sometimes harmful ones. In order to preserve their purity of principle, they abandoned the attempt to control events and turned down historic responsibilities.
At other times, terror has raged more severely, but it has been for the same reasons and in the same atmosphere created by permanent conspiracy within, foreign intervention, treachery, famine, and the threat of death in an infinite number of guises.
In these conditions I don’t think one can fail to have recourse to terror, although the duty of every revolutionary must obviousl
y be to limit it and to define its scope: and that, precisely, in order to make it into a more formidable weapon. For it is not by striking a great deal that you win, it is by striking in the right place.
The history of all revolutions contains similar pages. Those describing the revolution of modern times which has brought about the most profound social transformation are particularly striking, allowing us to draw a parallel between Year II of the French revolution and Year II of the Russian Revolution. Emigration, intervention, counter-revolutionary coalitions, mass reactionary insurrections like that of the Vendée,d separatist movements within, permanent conspiracy, famine and terror—it cannot be pure coincidence that these features occur identically in both these great historical cases. Rather it is the fact that the course of world wars obeys general laws which science will codify later on, but which we can already glimpse at the present time. Besides, we don’t need to evoke the epic of 1793 to understand that a rich and powerful class will not let itself be dispossessed without a fight to the death.
This fight to the death, in Red Russia, has had many victims. At certain times these days of hatred are so painful that one feels on the brink of despair, and one loses faith in humanity, and in ideas, and in oneself. The horizon seems to block out all light. The evil madness of humanity seems so great that there is no way out. The Russian revolutionaries have all gone through such doubt and anguish. Some have given in. Most have emerged strengthened in their commitment to the ideal.
For the essential thing is that during the days when the nightmare hovered above the Red city, thousands and thousands of people lived there—and were prepared to get themselves killed—supported by the awareness that they were carrying out a vast, necessary and noble task, that they were working for the future and for the whole of humanity.
Two or three ideas, but lofty, radiant ideas, stuck obstinately in their brains: the principle of the commune, the fraternity of workers, the International, fraternity between races. And they applied themselves to the liberation of women, to ensuring the security and well-being of children, to ceaselessly and fiercely cleansing their own ranks.
The essential thing is that, in those barbarous days, the Red city in arms guarded like a treasure its libraries, its schools, its palaces transformed into people’s clubs or children’s homes, its poets, its scholars, its actors, its musicians; that the love of culture was strong enough to bring together, under the threat of the British guns, on the very day when great betrayals took place, noble crowds around the composer Glazunov—or around young women reading the humble epic of The Twelve, who are in mystic fashion in the noble and lucid poem of Alexander Blok the twelve apostles of the new Gospel.
The essential thing is that, after having approached it and seen it at work, one can admire this suffering and passionate humanity of revolutionaries, sacrificed, often in what is best and most sacred about it, to the future. The essential thing is that we know well that the very bloodshed in these struggles is fertile: for our job is to ensure a little more well-being, justice and enlightenment here below, in the new society.
Petrograd, January 1–7, 1920
The Endangered City
Petrograd: Year Two of the Revolution
With affection and respect, I dedicate this testimony to the memory of my brothers and comrades:V-O Lichtenstadt (Mazin)
Max Flinberg
John Reed
Raymond Lefebvre
Lepetit
Marcel Vergeat
Sasha Tubin
who, having come from all parts of the world and all points on the intellectual spectrum, died for the revolution. For they knew that in the century of the dollar and of mustard gas, life is only worth living if it is devoted to the one great cause: that of the proletariat.
My road to Russia
These notes on life inside Petrograd in October 1919, that is, at a particularly heroic and important stage of its revolutionary destiny, were written by a “foreigner.”
Although the author is of Russian origin, he was born in Belgium and had only just arrived in Russia. His first contact with Russia and with the realities of the revolution had come in late January 1919. Prior to that he had been active for twelve years in the anarchist movements of Belgium, France and Spain. From the time of the October revolution, he thought of himself as a Communist; he joined the Russian Communist Party in May 1919. Thus his observations and reflections are those of a Communist formed in the libertarian traditions of the Latin countries. He set them down having constantly in mind his former comrades; his concern was to counter their objections, in the hope of enabling them to understand better the proletarian revolution; he also felt the need of a constant dialogue with himself.
Before the founding of the parties of the Third International there were not, in reality, any revolutionary Marxist parties in the Latin countries. At best you could locate the embryos of such parties in the intransigent tendencies within the Socialist Parties, especially in Guesdism in France, which had its moments of splendid revolutionary steadfastness, and even began to create, in northeastern France, a mass workers’ movement. But as a general rule parliamentary opportunism dominated in the Socialist Parties; and as a natural reaction, the revolutionary elements moved away from these parties, seeking different roads. In France the socialism of Jaurès blossomed, very eloquent, but so moderate, so pink, so permeated with the ideals of bourgeois democracy; meanwhile almost all the revolutionary forces of the French proletariat turned towards syndicalism, enthused by the new ideas of direct action and the general strike. Within the syndicalist movement or outside it, the anarchists still laid claim to a higher revolutionary purity, seeking to react against the bureaucratization of the unions. And it must be said that most of the time, with the best intentions in the world, all their dedication and even heroism succeeded only in multiplying sects and sub-sects, ludicrous or tragic deviations (advocacy of Esperanto, vegetarianism, nudism and the cult of free love everywhere; banditry in France; terrorism in Spain).
So, for the revolutionary workers of Western Europe, the October revolution was a spectacular revelation. It gave them more than an example to follow, more than a boundless source of hope; it gave them a body of doctrine, methods of struggle, an education; it gave them leaders. From 1917 on, there were many of us in the Latin countries who recognized all this, albeit in a confused fashion. We were looking for our road towards the Russian Revolution, from which we were separated by many miles and by frontiers bristling with cannon—and perhaps even more by the pernicious traditions of reformist socialism and the childish illusions of anarchism which had grown up in reaction to it.
So my journey towards Communism lasted some 12 years.
My journey towards the endangered city lasted 17 months.
On January 5, 1919, as evening fell, some twenty of us, surrounded by police, left the concentration camp at Précigné in France. Freezing cold and thin from hunger, dressed in old threadbare clothes, we went out joyfully into the cold night. We were twenty “Bolsheviks” who had been interned for many months and who were now to be exchanged with the Soviet government for officers from the French military mission in Moscow who had been held prisoner until now.
I had left Spain on my way to Russia at the end of July 1917, when the preparations for insurrection in Barcelona were ending up in failure;1 the French authorities had held me prisoner for fifteen months in various concentration camps. We were kept there within a triple enclosure—guns, barbed wire and walls; the soldiers, to whom we were presented as a gang of enemy agents, constantly pointed their guns at us. Our numbers were reduced by epidemics; we heard nothing of the Russian Revolution apart from the daily dose of mad slanders served up by the bourgeois press. As a result we—the whole group of comrades of Russian origin, both syndicalists and anarchists—felt every day more closely bound to the Red October, every day more communist. On the first anniversary of the victory of October 1917, we were perhaps the only people in France to celebrate it quite openly
, under the astonished eyes of our gaolers, in a monastery courtyard that had been turned into a prison.