by Victor Serge
Revolution was at the heart of the socialist exile culture into which Serge was born: the quintessential hope, the quintessential intensity. “The conversations of grown-ups dealt with trials, executions, escapes, and Siberian highways, with great ideas incessantly argued over, and with the latest books about these ideas.” Revolution was the modern tragic drama. “On the walls of our humble and makeshift lodgings, there were always the portraits of men who had been hanged.” (One portrait, surely, was of Nikolai Kibalchich, a distant relative of his father, who was among the five conspirators convicted of assassinating Alexander II.)
Revolution entailed danger, the risk of death, the likelihood of prison. Revolution entailed hardship, privation, hunger. “I think that if anyone had asked me at the age of twelve, ‘What is life?’ (and I often asked it of myself), I would have replied, ‘I do not know, but I can see that it means “Thou shalt think, thou shalt struggle, thou shalt be hungry.”’”
And it was. To read Serge’s memoirs is to be brought back to an era that seems very remote today in its introspective energies and passionate intellectual quests and code of self-sacrifice and immense hope: an era in which the twelve-year-olds of cultivated parents might normally ask themselves “What is life?” Serge’s cast of mind was not, for that time, precocious. It was the household culture of several generations of voraciously well-read idealists, many from the Slavic countries — the children of Russian literature, as it were. Staunch believers in science and human betterment, they were to provide the troops for many of the radical movements of the first third of the twentieth century; and were to be used, disillusioned, betrayed, and, if they happened to live in the Soviet Union, put to death. In his memoirs Serge reports his friend Pilnyak saying to him in 1933: “There isn’t a single thinking adult in this country who hasn’t thought that he might get shot.”
Starting in the late 1920s, the chasm between reality and propaganda widened drastically. It was the climate of opinion that made the courageous Romanian-born writer Panaït Istrati (1884–1935) consider withdrawing his truthful report on a sixteen-month stay in the Soviet Union in 1927–1928, Vers une autre flamme (Towards Another Flame), at the behest of his powerful French literary patron, Romain Rolland, which, when he did publish it, was rejected by all his former friends and supporters in the literary world; and that led André Malraux in his capacity as editor at Gallimard to turn down the adversarial biography of Stalin by the Russian-born Boris Souvarine (1895–1984; real name: Boris Lifchitz) as inimical to the cause of the Spanish Republic. (Istrati and Souvarine, who were close friends of Serge’s, formed with him a kind of triumvirate of foreign-born francophone writers who, from the late 1920s on, assumed the thankless role of denouncing from the left — therefore, prematurely — what was happening in the Soviet Union.) To many living in the Depression-afflicted capitalist world, it seemed impossible not to sympathize with the struggle of this vast backward country to survive and to create, according to its stated aims, a new society based on economic and social justice. André Gide was being only a bit florid when he wrote in his journal in April 1932 that he would be willing to die for the Soviet Union:
In the abominable distress of the present world, new Russia’s plan now seems to me salvation. There is nothing that does not persuade me of this! The miserable arguments of its enemies, far from convincing me, make my blood boil. And if my life were necessary to ensure the success of the USSR, I should give it at once … as have done, as will do, so many others, and without distinguishing myself from them.
As for what was actually happening in the USSR in 1932 — this is how Serge began “The Hospital in Leningrad,” a short story he wrote in Mexico City in 1946 that anticipates the narratives of Solzhenitsyn:
In 1932 I was living in Leningrad … Those were dark times, of shortages in the cities and famine in the villages, of terror, secret murder, and persecution of industrial managers and engineers, peasants, the religious, and those opposed to the regime. I belonged to the last category, which meant that at night, even in the depths of sleep, I never ceased to listen for the noises on the staircase, for the ascending footsteps heralding my arrest.
