Victor Serge Archives

Literature and Revolution

June 5, 2010 by Roy Johnson

collected essays, articles, and reviews

Marxists have always had a problem with theorising Art. Radical proposals for changing the State and replacing the power of one class with that of another does not sit easily with a taste for Beethoven, Michaelangelo, and Marcel Proust. And political sympathy for an oppressed class (the proletariat) has often resulted in wishing its artistic achievements into being. When a revolution (of sorts) did take place in St Petersburg in 1917, expectations were high that a different art would be formed in the new type of society. And at first it did start to happen. The graphic art of Rodchenko and El Lissitzsky, the architecture of Tatlin, and the poetry of Mayakovsky produced a native form of modernism whose influence is still alive today, almost one hundred years later. Literature and Revolution is Victor Serge’s on-the-spot essays engaging with the new literary endeavours of the period.

But none of these artists were working class, and before long Party apparatchiks were calling for the suppression of their work and demanding art that followed the Party line. Since the party had a monopoly of the means of production and even the supply of paper, they got what they called for. The result was worthless propaganda of the ‘boy meets tractor’ variety.

Victor Serge was able to avoid these ideological traps more than his contemporaries (and his predecessors) for two good reasons. The first was that throughout his life he retained a critical integrity that kept him free from any Party line prejudice. The second was that unlike many of the so-called theorists of his time, he was a practising artist. Even though he worked in the most appalling circumstances and spent the last twenty years of his life in exile, he produced two excellent trilogies of novels, as well as his amazing memoirs and other works.

The first part of this collection of his writings is on the subject of literature and politics, under the title of ‘The Theory of Proletarian Literature’. Serge is defending the political gains of the revolution and pointing out quite rightly that the proletariat is too busy defending itself and producing enough to sustain life to be creating great works of art.

The development of any intellectual culture takes for granted stable production, a high level of technique, well-being, leisure and time.

The so-called proletarian writing produced under Party diktat turned out to be entirely schematic, with heroes ‘bearing no resemblance to any human being one had actually ever met.’ But his argument is that this was to be expected.

The second part of the book is a collection of critical essays on literary topics written in the heat of events during the early 1920s. It’s interesting to note that they were all published in France – a fact which established Serge’s reputation outside Russia and later helped to save his life when he was granted permission to leave Russia at a time when his contemporaries were simply being shot.

These essays provide what’s called ‘A Chronicle of Intellectual Life in the Soviet Union’. Apart from beating the drum for Russian achievements at a time of austerity and shortages, the only artists to emerge from this honourably are the poets – Blok, Biely, Yesenin, and especially Mayakovsky, whom Serge puts into a category of his own, presumably because he was the most committed Bolshevik and therefore (in 1922) above criticism. The only other writer to emerge with laurels is Leon Trotsky, whose own Literature and Revolution closely resembles Serge’s own work.

There’s a section on individual writers – tributes to the poet Blok, novelist Boris Pilnyak who was an influence on Serge’s own literary style (shot during the purges) Gorky and Mayakovsky. Because so many of these articles were written during the early 1920s they have an optimistic tone and they speak of literary potential which is yet to be fully realised. Knowing as we do what happened shortly afterwards, they have a sort of unreality about them. It is therefore fortunate that the collection ends with appreciative notes on some of the same writers as they began to ‘disappear’ in the purges of the mid 1930s and onwards. This is why Serge was happy to accept Trotsky’s description of ‘the revolution betrayed’.

It is a dark but honest note on which to end the collection – his outrage at the murder of Osip Mandelstam and countless others in the purges, but it confirms that his line of argument on politics and literature was consistent, and it has been proved to be true.

Serge never fell into any of the crude over-simplifications of propagandist writing in his own fictional creations. His artistic practice was based firmly on the literary traditions which he and his fellow theorists would call ‘bourgeois’, and even though his material existence was light years away from the comforts of the western literary world of 1920-1945, he was in his own way a contributor to ‘modernism’.

He removed the central ‘I’ from the controlling individual consciousness of his narratives, and put in its place a more general ‘We’. That was his conscious political choice. We read his novels and come away with a sense of collectives or representatives of general social tendencies, rather than Big Individuals.

And his other literary techniques fit comfortably alongside other literary modernists – from Conrad to Woolf and Beckett. He uses extended metaphors, repeated motifs, sparkling imagery, blurs the distinctions between prose and poetry, flits from one point of view to another with no clunky connecting passages, and has what might be called a ‘mosaic’ rather than a linear approach to narrative.

Serge survived in terrible conditions in Mexican exile until 1946, and thank goodness he was able to produce his finest novels in those last years. The Case of Comrade Tulayev, Unforgiving Years, and The Long Dusk stand as testaments to a passionate belief in truth, a militant critic, and a great artist.

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Victor Serge, Collected Writings on Literature and Revolution, London: Francis Boutle Publishers, 2004, pp.367, ISBN: 1903427169

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Memoirs of a Revolutionary

August 4, 2012 by Roy Johnson

an extraordinary life in radical left politics 1905-1941

Memoirs of a Revolutionary the autobiography of one of the most remarkable writers in the first half of the twentieth century, and yet his work is hardly known outside a small coterie of admirers. He was a novelist, a poet, a historian, and a political activist. His parents were Russian emigrees; he was born in Belgium; he wrote in French; and he died in political exile in Mexico in 1947. Memoirs of a Revolutionary is a new edition of his political autobiography, which stretches from his youth in Brussels, Lille, and Paris, to his participation in the Russian revolution. It covers his days as a Left Oppositionist, and his eventual exile at the hand of Stalin, to his last desperate years searching for escape on a ‘planet without a passport’ until he was finally able to record this deposition of courage and fortitude.

The first pages are filled with an account of his youthful ideals – mainly centred on a form of libertarianism and anarchism, though recollected from a politically mature point of view. There is remarkably little about his own personal life except his admiration for his father, the fact that he never went to school, and the poor life he eked out as a typesetter and a machine tool draughtsman.

His story really begins in Paris, where he lived amongst the poorest, giving language lessons, doing translation work, and writing articles for left-wing newspapers and magazines. It was 1909, and all sorts of political groups were active and (as was often the case) at war with each other – anarcho-syndicalists, Christian democrats, ‘illegalists’ (robbers) and exiled Russian revolutionaries, towards whom Serge felt drawn.

As the editor of a left-wing newspaper he was asked to give evidence against an anarchist gang who carried out a series of desperate raids in 1910. He refused, and was sent to jail for five years. He summarises this next half decade, since the details of his incarceration were transformed into the content of his first documentary novel Men in Prison.

It cannot be stressed too strongly how almost all of Serge’s writing was produced under enormous constraints of time and resources. He wrote whilst in exile, in hiding, and in transit. There were few opportunities for revision, fact-checking, or the sort of re-drafting that most authors take for granted. Everything was produced white-hot – which might account for his direct, compressed, and telegraphic style.

On release from jail he went to Barcelona and took part in the 1917 uprising (something he documents in his second novel, Birth of our Power), but feeling that the real revolution was taking place in Russia, he volunteered for ‘repatriation’ to a country in which he had never set foot, arriving in Petrograd in 1919.

Almost immediately he was recruited into the services of the Third Communist International because of his language skills and knowledge of western Europe, even though at this time he was not a member of the Communist Party.

He committed himself to the Bolsheviks, whilst at the same time being aware of their weaknesses and mistakes – the greatest of which he believed to be the creation of the Cheka, the secret police or state-within-a-state which changed its name frequently but not its pernicious effects.

He paints an unflinchingly honest picture of the Revolution and its aftermath – the disjuncture between official propaganda and the reality of mass starvation, the black market, failed production, and an economy run on useless banknotes.