In October 1932, Serge wrote to the Central Committee of the Party appealing to be allowed to emigrate; permission was refused. In March 1933, Serge was arrested again, and after a term in the Lubyanka was sent into internal exile to Orenburg, a bleak town on the frontier between Russia and Kazakhstan. Serge’s plight was the subject of immediate protests in Paris. At the International Congress of Writers for the Defense of Culture, a stellar gathering held in Paris in June 1935, presided over by Gide and Malraux, which was the climax of Comintern-designed efforts to mobilize unaffiliated progressive-minded writers in defense of the Soviet Union — this just as Stalin’s program of framing and executing all the surviving members of the Bolshevik Old Guard was getting under way — “the case of Victor Serge” was raised by a number of delegates. The following year, Gide, who was about to leave, with entourage, for a triumphal tour of the Soviet Union on which great propaganda importance had been placed, went to see the Soviet ambassador in Paris requesting Serge’s release. Rolland, on a return state visit to Russia, brought up the case with Stalin himself.
In April 1936, Serge (with his teenage son) was taken from Orenburg to Moscow, stripped of his Soviet citizenship, reunited with his mentally fragile wife and their infant daughter, and put on a train to Warsaw — the sole instance during the era of the Great Terror when a writer was liberated (that is, expelled from Soviet Russia) as the result of a foreign campaign of support. Undoubtedly, it helped enormously that the Belgian-born Russian was considered a foreigner.
After reaching Brussels in late April, Serge published an “Open Letter” to Gide in the French magazine Esprit, thanking him for a recent approach he had made to the Soviet authorities to try to recover Serge’s confiscated manuscripts, and evoking some Soviet realities Gide might not hear about during his tour, such as the arrest and murder of many writers and the total suppression of intellectual freedom. (Serge had already sought contact with Gide in early 1934, sending him a letter from Orenburg about their shared conceptions of freedom in literature.) The two writers were able to meet secretly several times after Gide’s return, in Paris in November 1936 and in Brussels in January 1937. Serge’s journal accounts of these meetings provide a poignant contrast: Gide the consummate insider, the master on whom the mantle of the Great Writer had descended, and Serge, the knight of lost causes, itinerant, impoverished, always in jeopardy. (Of course, Gide was wary of Serge — of being influenced, of being misled.)
The French writer of the period whom Serge does resemble — in the starkness of his rectitude, his incessant studiousness, his principled renunciation of comfort, possessions, security — is his younger contemporary and fellow political militant, Simone Weil. It is more than likely that they met in Paris in 1936, shortly after Serge’s liberation, or in 1937. Since June 1934, right after his arrest, Weil had been among those committed to keeping alive “the case of Victor Serge” and making direct protests to the Soviet authorities. They had a close friend in common, Souvarine; both wrote regularly for the syndicalist magazine La Révolution prolétarienne. Weil was well known to Trotsky — the twenty-five-year-old Weil had had an evening of face-to-face debate with Trotsky on his brief visit to Paris in December 1934, when Weil arranged for him to use an apartment belonging to her parents for a clandestine political meeting — and figures in a letter to Serge in July 1936 in response to the suggestion that she collaborate on the new magazine Serge hoped to found. And, during Weil’s two months in late summer 1936 as a volunteer with an international militia fighting for the Spanish Republic, her principal political contact, whom she saw upon arriving in Barcelona, was the dissident Communist Julian Gorkin, another close friend of Serge’s.
Trotskyist comrades had been the most active campaigners for Serge’s freedom, and while in Brussels Serge gave his adherence to the Fourth International — as
the league of Trotsky’s supporters called themselves — although he knew the movement did not advance a viable alternative to the Leninist doctrines and practice that had led to Stalinist tyranny. (For Trotsky, the crime was that the wrong people were being shot.) His departure for Paris in 1937 was followed by the open rift with Trotsky, who, from his new, Mexican exile, denounced Serge as a closet anarchist; out of respect and affection for Trotsky, Serge refused to return the attack. Unfazed by the obloquy of being perceived as a turncoat, a traitor to the left, he published more against-the-stream tracts and dossiers on the destiny of the revolution from Lenin to Stalin, and another novel, Midnight in the Century (1939), set five years earlier, mostly in a remote town resembling Orenburg to which persecuted members of the Left Opposition have been deported. It is the very first depiction in a novel of the Gulag — properly, GULAG, the acronym for that vast internal carceral empire whose official name in Russian translates as Chief Administration of Camps. Midnight in the Century is dedicated to comrades from the most honorable of the radical parties in the Spanish Republic, the dissenting Communist — that is, anti-Stalinist — Partido Obrero de Unificación Marxista (POUM); its leader Andrès Nin, executed by Soviet agents in 1937, was a cherished friend of Serge’s.
In June 1940, after the German occupation of Paris, Serge fled to the south of France, eventually reaching the haven set up by the heroic Varian Fry who, in the name of an American private group calling itself the Emergency Rescue Committee, was to help some two thousand scholars, writers, artists, musicians, and scientists find an exit from Hitler’s Europe. There, in the villa outside Marseilles that its inmates and visitors — they included André Breton, Max Ernst, and André Masson — dubbed Espervisa, Serge continued work on the new, more ambitious novel about the reign of state murder in Soviet Russia he had begun in Paris in early 1940. When a Mexican visa finally came through for Serge (Breton and the others were all admitted to the United States), he set out in March 1941 on the long precarious sea voyage. Delayed for questioning, then jailed by Vichy government officials when the cargo ship stopped in Martinique, delayed again for want of transit visas in the Dominican Republic, where during the enforced sojourn he wrote a political tract designed for a Mexican public (Hitler versus Stalin), and delayed again in Havana, where, jailed once more, he went on with his novel, Serge did not arrive in Mexico until September. He finished The Case of Comrade Tulayev the following year.
At the beginning of the twenty-first century, nothing of the novel’s once controversial aura remains. No sane person now can dispute the toll of suffering that the Bolshevik system inflicted on the Russian people. Then, the consensus was elsewhere, producing the scandal of Gide’s unfavorable report on his trip, Return from the USSR (1937): Gide remained even after his death in 1951 the great left-wing writer who had betrayed Spain. The attitude was reproduced in Sartre’s notorious refusal to broach the subject of the Gulag on the grounds that it would discourage the just militancy of the French working class. (“Il faut pas faire désesperer Billancourt.”) For most writers who identified with the left in those decades, or who simply thought of themselves as against war (and were appalled at the prospect of a Third World War), condemning the Soviet Union was at the very least problematic.
As if to confirm the anxiety on the left, those who had no problem denouncing the Soviet Union seemed to be precisely those who had no qualms about being racist or anti-Semitic or contemptuous of the poor; illiberals, who had never heard the siren call of idealism or been moved to any active sympathy with the excluded and the persecuted. The vice president of a major American insurance company, who was also America’s greatest twentieth-century poet, might welcome Serge’s testimony. Thus section XIV of Wallace Stevens’s magisterial long poem “Esthétique du mal,” written in 1945, opens with:
Victor Serge said, “I followed his argument
With the blank uneasiness which one might feel
In the presence of a logical lunatic.”
He said it of Konstantinov. Revolution
Is the affair of logical lunatics.
The politics of emotion must appear
To be an intellectual structure.
That it seems odd to find Serge evoked in a poem of Stevens’s suggests how thoroughly Serge has been forgotten, for he was indeed a considerable presence in some of the most influential serious magazines of the 1940s. Stevens is likely to have been a reader of Partisan Review, if not of Dwight Macdonald’s maverick radical magazine Politics, which published Serge (and Simone Weil, too). Macdonald and his wife, Nancy, had been a lifeline, financially and otherwise, to Serge during the desperate months in Marseilles and the obstacle-ridden voyage, and went on with their assiduous help once Serge and his family were in Mexico. Sponsored by Macdonald, Serge had begun writing for Partisan Review in 1938, and continued to send articles from this last, improbable residence. In 1942, he became Mexican correspondent of the New York anti-Communist biweekly The New Leader (Macdonald strongly disapproved), and later began contributing — on Orwell’s recommendation — to Polemic and to Cyril Connolly’s Horizon in London.
Minority magazines; minority views. Excerpted first in Partisan Review, Czeslaw Milosz’s masterly portraits of the mutilation of the writer’s honor, the writer’s conscience, under communism, The Captive Mind (1953), was discounted by much of the American literary public as a work of cold war propaganda by the hitherto unknown émigré Polish writer. Similar suspicions persisted into the 1970s: when Robert Conquest’s implacable, irrefutable chronicle of the state slaughters of the 1930s, The Great Terror, appeared in 1969, the book could be regarded in many quarters as controversial — its conclusions perhaps unhelpful, its implications downright reactionary.