After a failed attempt to create a self-sufficient commune amongst the famine and poverty in the countryside, he decided that the future of the Revolution lay in the West, and moved to work secretly for the Communist International in Berlin.

He worked as a secret agent, using multiple identities and the cover of a job as journalist and editor. His real job there was to assist the promotion of the German Revolution ‘planned’ for October 1923. This was a period when Marxist orthodoxy thought that revolutions could be planned and organised according to theoretical principles, without troubling to analyse or face any social facts. When the revolution failed to take place, he de-camped to Prague. However, even though conditions there were less severe, he felt unable to act effectively, and so, as a Trotsky supporting oppositionist and at the worst possible time, he loyally returned to Leningrad in 1926.

The number of famous people he knew personally is astonishing – political figures such as Zinoviev, Maxim Gorky, Lenin, Trotsky, and Georg Lukacs, but also artists and poets such as Anna Akhmatova, her husband Nikolai Gumilev, plus Alexander Blok and Sergei Yesenin – all of whom he wrote about in his Literature and Revolution.

At times his account reads like a novel, which is not surprising since the narrative is composed of vivid character sketches, scenes recounted from participants’ points of view, sparkling atmospherics and mise en scene, sensational episodes, sudden murders or suicides, and all the time a dramatic tension created by his efforts to survive when all around him are being imprisoned and shot.

If there’s a chapter that’s less briskly paced than the rest, it’s that dealing with the expulsion of the Left-Oppositionists from the Party into exile, jail, and (later) extermination. But Serge’s justification is that of writing as ‘testament’. He passionately wished to place on record the tragic ‘betrayal of the revolution’ exactly as it unfolded.

This period (1926-1928) was followed by the first of the show trials – fabricated crimes in which nobody believed which were used as an excuse to eliminate any traces of criticism of the executive. The punishment for pre-determined outcomes was imprisonment and a bullet in the back of the head.

All of this repression was taking place at the same time as the central committee was responsible for more or less criminal levels of mismanagement of the economy . Famines were created through deliberate stupidity; millions of people were displaced from their land; millions more starved to death. This is the period which forms the background to what many people believe is Serge’s greatest novel, The Case of Comrade Tulayev

In 1933 Serge was finally arrested by the secret police, imprisoned, and when he refused to confess to his non-existent crimes was exiled to Kazakhstan for three years. He records this experience in the third volume of his first trilogy, Midnight in the Century.

He was saved from extinction by the reputation as a writer he had built up in western Europe – particularly France. In the literary conferences called in 1935 and 1936 his case was raised and calls made for his release. Eventually Romain Rolland made a personal appeal to Stalin, and Serge was released.

The police stole his manuscripts and his belongings, but he was deported to Belgium. Even there he was pursued by lies and slander propagated from Moscow. This vilification was accepted by European left-wing parties which were in the process of setting up the Popular Front in co-operation with Stalin against fascism.

Stalin repaid this gullibility with cynical betrayal in the Hitler-Stalin pact of 1939 (and its secret protocols) which was rapidly followed by the Nazi invasion of France. Hundreds of artists and intellectuals (as well as refugees from the Spanish Civil War) crowded into southern France hoping to gain visas for the Americas. Serge was in the company of people such as Alma Mahler, André Breton, Marcel Duchamp, Max Ernst, Leon Feuchtwangler, and Walter Benjamin (who committed suicide on the Spanish border).

Serge made it to Mexico in 1941 – and that’s where his memoir ends, though he was to live another six years in Mexico city – persecuted and shot at by the same agents of Stalin who had murdered Trotsky with an ice pick in 1940. Serge kept on writing until the very end, producing political analyses and also his two greatest novels The Case of Comrade Tulayev and Unforgiving Years. He died of a heart attack in 1947.

If you have never read this classic memoir before, make sure you get this new edition. When it was first released by Oxford University Press in the 1960s one eighth of it was cut on economy grounds. The missing sections have now been restored and the whole of Peter Sedgwick’s remarkable translation is now presented in its entirety for the first time.

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Victor Serge, Memoirs of a Revolutionary, New York: New York Review Books, 2012, pp.521, ISBN: 1590174518

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Men in Prison

August 22, 2010 by Roy Johnson

the forging of revolutionary consciousness

In common with many other revolutionary writers, Victor Serge turned to fiction as a result of being excluded from active political life when he was expelled from the Communist Party as a Left Oppositionist in 1927. Writing in exile under extremely difficult conditions, he set himself the task of presenting in fictional form an account of revolutionary developments during the first three decades of the twentieth century – in most of which he had been personally involved. Men in Prison is the first volume in two separate trilogies he created to cover this historical period.

It’s a fictionalised account of his own experience of having been imprisoned by the French authorities between 1912 and 1917 because of his sympathies for a group of anarchists. Its form is the traditional one for jail memoirs of overcoming a lack of possibilities in terms of plot by splitting the material into separate chapters dealing with the common tropes of imprisonment — its topography, warders, fellow inmates, survival, resistance, food, work, and the prisoner’s endless problem of dealing with passage of time.

The prisoners spend long, poorly paid hours in workshops – ‘the rule is work and silence’ – with severe punishments for infractions of rule and discipline. The weak and poor are driven into the ground, bad conditions create bad health, men expire horribly after a lifetime of work, misery, and deprivation, and any possibilities of resistance or rebellion are crushed between very narrow limits. It requires colossal efforts of will and self-discipline merely to stay human and survive.

All of this is an accurate reflection of life in the outside world – particularly that prior to 1914. The world, that is, seen from a proletarian point of view. In his attempt to create a new kind of novel Serge not only allies himself with the working class politically, but tries to reflect much of its consciousness and culture in his literary method.

the form of the classical novel seemed to me impoverished and outmoded, centring as it does upon a few beings artificially detached from the world … My first novel had no central character; its subject was not myself, nor this or that person, but simply men and prison.

Men in Prison is densely studded with the portraits and potted biographies of his fellow prisoners, rich in illustrative anecdote, in analysis of human behaviour, and in factual accounts of the details of penal regulations and their practical effects on the lives of inmates. Using a fast, vigorous style Serge populates his novel with everything from the thumbnail sketch, through silhouettes, to the condensed biography which will offer the essential facts of someone’s life. Not what they think they are, what their motives might be, or what extenuating circumstances they might plead, but what they have done – manslaughter, fifteen years penal servitude, learnt five languages, robbed banks, or written a book on Goethe.

Ex-Captain Meslier, accountant … an intelligent, ageless face ravaged by fever, struggle, debauchery, and alcohol. The Indo-Chinese and Sahara campaigns. Alcohol. Left for dead, riddled with javelin wounds, one night of battle in the African jungle. Legion of Honour. Alcohol. Wild nights in Paris. Alcohol … had written to his mistress, a demi-mondaine infatuated by this mad hero: ‘Fifty francs tonight, or I’ll kill you’ … paid only thirty month’s imprisonment for that slit throat … In the lines he used to bow to passing buddies, then he let fly at them with horrible insults behind a friendly glance. In church on Sunday, he would sometimes sit down at the organ and play amazing pieces by Bach or Handel by heart.

The characters come off the page thick and fast – a dazzling cast list of humanity – all treated quite fairly according to character as manifest through acts in the material world. Captain Meslier has participated in France’s imperial plunder, but he is not to be reduced to a military caricature and is credited with his playing of classics – which says far more about the psychology of colonialism than a naively committed piece of propagandist fiction.

Serge’s form of narrative address presents an interesting example of the way in which political attitude is given an aesthetic formulation. Instead of selecting and sticking to a single mode (the first person singular would have been the most obvious) he uses all possibilities, swinging freely from one to another. From the first person – ‘I was no longer a man, a man in prison’ – to the impersonal third – ‘man imprisoned differs from man in general, even in his outward appearance’ – to the personal – ‘He is still wearing the cause of his good or bad fortune … an ordinary beige overcoat’ – and back to the second – ‘Yesterday you had a thousand worries’. Sometimes in this mode, from within the narrative itself, a person is given hortatory encouragement and addressed personally – ‘Defend yourself Legris, show you’re a man like the others’. But undoubtedly the most significant is his use of the first plural, the collective voice – we:

I have not lost the years it has taken from me. We have committed great errors comrades. We wanted to be revolutionaries: we were only rebels. We must become termites, boring obstinately, patiently, all our lives. In the end, the dyke will crumble.

This is a fresh and an ideological approach to narrative that he was to develop in the novels that followed. Men in Prison is the initial volume of Serge’s first triptych that documents his political move from anarcho-individualism towards revolutionary organisation, patience, and planning. He started from that new position in his next novel, Birth of Our Power.

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Victor Serge, Men in Prison, London: Pluto Press, 1978, pp.260, ISBN: 090461350X

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Midnight in the Century

August 21, 2010 by Roy Johnson

revolutionaries face betrayal and defeat

Victor Serge is one of the most undeservedly neglected writers of the twentieth century. He wrote under extremely difficult conditions, much of the time whilst living in exile – in his adopted homeland Russia, in France, and in Mexico. He frequently had to write in secret and he smuggled his work out of the Soviet Union to be published in France and Spain. His writing was banned throughout the communist period in Russia, and it has only been available there quite recently. Midnight in the Century is the third volume in his first trilogy documenting the struggle for left wing ideals against the tyranny and totalitarian power of Stalin and all he stood for.

His novels are presented in the form of self-contained chapters that sometimes appear to have very little connection with each other. Characters are developed, then suddenly seem to disappear, only to pop up again later in a different context. What Serge was doing was trying to capture the chaotic state of a world in political flux, and create representative figures rather than outstanding individuals – though in the end what he produced turned out to be not unlike the traditional European novel.

He was writing as a witness to history – putting on record the terrible events and dilemmas faced by those who wished to keep a radical political view of the world alive. when it was faced by two totalitarian nightmares at the same time – Nazism and Stalinism. That’s why this novel is called Midnight in the Century. Loyal communist party members who had fought to free their country from Tsarist oppression were confronted by a government which betrayed their revolution, and the slightest criticism they made of the Stalinist regime was interpreted as an act of sabotage, aiding the Nazis. [It is no accident that those two systems of terror eventually united to fight on the same side.]

These grave diggers were born to understand each other. Enemies and brothers. In Germany, one is burying an aborted democracy, the child of an aborted revolution. In Russia, the other is burying a victorious revolution born of a weak proletariat and left on its own by the rest of the world. Both of them are leading those they serve – the bourgeoisie in Germany, the bureaucracy here at home – towards a catastrophe.

Serge’s central figures are the idealists, the left-oppositionists who believe in the revolution and work in a self-sacrificing manner for its success. But they are surrounded on all sides by members of the corrupt bureaucracy who are the agents of its betrayal. Of course it is easy to see with seventy years’ hindsight that these left oppositionists, for all their honour, bravery, and discipline – were still searching for a version of the ideological myth that had been imposed on the entire Soviet state – the notion that there was a single, unifying theory which would explain world history and allow the future to be planned.

Midnight in the Century is set in the 1930s, in the period of Stalin’s consolidation of power and his elimination of all opposition. Mikhail Kostov, a university lecturer in Historical Materialism is a left oppositionist sympathiser. He is arrested, thrown into a horrible prison, and left there until he is so demoralised that he writes the ‘confession’ required of him. This results in his being exiled to a remote outpost which is a squalid backwater of the Soviet state. Even there, official diktats and target production quotas are used to oppress the ragged bunch of exiles, peasants, and prisoners who live a pitiful existence of what Marx called ‘rural idiocy’ without even enough to eat.

Stalin’s so-called planned economy is shown to be a complete disaster, based as it is on a combination of wish-fulfilment, lies, and official propaganda. Those few people still capable of any independent thought keep their spirits alive by sending secret messages to their colleagues in similar circumstances. All of them are surrounded by spies, informers, and willing agents of a duplicitous state. Official government policies are based on a form of what we would now call Political Correctness – a series of policies completely out of touch with the reality of people’s lives.

As Stalin manoeuvers the Central Committee into yet another bout of oppression launched in the name of preserving democracy, its waves of terror are shown rippling throughout the archipelago of the GULAG. The regional governor has his quota of detainees to produce, but is driven to distraction because they will not confess to crimes they did not commit. As the oppositionists are all rounded up for yet another spell in prison, the youngest of them escapes, and the novel ends with him in a far flung corner of the Soviet empire, working on a construction site that is building a new Secret Police headquarters.

The novel was written in France between 1936 and 1938 when Serge was finally exiled from the USSR. It lacks the dramatic intensity of his two final masterpieces, The Case of Comrade Tulayev and Unforgiving Years which he wrote in Mexico. But in it he was honing his style, which is his own special brand of literary modernism. The narrative passes from one character to another with seamless transitions, and as it does so he is very fond of entering the point of view of the character on whom the narrative rests, and showing events from that character’s point of view – often using the second person ‘you’. This can sometimes be seen as an outer narrator commenting on the character, and other times the character reflecting on him or herself. Kostrov reflects on the failures of his past and his present ill health as he endures solitary confinement:

You knew very well that you were breaking her heart. Now this pale memory is breaking your heart. For your life is over. You’re still attached to it since your flesh still remembers these feelings. Of no importance. You think you’re unique and that the universe would be empty without you. In reality you occupy in the world the place of an ant in the grass. The ant moves along carrying a louse-egg – a momentous task for which it was born. You crush it without knowing, without being aware of it. Without the ant itself being aware of it. Nothing changes. There will be ants until the end of the world who will bravely carry louse-eggs through the tunnels of the city. Don’t suffer on account of your nullity. Let it reassure you. You lose as little when you lose yourself – and the world loses nothing. You can see very well from up in an aeroplane, that cities are ant hills.

Serge also has what might be called a supra-continental viewpoint from which to depict events. No matter how anguished and personally tragic a character’s situation, we are repeatedly reminded that all of us are specs of dust in any Great Scheme of Things. Not that there is any great scheme – even that psychologically consoling idea is kept at bay. There is only struggle, and the will to be rational and try to understand things. These are the small crumbs of comfort he offers us from this, the bleakest moment in Europe’s history.

Despite the fact that many people might find the subject matter of this novel somewhat specialised or esoteric, the central issues Serge dramatises are fundamental to a full understanding of the ideological and political history of the twentieth century. The sad fact is that in some parts of the world they are still being played out – now, in the twenty-first.

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Victor Serge, Midnight in the Century, London: Writers and Readers, 1982, pp.246, ISBN: 090461395X

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The Case of Comrade Tulayev

August 21, 2010 by Roy Johnson

the Stalinist purges and show trials of the 1930s

By the time he came to write The Case of Comrade Tulayev Victor Serge had miraculously escaped the worst of political persecution in Europe. He began the novel writing as an exile in Paris, continued it in Marseilles whilst waiting for an exit visa, wrote more in the Dominican Republic, and finished the book in Mexico where he spent the last seven years of his life. His living conditions were impoverished and austere – but it was as if he found the psychological space in which to develop his mature style. All his best work was produced in the last few years left to him, including his autobiography Memoirs of a Revolutionary and his two final novels The Case of Comrade Tulayev and Unforgiving Years.