Those decades of turning a blind eye to what went on in Communist regimes, specifically the conviction that to criticize the Soviet Union was to give aid and comfort to Fascists and warmongers, seem almost incomprehensible now. In the early twenty-first century, we have moved on to other illusions — other lies that intelligent people with good intentions and humane politics tell themselves and their supporters in order not to give aid and comfort to their enemies.
There have always been people to argue that the truth is sometimes inexpedient, counterproductive — a luxury. (This is known as thinking practically, or politically.) And, on the other side, the well-intentioned are understandably reluctant to jettison commitments, views, and institutions in which much idealism has been invested. Situations do arise in which truth and justice may seem incompatible. And there may be even more resistance to perceiving the truth than there is to acknowledging the claims of justice. It seems all too easy for people not to recognize the truth, especially when it may mean having to break with, or be rejected by, a community that supplies a valued part of their identity.
A different outcome is possible if one hears the truth from someone to whom one is disposed to listen. How was the Marquis de Custine, during his five-month tour of Russia a century earlier, able — prophetically — to understand how central to this society were the extravagances of despotism and submissiveness and indefatigable lying for the benefit of foreigners, which he described in his journal in the form of letters, Letters from Russia? Surely it mattered that Custine’s lover was Polish, the young Count Ignacy Gurowski, who must have been eager to tell him of the horrors of tsarist oppression. Why was Gide, among all the left-wing visitors to the Soviet Union in the 1930s, the one to remain unseduced by the rhetoric of Communist equality and revolutionary idealism? Perhaps because he had been primed to detect the dishonesty and the fear of his hosts by the intrusive briefings of the unimpeachable Victor Serge.
Serge, modestly, says it only takes some clarity and independence to tell the truth. In Memoirs of a Revolutionary, he writes:
I give myself credit for having seen clearly in a number of important situations. In itself, this is not so difficult to achieve, and yet it is rather unusual. To my mind, it is less a question of an exalted or shrewd
intelligence, than of good sense, goodwill and a certain sort of courage to enable one to rise above both the pressures of one’s environment and the natural inclination to close one’s eyes to facts, a temptation that arises from our immediate interests and from the fear which problems inspire in us. A French essayist has said: “What is terrible when you seek the truth, is that you find it.” You find it, and then you are no longer free to follow the biases of your personal circle, or to accept fashionable clichés.
“What is terrible when you seek the truth…” A dictum to be pinned above every writer’s desk.
The ignominious obtuseness and lies of Dreiser, Rolland, Henri Barbusse, Louis Aragon, Beatrice and Sidney Webb, Halldór Laxness, Egon Erwin Kisch, Walter Duranty, Leon Feuchtwanger, and the like are mostly forgotten. And so are those who opposed them, who fought for the truth. The truth, once acquired, is ungrateful. We can’t remember everyone. What is remembered is not testimony but … literature. The presumptive case for exempting Serge from the oblivion that awaits most heroes of truth lies, finally, in the excellence of his fiction, above all The Case of Comrade Tulayev. But to be a literary writer perceived only or mainly as a didactic writer; to be a writer without a country, a country in whose literary canon his fiction would find a place — these elements of Serge’s complex fate continue to obscure this admirable, enthralling book.
Fiction, for Serge, is truth — the truth of self-transcendence, the obligation to give voice to those who are mute or have been silenced. He disdained novels of private life, most of all autobiographical novels. “Individual existences were of no interest to me — particularly my own,” he remarks in the Memoirs. In a journal entry (March 1944), Serge explains the larger reach of his idea of fictional truth:
Perhaps the deepest source is the feeling that marvelous life is passing, flying, slipping inexorably away and the desire to detain it in flight. It was this desperate feeling that drove me, around the age of sixteen, to note the precious instant, that made me discover that existence (human, “divine”) is memory. Later, with the enrichment of the personality, one discovers its limits, the poverty and the shackles of the self, one discovers that one has only one life, an individuality forever circumscribed, but which contains many possible destinies, and … mingles … with the other human existences, and the earth, the creatures, everything. Writing then becomes a quest of poly-personality, a way of living diverse destinies, of penetrating into others, of communicating with them … of escaping from the ordinary limits of the self … (Doubtless there are other kinds of writers, individualists, who only seek their own self-assertion and can’t see the world except through themselves.)