Comrade Tulayev has a fluency, a confidence, and a consistency of tone that far surpasses his earlier works. His narrative flows effortlessly from one character and one point of view to another. The most serious political issues are delivered alongside a sensitive apprehension of the everyday world. Tyrants and bullies have moments of doubt and sentimental attachment. Even the heroic figures have flaws and weaknesses, including the most tragic ideological weakness of all – believing that they are making sacrifices in a good cause.

There is also a powerful thematic unity to the novel. It reveals the deprivations suffered by millions in the world’s worst ‘planned economy’; it reveals the bureaucratic corruption that created the shortages, waste, and even famines; and it dramatises magnificently the ideological struggles between those old Bolsheviks who had sacrificed everything to create a better society, and the New Men who had taken over to betray their efforts.

At the height of the Stalinist terror in the late 1930s a petty clerk Kostia shoots Central Committee member Tulayev almost on a whim – just because he happens to have acquired a gun. This sets in motion a new wave of purges which percolate all the way through Soviet society. Government officials are arrested; oppositionists and critics of the Party are jailed; there are mass arrests of ‘wreckers’ and ‘saboteurs’. None of these people have done anything wrong: the paranoid madness of Stalinism merely requires guilty victims. All of these people realise that no matter how long their torment lasts, their future is either years in the GULAG or a bullet in the back of the head.

Serge’s great achievement is to show how people from the top to the bottom of Soviet society coped with the terror of the purges. But most especially, he is keen to reveal how former Bolshevik loyalists managed to persuade themselves, when charged with all sorts of crimes they did not commit, that they were agreeing to confess in order to serve a greater good. That is, they put the Party above everything. And the circular logic of the Party’s argument is brilliantly compressed into the expression “obey or betray”. It’s what we might now call a Catch-22 situation. You can help the Party achieve its ends by agreeing to your own guilt (and death) or you can resist, and die anyway. In the first case, your sacrifice will help us; in the second, you are besmirching everything you have worked for over the last twenty years.

The flaws in this argument are now well known. The Party was certainly not any guide to sensible policy: it was liquidating its best intellectuals, scientists, engineers, and even military leaders just when it needed them most. It did not represent the working class on whose behalf its claims were made, because it was a corrupt bureaucracy. And the democratic principles to which it appealed were a complete sham. The entire system of government in the Soviet system was based on lies, fabrications, corruption, injustice, falsified statistics, inefficiency, and terror (which is why it eventually collapsed in 1989). But at the time Serge was writing not many people were aware of the gigantic gulf between propaganda and reality. Many writers in the west swallowed the Soviet propaganda wholesale. Sidney and Beatrice Webb, (The Truth About Soviet Russia, Soviet Communism: A New Civilization) are now risible museum pieces, though many at the time took them seriously.

Each of the principal characters in the novel is shown grappling with the central problem in his own way. Makayev a dull and brutish peasant rises through the ranks to become a local leader because of his willingness to do the party’s bidding; but he has no intellectual or moral reserves when he finds himself on the wrong side of the investigation. Even the investigators themselves fall under the wheels of the Juggernaut – because failing to deliver results is branded as counter-revolutionary and ‘sabotage’. Old Bolshevik Ryzhik is dragged back from an unimaginably severe and miserable life in exile beyond the Arctic Circle, and faced with the same accusations as everybody else. He chooses to thwart his captors by starving himself to death in jail.

Even foreign policy is affected. Kondratiev, a loyal Soviet agent working in Spain in the middle of the civil war is swept up into the madness. His job is to eliminate Stalin’s rivals whilst appearing to support the Republican movement. Recalled to Moscow and invited by Stalin himself to give a truthful report on events, he does so – and although branded as a Trotskyist sympathiser and expecting every moment to be jailed and shot, he is one of the rare examples of someone ‘spared’ because of his old links with Stalin. He is merely banished to a Siberian mine.

No such luck for Xenia, the daughter of prosecutor Popov who is on an official visit to Paris. On hearing that the incorruptible old Bolshevik Rublev has been accused, she makes a vain series of attempts to have messages of support sent back to Moscow. This alerts the secret service agents who are already spying on her activities, and she is taken back to Moscow under arrest. And because they are related, her father is arrested too.

The show trials take place, the accused are convicted, and the episode has what we now call closure. The three principals Erchov, Makeyev, and Rublev (who have absolutely nothing to do with each other) meet their death, and the corrupt system that has brought this about goes on. Even when the original assassin writes a letter to the prosecutor confessing his guilt, the letter is destroyed – because it compromises the Case, which has now been closed.

The novel is tragic in the very best sense. It shows enlightened and courageous individuals inspired by noble ideals who are brought to a pitiable end by ideological flaws in the system they embrace. It offers a first-hand account of the Soviet system written by somebody who was a high-ranking insider. And most important of all it reveals the secret mechanisms of the the Terror and the Show Trials which were at the time a baffling mystery to everyone. We have known the technical details for over seventy years now, but the artistic truth offered by a magnificent novel such as The Case of Comrade Tulayev lives on forever.

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Victor Serge, The Case of Comrade Tulayev, New York: New York Review Books, 2004, pp.362, ISBN: 1590170644

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Unforgiving Years

October 22, 2009 by Roy Johnson

revolutionary hopes betrayed

Victor Serge is one of the most undeservedly neglected writers of the twentieth century. In his introduction to this recent translation of Unforgiving Years, Serge scholar Richard Greeman speculates that this might be because he cannot be easily categorised into any national literary tradition. Serge was born of Russian emigré parents in Brussels. He travelled widely throughout Russia and Europe as a revolutionary, and he wrote in French. Indeed, this linguistic fact may well have saved his life, because he was one of the few Oppositionists in Stalin’s reign of terror who was given permission to leave the Soviet Union – largely as a result of an international protest organised in France.

Unforgiving Years is one of his last great works, written in exile in Mexico around the same time as Memoirs of a Revolutionary and The Case of Comrade Tulayev. It covers the years 1939-1945 and is split into four distinct sections, each one of which illustrates a facet of ‘Midnight in the Twentieth Century’ as Europe was plunged into horrifying conflicts dominated (at first) by two conflicting forms of totalitarianism. The first section is set in Paris at an unspecified period just before the outbreak of war.

Two secret agents, Sasha and Nadine, decide they no longer believe in the infallibility of the Party and its policies, and they decide to escape – knowing that they will be hunted down and possibly assassinated by agents – as many people were at the time. Every move they make is fraught with danger, and they fear betrayal at every step – even from each other. The Spanish civil war has ended in defeat, the liberal democracies are capitulating before the threat of Nazism, and Stalin is purging everyone in his wake – even including leading intellectuals and his best military commanders, just when he will need them most.

In part two, one of their comrades is sent on a mission to a frozen Leningrad besieged by the Germans in 1941 – to endure unimaginable hardships in support of one corrupt regime resisting another. Although Serge’s sympathies are clearly with the Russian people and not with the Stalinist aparatchicks, he might not have known at the time of writing that Stalin turned out to be responsible for killing more Russians than Hitler.

Daria – the only character to appear in all four parts of the book – tries hard to be a loyal Party agent, but she cannot stop herself questioning the perverted logic of any means, no matter how corrupt, justifying some theoretical ends. She cannot rid herself of humane sympathies for the people she sees suffering around her. In a novelistic sense she stands in for Serge himself, desperately trying to locate a set of values which will accommodate both aspirations towards democratic socialism and a liberal humanism which she can hardly even admit to herself.

Part three takes place in a Berlin devastated by allied carpet bombing as the Reich nears its apocalyptic end. Daria has volunteered for a mission behind enemy lines, working as a nurse under an assumed identity. Serge’s skill in this section is to recount the events from the points of view of loyal (non-Nazi) Germans, their belief in the war almost at breaking point. All the official news is ridiculously optimistic propaganda, and the entire population is surrounded by officials with orders to root out and destroy the slightest signs of doubt in the Fuhrer’s omnipotent wisdom – just as was happening in the East.

Throughout all the horrendous conditions he describes, the Comrades all behave impeccably – with only their ideological doubts bringing them down to the level of normal human beings. Of course they reflect the intellectual journey which Serge had made himself. But it should be borne in mind that the saintly Daria/Erna, whilst sleeping with young men out of compassion and tending war-shattered enemies in her capacity as a spy behind the front line, is in fact reporting back to a regime which was systematically slaughtering its soldiers who had come back from fighting the Nazis because they might have been tainted with democratic ideas – and were actually accused of being German spies. The Comrades can be admired for their aspirations, but they clung on to their allegiances for too long – though of course it’s easy for us to say that now.

In part four Daria has finally broken ranks with the Party and escapes to the New World to start a new life. She eventually locates Sasha and Nadine, who have retired to run a plantation in rural Mexico – hidden away from everyone. Sasha has resolved his ideological dilemma by making a connection with the primitive forces of an almost prehistoric world, yet he still wonders ‘Where did we go wrong?’ Nadine has ‘retreated’ into a mild form of schizophrenia. But just as they have feared all along, the Party will not forgive recusants, and a visiting archeologist turns out to be a Stalinist agent. He infiltrates himself into their confidence, poisons Sasha and Daria, then moves on to his next assignment.

It’s possibly the bleakest of all Serge’s novels – and no wonder. He himself was still being pursued by Stalin’s agents when he died (of a heart attack) in Mexico in 1946. Anyone not used to his narrative techniques might find the story difficult to follow. He was trying to escape the form and the methods of the traditional bourgeois novel by downgrading the individual in favour of the mass – a theory he expounds in Literature and Revolution. Fortunately he never quite managed it, but since he also fused his narrative with a poetic lyricism, the results are magnificent.

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Victor Serge, Unforgiving Years, New York: New York Review Books, 2008, pp.341, ISBN 1590172477

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Victor Serge a biography

November 9, 2013 by Roy Johnson

the life of a revolutionary and a great novelist

Victor Serge (1890—1947) was one of the most talented writers and intellectual historians of the early twentieth century, and yet his work still seems to be unknown outside a small group of left-wing enthusiasts. His output was colossal — novels, histories, biography, literary criticism, documentaries, journalism, poetry, and diaries — and yet he wrote under incredibly difficult conditions – often in exile or in jail, and most of the time poor and hungry. He was also an active revolutionary – which is possibly why he doesn’t sit easily within the western literary mainstream. His accounts of the reign of terror unleashed by Stalin in the 1930s anticipate later work such as Koestler’s Darkness at Noon (1940) and Orwell’s Animal Farm (1945) and Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949) , and offer a far more insightful explanation of the forces that were at work.

So far the majority of the information we have about his life history comes from his own magnificent Memoirs of a Revolutionary (1941) written towards the end of his life when he was an exile in Mexico. This offers a breathtaking political journey through the first four decades of the twentieth century, with Serge active in many of its key events – except that he spent most of the first world war in a French jail. But immediately on release he joined forces with insurgents, first in Barcelona, then he travelled to his spiritual homeland of Russia to join the Bolshevik revolution. Although he had been born in Belgium, his father was a Russian left-wing exile. Serge was a talented writer, translator, editor, and activist. He joined forces with the Bolsheviks, and although he had no ambitions for personal advancement, he was given important roles in the new government which enabled him to witness the mechanisms of power close up, at first hand.

Although he arrived a year after the revolution had taken place, he quickly became engaged in its essential issues, and since he took a stance to the Left of the mainstream, he had to work a difficult path for himself. Disillusioned with official policy after the crushing of the Kronstadt rebellion, Serge accepted a posting to Berlin as an agent of the Comintern. When the Berlin revolution of 1923 was aborted – all wholly directed from Moscow – Serge moved on to Vienna and lived there for the next two years. During this period he turned his attention to literature, for as Susan Weissman observes in this huge and detailed examination of his political life, ‘Serge was first and foremost a political animal, and it was only when barred from political action that he turned to literary activity’.

In Vienna he began writing his first novel Men in Prison, which was based on his experiences of being jailed in France after being sentenced for his (tangential) part in the notorious anarchist Bonnot gang raids, and he also produced the series of articles later collected in Literature and Revolution which examined the relationship between culture and social class.

But in 1925, alarmed by the stranglehold Stalin was imposing on the Party, he returned to the Soviet Union to support the Left Opposition, which was headed by his friend Leon Trotsky. Serge could easily have stayed comfortably in western Europe, and his motives for returning to Russia – to support the revolution – were noble, but if ever there was a case of being in the wrong place at the wrong time, this was it. As a result, he spent much of the following decade in exile and prison.

Stalin rose to power during this period, packing committees with his henchmen; falsifying reports; rigging elections; re-writing history; banning all forms of critical debate; and hiring other people to slander rivals. And he did all this claiming to have the highest possible ethical motives. But of course he also took this wholly illegal and paranoid policy to an extreme, and began murdering anyone who opposed him.

Serge helped Trotsky organise the Left Opposition, but by 1927 — the tenth anniversary of the revolution — they were all expelled from the Party. Having been removed from political life Serge once again returned to his role as author, writing articles on the Chinese revolution which were published in France – a factor which later helped to save his life. The appearance of this work abroad was used as the pretext for his first arrest in early 1928, from which he was released after protests from French intellectuals.

Having almost died whilst in prison he decided on release to devote himself to literature – specifically to record the revolution and its aftermath in a series of documentary novels, which turned out to be the double trilogy Men in Prison, Birth of Our Power, Conquered City, Midnight in the Century, The Case of Comrade Tulayev, and Unforgiving Years. There is also the very elusive The Long Dusk and other manuscripts which were confiscated by the secret police and have never been located since. Serge and his family were harassed by the GPU: his mail was opened and his conversations recorded. His wife suffered a nervous breakdown from which she never recovered, dying in a mental institution in the south of France in 1984.

Serge was arrested in 1933, held in solitary confinement, and interrogated endlessly, accused of ‘crimes’ based on the confessions of others which the GPU had actually written. Refusing to co-operate with his captors, he was exiled to Orenberg on the borders of Kazakhstan. He lived there with his son Vlady for the next three years, cold, hungry, and under constant surveillance – but at least free to write. He produced Les Hommes perdus a novel about pre-war French anarchists, and La Tourmente, a sequel to Conquered City. He despatched several copies to Romain Rolland for publication in Paris, but they were ‘lost’ in the post. Ironically, the Post Office was obliged to compensate him for each loss, and he earned ‘as much as a well-paid technician’. He shared the money he earned and the support he received from western Europe with his fellow exiles – on one occasion dividing a single olive with his fellow inmates, who had never tasted one before.

Meanwhile, his supporters in France formed pressure groups to campaign for his release, and eventually Rolland petitioned Stalin in person. This was at the time of the 1936 international congress of writers, and Rolland argued that the continued detention of Serge was causing embarrassment within the congress. Miraculously, Stalin agreed to release him (though he almost immediately regretted his decision) and Serge was released in 1936. But the GPU confiscated his writings as he was crossing the border, bound for Europe.

He settled in Brussels, then Paris- though his papers were not in order, and his political status terribly uncertain. Wherever he went he was pursued by vilification from the orthodox Communists (whose orders were all dictated from Moscow) and by Stalin’s secret agents. He was sustained intellectually by his renewed correspondence with Trotsky, who was in exile in Norway at the time. It was the terrible year of 1936 which saw the Moscow show trials and the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War. Serge wrote on both these topics, but the only outlets for his work were small left-wing journals and newspapers.

Unfortunately at this point in Susan Weissman’s narrative Serge disappears almost completely – to be replaced by detailed accounts of the spies and assassination squads Stalin despatched into Europe in his quest to eliminate all vestiges of the Old Guard. The network spread from the Balkans to the Atlantic, and even crossed into the USA. There is also a protracted account of the misunderstandings and the spat between Serge and Trotsky which makes them both seem like petulant sixth-formers arguing over the results of a cricket match – even though the issues of contention were the Fourth International and the prospects for the working class at a time of rising fascism, Stalinist totalitarianism, and the growing prospects of war.

The last part of Weissman’s account covers almost a decade and one of the most fertile periods of Serge’s career – and yet it’s over in what seem like a few pages. It begins with the fall of France in June 1940. Serge left on the very day that the Nazis entered Paris, fleeing along with thousands of others for the unoccupied South along with Vlady and Laurette Séjourné, who was twenty years younger than him and was to become his third wife. This defeat at the hands of ‘the twin totalitarianisms’ and the fight for survival were to be documented in his novel Les Derniers Temps (The Long Dusk in English translation). They arrived almost penniless in Marseilles, only to learn of the assassination of Trotsky in Mexico. Serge was one of the last Oppositionists left alive, and he knew his name would be on the GPU’s hit list.

Fortunately, they were rescued thanks to the efforts of Varian Fry and the American Relief Committee which helped to smuggle hundreds of refugees out of France under the very noses of the Gestapo. There was an amazingly idyllic period of a few month when Fry hosted a group of artists, intellectuals, and even surrealists at a large chateau on the outskirts of the city – but Serge was eventually asked to leave because his reputation as a Trotskyist was putting other people at risk. He finally got away from France in March 1941 on a ship bound for Mexico.

En route Serge was separated from his luggage, which had been labelled as destined for the USA, where his publisher Dwight Macdonald (editor of the Partisan Review) had offered him hospitality. The contents of the suitcases were confiscated and photographed by the FBI, which then translated all the manuscripts and compiled summaries which were sent for the personal attention of J. Edgar Hoover.

Serge was interned and interrogated in both Martinique (under French Vichy control) and the Dominican Republic, then put into a concentration camp in Cuba, finally arriving in Mexico in September 1941. The last years of his life were spent in poverty, ill-health, and what he felt as a terrible intellectual loneliness – but at least he could write. This was the period in which he produced his most mature work, the late masterpieces Memoirs of a Revolutionary, The Case of Comrade Tulayev, and Unforgiving Years. There was also The Long Dusk, though he himself considered that something of a failure. He also continued his work on political, economic, and social theory – trying to make sense of a world which by the mid 1940s had seen tens of millions of people killed by both the Nazis and by Stalin.

His ending was as grim as his life had been – cut short by a heart attack after hailing a taxi in Mexico City, dressed in a threadbare suit and with holes in his shoes. His son Vlady suspected he had been poisoned, and even wondered if his stepmother might have been responsible. Serge’s marriage had not been a success, and shortly after Serge’s death Laurette Séjourné married a prominent Mexican Communist and even joined the Communist Party herself.

So – what is to be made of this monumental piece of scholarship? I was disappointed to realise that Susan Weissman’s account of Serge’s political ideas begins in 1917, as he made his way to Russia, which he regarded as his homeland, despite never having lived there. There is no account of the formation of his beliefs and his ‘education’ as a young man (he barely went to school at all, in the sense we know it) and his politicisation as the son of a Russian oppositionist, nor of his radicalisation whilst working as a a printer and a type-setter in Brussels. Neither is there any real attempt to look in detail at his years flirting with anarcho-syndicalists.

A consideration of these early years of Serge’s life are important because it was the skills he had acquired as a self-educated scholar, a linguist, a writer, a printer, and an editor which enabled him to take such an active part in the early days of the Russian revolution, where he worked as a political organiser, propagandist, author, editor, translator, secretary, and even secret agent. His knowledge of anarchism and syndicalism also had an effect on both his theoretical understanding of Marxism and his practice as a revolutionary.

Susan Weissman’s account also seeks to put Serge in the right at every step of his career – even though for a number of years he was working essentially as an agent for the Comintern. It’s true that he thought the formation of the Cheka (the Bolshevik’s secret police) was the first big mistake of the revolutionaries; but this opinion was only formed later. He suggested alternative strategies at the crisis of the Kronstadt rebellion, but ultimately sided with the Party in its tragic massacre of the sailors and workers. And he was amongst the first to identify totalitarian elements within Soviet society and the way it was being governed; but he remained loyal to the Party in what he later called ‘Party patriotism’ – that is, the Party can do no wrong.

This was the major weakness in their policy – Serge (and others) believed in the infallibility of the Party; they believed in their own slogans and rhetoric; and they were very slow to acknowledge the complete divide between aspirations, theory, and the reality of the world in which they lived. They clung to the completely deluded idea that the Party was right because it represented the will of the working class – neither of which suppositions were logically tenable or practically correct. Serge was fortunate enough to eventually reject this supposition – and it helped to save his life.

Susan Weissman rightly gives her account the sub-title ‘A Political Biography’ – because it is not anything like a biography in the conventional sense. There is no account of the first twenty-seven years of Serge’s life; hardly any details of his personal or family life (he was married three times); and no account of where and how he managed to live with apparently no regular source of income. What we get in abundance is a tracking of the debates which fuelled his confidence in the importance of the Russian revolution and his conviction that it should be rescued from the clutches of the Stalinist counter-revolution. There is impeccable scholarly referencing throughout, but very little of the fluency, the facts, the details, and the sap of real life.

In fact this is a biography Susan Weissman has been writing for more than two decades. She published Victor Serge: The Course is Set on Hope in 2001 with the same publisher – and my copy of the latest version still has this sub-title on the title page. although this version has been brought up to date with more recent research, there is very little acknowledgement of the fact in the text. The original publication was based on a 1991 PhD thesis entitled ‘Victor Serge: Political, social and literary critic of the USSR, 1917-1947; the reflections and activities of a Belgo-Russian Revolutionary caught in the orbit of Soviet political history’ — which would explain the first half of the unexamined lifespan, the plethora of historical and political detail, and the paucity of human interest. A review of the original publication by the Serge scholar Richard Greeman which makes similar points is available here.

Susan Weissman has devoted huge amounts of scholarly discipline to this enterprise – and has even made attempts to recover the ‘lost manuscripts’ of Serge’s work confiscated by the secret police. The publication carries an enormous record of Serge’s writings, a series of potted biographies, and a gigantic bibliography of sources which make this an unmissable publication for anybody interested in Serge’s life – but I think the definitive biography has still to be written.

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Susan Weissman. Victor Serge: A Political Biography, London and New York: Verso/New Left Books, 2013, pp.406, ISBN: 1844678873

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Victor Serge an introduction

May 13, 2010 by Roy Johnson

the life and work of a revolutionary and novelist

Victor Serge (1890-1947) wrote under the most difficult conditions, much of the time whilst living in exile – in his adopted homeland Russia, in France, and in Mexico. He frequently had to write in secret and he smuggled his work out of the Soviet Union to be published in France and Spain. His work was banned throughout the communist period in Russia, and it has only recently become available there. It also has to be said that his work goes in and out of print rather a lot in English-language publications. A gifted linguist, he chose to write in French. Besides being the preferred language of Russian intellectuals of his generation, French assured him an international audience.

He wrote in a great variety of literary forms – poetry, journalism, novels, and political history, as well as some very good literary criticism and an excellent autobiography. All his work is very political, but it is shot through with what might be called a militant humanism. That is, he never let political dogma over-rule his compassion for his fellow men.

If you have not read his work before, a good place to start is his autobiography, Memoirs of a Revolutionary 1901-1941 written when he was in exile in Mexico. It outlines his astonishing life in the first four decades of the twentieth century. He was active first as an anarchist, then as a socialist militant, as a typographer, a journalist, and then as a professional revolutionary. He spent time in poverty, in jail, and in armed struggle. And he seemed to know everybody who was important – people such as Leon Trotsky, Lenin, and Georgy Lukacs.

The pages of this memoir are packed with events and people, and he writes in a vivid, sparkling style which holds you gripped. His life is almost unbelievably dramatic, and he is not in the slightest self-pitying as he endures poverty, political persecution, jail, and exile. And all the time, not matter what the circumstances, he is being creative as a novelist, a historian, or a journalist. It is truly amazing that he survived a period which he himself called ‘Midnight of the Century’, and it’s a tribute to his creativity that this is what saved him, because his fame as a writer had spread so wide. He was sent into ‘internal exile’ by Stalin because of his oppositionist views, but a campaign for his release was launched in western Europe, and was eventually successful.

The novels of Victor Serge fall into two sets of trilogies. The first deals with his early prison experiences, the failed Barcelona uprising, and the successful Bolshevik revolution. Men in Prison (1930) is based on his own life as a prisoner of the French during the first world war. Politically, it deals with his early anarcho-syndicalist beliefs, but in literary terms it belongs to the very Russian tradition of prison literature. More than anything, it is a heartfelt plea of human sympathy for the underdog, and a call to arms in favour of rebellion and resistance to all forms of repression and tyranny.

Birth of Our Power (1931) is losely basd on Serge’s own experiences following his release from prison. It is centred on the events of the Barcelona uprising in 1918 and then after its failure moves on to the immediate aftermath of the successful Russian revolution in St Petersburg. Politically, these events trace the development of his allegiance from that of an anarcho-syndicalist to that of a Bolshevik, but a communist in the old sense – one with liberal-humanist values and a respect for democratic values.

Differences of opinion with the Stalinists who took over in the USSR led to him being sent into ‘internal exile’, where all of his writings and personal papers were confiscated by the secret police. There have been several attempts made to have these released, especially after the fall of communism in 1989, but they have still not been located.

Following a successful campaign in the west for his release, he returned to France in 1936 and resumed work on two books on Soviet communism, From Lenin to Stalin (1937) and Destiny of a Revolution (1937). He also published a volume of poetry, Resistance (1938) about his experiences in Russia. there was also a voluminous exchange of correspondence with Leon Trotsky, though the two oppositionists eventually agreed to disagree.

When the Germans invaded France in 1940, he left Paris and travelled to Marseilles, and in 1941 left on the same ship as Andre Breton and Claude Levi-Strauss. His destination was Mexico – the only place which would grant him a resident’s visa. As soon as he settled there he became the object of violent articles and threats to his life from Stalin’s agents – who had recently assassinated Leon Trotsky.

His last years were full of poverty, malnutrition, illness, police surveillance, slander and isolation. Yet he continued to publish novels such as The Long Dusk, Unforgiving Years, and his masterpiece, The Case of Comrade Tulayev. His autobiography, Memoirs of a Revolutionary, was first published in the United States in 1945. Serge’s health had been badly damaged by his periods of imprisonment in France and Russia. However, he continued to write until he died of a heart-attack in Mexico City on 17th November, 1947.

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Victor Serge biography

September 22, 2009 by Roy Johnson

novelist, historian, revolutionary

Victor Serge (1890-1947) (real name Victor Lvovich Khibalchich) was born in Brussels, the son of Russian-Polish exiles. His father was an officer in the Imperial Guard who fled the country after the assassination of Alexander II in 1881. His mother was a Polish aristocrat and a teacher. Serge’s father found work as a teacher at the Institute of Anatomy in Brussels, and then moved to France where he became involved in the radical Russian emigre community. As a child he often went hungry, he never went to school, and his younger brother died at the age of nine. He began work at the age of 15 as an apprentice photographer, then went on to work as a designer and a typographist, learning this trade in an anarchist printing works. Serge suffered privation and hardship throughout his life and spent over ten years of it in prisons.

He was strongly influenced by the works of the Russian anarchist Kropotkin and became an active journalist and translator in the revolutionary press. In 1912 he was wrongly accused of participating in the Bonnot Gang, a group of bohemian bank robbers. Several of his comrades were executed: Serge was given a five year jail sentence in solitary confinement, followed by five year’s exile.

Freed in 1917, he went to Barcelona to work as a typographer, and also took part in the popular insurrection there. In 1918 he volunteered for service in Russia, but was arrested and imprisoned without trial in Paris, because of the ban on his staying there. Then he was exchanged for an officer of the French military mission being held in Russia.

The whole sweep of his life as a writer, intellectual, historian, and revolutionary is covered in his autobiographical Memoirs of a Revolutionary. This covers the period between 1900 and 1940 and includes his early affiliations with the anarchists, his participation in the Russian revolution, and his fight against Stalinism. But it is much more than just a historical chronicle. It follows his intellectual and artistic development, and his dealings with lots of the major figures of the Left during this period – Trotsky, Zinoviev, Radek, and Georgy Lukacs.

Arriving in Petrograd in February 1919, he joined the Bolshevik Party and worked on the executive of the Third Communist International with Gregory Zinoviev, travelling to Moscow, Berlin, and Vienna. Meanwhile he also worked as a journalist for L’Humanité and Le Monde in Paris.

In 1923 he took part in the communist insurrection in Germany. Around this time he became increasingly critical of Soviet government. He joined with Emma Goldman and Alexander Berkman to complain about the way the Red Army treated the sailors involved in the Kronstadt Uprising. A libertarian socialist, Serge protested against the Red Terror that was organized by Felix Dzerzhinsky and the Cheka.

Following this he joined the Left Opposition group along with people such as Leon Trotsky and Karl Radek. Serge was an outspoken critic of the authoritarian way that Joseph Stalin governed the country and is believed to be the first writer to describe the Soviet government as ‘totalitarian’. Because of this, Serge was expelled from the Communist Party in 1928.

He was now unable to work for the government and over the next few years he spent his time writing Year One of the Russian Revolution (1930) and two novels Men in Prison (1930) and Birth of Our Power (1931). These books were banned in the Soviet Union but were published in France and Spain. He wrote in French: besides being the preferred language of Russian intellectuals of his generation, French assured him an international audience.

Susan Weissmann’s The Course is Set on Hope is the first full-length biography of Victor Serge. It draws on some of the recently-opened Comintern archives and shows Serge’s principled struggle to maintain socialist principles in his fight against the grip of totalitarianism. This covers the period from 1919 when Serge first went to take part in the Russian revolution, until his death in poverty and exile in Mexico in 1947.

In May 1933, he was arrested by the secret police (the GPU) and sentenced without trial to three year’s exile in the village of Orenburg in the Urals – an early outpost of what would become the Gulag Archipelago. Most of his colleagues in the Left Opposition that were arrested were executed, but as a result of protests made by leading politicians in France, Belgium and Spain, Serge was kept alive.

Protests against Serge’s imprisonment took place at several International Conferences. The case caused the Soviet government considerable embarrassment and in 1936 Joseph Stalin announced that he was considering releasing Serge from prison. Pierre Laval, the French prime minister, refused to grant Serge an entry permit. Emile Vandervelde, the veteran socialist, and a member of the Belgian government, managed to obtain Serge a visa to live in Belgium.

Serge’s relatives were not so fortunate: his sister, mother-in-law, sister-in-law (Anita Russakova) and two of his brothers-in-law, died in prison. All of his writings and personal papers were confiscated by the secret police. There have been several attempts made to have these released, especially after the fall of communism in 1989. They have still not been located.

The Case of Comrade Tulayev is without doubt Serge’s masterpeice, and the finest novel written about the Stalinist purges of the 1930s. A government official is shot at random by a disgruntled Moscow youth, and this sets in motion a repressive crack-down in search of a ‘political conspiracy’ which does not really exist but which gives the forces of repression an excuse to eliminate their rivals. The youth goes free, even though he confesses, whilst completely innocent officials are forced to ‘confess’ to crimes they have not committed. The story is closely related to Stalin’s organisation of the murder of Kirov, the popular head of the Leningrad party district.

He returned to France in 1936 and resumed work on two books on Soviet communism, From Lenin to Stalin (1937) and Destiny of a Revolution (1937). He also published several novels and a volume of poetry, Resistance (1938) about his experiences in Russia. there was a voluminous exchange of correspondence with Leon Trotsky, though the two oppositionists eventually agreed to disagree.

When the Germans invaded France in 1940, he left Paris and travelled to Marseilles, and in 1941 left on the same ship as Andre Breton and Claude Levi-Strauss. His destination was Mexico – the only place which would grant him a resident’s visa. As soon as he settled there he became the object of violent articles and threats to his life from refugee Stalinists – who had recently assassinated Leon Trotsky.

It is astonishing to realise that alongside all his political activities and his time spent as a historian and novelist, Serge also found time to write on literary theory. His Collected Writings on Literature and Revolution offer reflections on modernist literary theory, Russian experimental writing, and the nature of the relationship between literature and politics. It gathers together for the first time the bulk of his literary criticism from the 1920s to the 1950s, giving an invaluable contemporary account of the debates about the production of literature in a socialist society, the role of intellectuals, the theory of ‘proletarian’ literature, as well as assessments of Soviet writers: Mayakovsky, Gorky, Alexei Tolstoy, Alexander Blok, and the less well known Korolenko, Pilnyak, Fedin, Bezymensky, Ivanov, amongst others.

His last years were full of poverty, malnutrition, illness, police surveillance, slander and isolation. Yet he continued to publish novels such as Unforgiving Years, The Long Dusk and his masterpiece, The Case of Comrade Tulayev. His autobiography, Memoirs of a Revolutionary, was first published in the United States in 1945. He continued to write until he died of a heart-attack in Mexico City on 17th November, 1947.

Victor Serge – web links

Victor Serge and The Novel of Revolution – an essay by Richard Greeman, Serge scholar and translator (1991).

Unforgiving Years – an extended book review by Roy Johnson of Serge’s last great novel (2009).

Men in Prison – a book review by Roy Johnson, originally part of an essay which appeared in Literature and History

The Cycle of Revolution: Men in Prison – an essay by Adam David Morton, part of his series relating literature to space, geography, and the city (2012).

Red Petrograd: Conquered City – an essay by Adam David Morton, part of his series relating literature to space, geography, and the city (2012).

The Case of Comrade Tulayev– an extended book review by Roy Johnson, (2010).

The Journey into Defeat: The Case of Comrade Tulayev– an essay by Adam David Morton, part of his series relating literature to space, geography, and the city (2012).

Midnight in the Century – extended book review by Roy Johnson (2010).

The Zero Hour: Midnight in the Century – an essay by Adam David Morton, part of his series relating literature to space, geography, and the city (2012).

Memoirs of a Revolutionary – an extended book review by Richard Greeman of Susan Weissman’s The Course is Set on Hope. Originally published in Issue 94 of INTERNATIONAL SOCIALISM JOURNAL, Published Spring 2002 Copyright © International Socialism.

Victor Serge Papers – Yale University archive

Revolutionary & Novelist – a biographical sketch (2009).

Victor Serge – an introduction to his work – brief notes on Serge’s major fiction and non-fiction (2008).

Victor Serge at Wikipedia – biographical notes, political ideas, works available in English, and web links.

Victor Serge and Socialism – an essay by Peter Sedgwick, first published in International Socialism (1st series), No.14, Autumn 1963, pp.17-23.

A Requiem for Paris: The Long Dusk – an essay by Adam David Morton, part of his series relating literature to space, geography, and the city (2012).

The City as Protagonist: Birth of Our Power – essay by Adam David Morton, part of his series relating literature to space, geography, and the city (2012).

On Victor Serge as Vagabond Witness – a review by Adam Morton of Paul Gordon’s Vagabond Witness: Victor Serge and the Politics of Hope (2013).

Victor Serge: A Political Biography – a review by Roy Johnson of Susan Weissman’s study of Serge’s politics as an intransigent Left Oppositionist (2013).

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Victor Serge web links

May 13, 2010 by Roy Johnson

a selection of articles, reviews, and resources

This collection of Victor Serge web links offers a selection of essays, book reviews, and articles related to the Russian novelist, historian, and revolutionary. Since his death in 1947, Serge’s work has been largely ignored outside a small coterie of enthusiasts, but his reputation has gradually spread internationally in the post cold war era.

Victor Serge and The Novel of Revolution – an essay by Richard Greeman, Serge scholar and translator (1991).

Unforgiving Years – an extended book review by Roy Johnson of Serge’s last great novel (2009).

Men in Prison – a book review by Roy Johnson, originally part of an essay which appeared in Literature and History

The Cycle of Revolution: Men in Prison – an essay by Adam David Morton, part of his series relating literature to space, geography, and the city (2012).

Red Petrograd: Conquered City – an essay by Adam David Morton, part of his series relating literature to space, geography, and the city (2012).

The Case of Comrade Tulayev– an extended book review by Roy Johnson, (2010).

The Journey into Defeat: The Case of Comrade Tulayev– an essay by Adam David Morton, part of his series relating literature to space, geography, and the city (2012).

Midnight in the Century – extended book review by Roy Johnson (2010).

The Zero Hour: Midnight in the Century – an essay by Adam David Morton, part of his series relating literature to space, geography, and the city (2012).

Victor Serge Papers – Yale University archive

Revolutionary & Novelist – a biographical sketch (2009).

Victor Serge – an introduction to his work – brief notes on Serge’s major fiction and non-fiction (2008).

Victor Serge at Wikipedia – biographical notes, political ideas, works available in English, and web links.

Victor Serge and Socialism – an essay by Peter Sedgwick, first published in International Socialism (1st series), No.14, Autumn 1963, pp.17-23.

A Requiem for Paris: The Long Dusk – an essay by Adam David Morton, part of his series relating literature to space, geography, and the city (2012).

The City as Protagonist: Birth of Our Power – essay by Adam David Morton, part of his series relating literature to space, geography, and the city (2012).

On Victor Serge as Vagabond Witness – a review by Adam Morton of Paul Gordon’s Vagabond Witness: Victor Serge and the Politics of Hope (2013).

Victor Serge: A Political Biography – a review by Roy Johnson of Susan Weissman’s study of Serge’s politics as an intransigent Left Oppositionist (2013).

More on Victor Serge
Twentieth century literature
More on biography

collected essays, articles, and reviews

an extraordinary life in radical left politics 1905-1941

the forging of revolutionary consciousness

revolutionaries face betrayal and defeat

the Stalinist purges and show trials of the 1930s

revolutionary hopes betrayed

the life of a revolutionary and a great novelist

the life and work of a revolutionary and novelist

novelist, historian, revolutionary

Victor Serge – web links

a selection of articles, reviews, and resources

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