A revolutionary for all seasons

Victor Serge: Revolution in life and literature

Simon Olley

Libertarian convert to Bolshevism, agitator, novelist, journalist, poet, pamphleteer, artist and political writer: Victor Serge was a revolutionary par excellence (and he had the jail time to prove it). But arguably his greatest achievement, that which makes his work so relevant for today, was to capture the intense revolutionary spirit of his age: a flash of brilliance so bright that it would endure in the minds of millions, even in the darkest hours of subsequent decades, holding out the hope of a society adequate to the truly dignified and creative nature of human existence. Victor Lvovich Kibalchich (Victor Serge) was born in Belgium in 1890 into a Russian émigré family with close connections to the Narodnaya Volya (People's Will) movement. Serge became political at a very early age. In Memoirs of a Revolutionary he recalls taking anarchist positions from the age of six onwards. When he was 15 Serge and his circle of friends joined the Jeunes Gardes, the Belgian young socialists, but they quickly grew dissatisfied with the increasingly reformist and parliamentary focus of the party. Influenced by the romantic libertarianism of writers such as Albert Libertad, Serge left Belgium to throw himself into the anarchist milieus of Paris. Under the pseudonym Valetin, Serge edited the newspaper L'Anarchie, railing against the oppressed and degraded life of the workers who endured "robotic labour under authoritarian direction in humiliating and filthy conditions" and extolling the virtues of banditry as a means of escape from the ignominy of exploitation. Unfortunately for Serge, the French police took seriously the saying that "words are weapons", and in 1912 he was sentenced to five years in prison for his alleged role in instigating the crimes of the Bonnot gang. His time in jail, which included long periods of solitary confinement, later became the inspiration for his novel Men in Prison. Reflecting on this period of his life in his Memoirs, Serge expresses the frustration he felt at seeing the anarchist circles crumble and crack under the pressures of police repression: "I saw the whole of the movement founded by Libertad dragged into the scum of society by a kind of madness; and nobody could do anything about it, least of all myself." His experiences in Paris contributed to his later shift away from libertarianism towards an understanding that collective action by workers was the key to success in the struggle against capitalism. Upon his release from jail in 1917 Serge travelled to Barcelona, arriving just in time to participate in a failed syndicalist uprising. But, following the outbreak of the Russian revolution in February 1917, he was above all desperate to get back to Russia. Serge attempted to find his way back to Russia through France, but he was quickly detained for breaching the conditions of his release from jail, which forbade him from returning to the country. For the next year he was stuck in a French internment camp, passing the time in passionate discussion and debate with Russian émigrés about the significance of the October 1917 revolution and the Bolshevik Party that led it. It is this period in Serge's life that formed the basis for the novel Birth of our Power, a powerful evocation of the highly charged political atmosphere during World War I, and the wave of enthusiasm that swept through the European workers' movement in response to events in Russia. Finally, in October 1918, the French government agreed to exchange Serge and other revolutionaries for a number of anti-Bolshevik prisoners being held in Russia. Serge arrived in Petrograd in January 1919 to find the city, and the Soviet government, in a desperate struggle to survive. He was immediately struck by the power of the revolutionary spirit that drove the Russian workers to hold on in the face of the unspeakable deprivations of the civil war. And he could see that it was only the Bolsheviks who stood with the workers, providing the organisational capability necessary to defend the gains of the revolution from its many adversaries. As Serge later put it, "I was neither against the Bolsheviks nor neutral; I was with them, albeit independently, without renouncing thought or critical sense." Serge's novel Conquered City provides a compelling account of life in Petrograd during the civil war, and his most significant historical work, Year One of the Russian Revolution, provides the broader context. The Soviet government was under siege from all sides, and Serge could see that without support from a revolution in a more developed Western European country, there was little hope that it could survive. The Third (Communist) International was established in March 1919 with the aim of hastening the spread of revolution abroad. For the next seven years Serge worked for the Comintern, describing himself and his colleagues as "emissaries, functionaries, secretaries, editors, translators, printers, organisers, directors, ‘members of the collegium' and then some." In 1922, under the auspices of his role with the Comintern, Serge travelled to Germany where in the following year he was to witness the tragic defeat of the German revolution. Serge clearly realised the significance of this event for the hopes of the Russian workers: "If only" he wrote, "If only...". From 1923 until his return to Russia in 1926, Serge continued his work in Germany and later Austria, tirelessly committing himself to the fading prospect of revolution in Western Europe. Back in Russia Serge found that the continuing isolation of the Soviet regime had led to a significant degeneration and the increasing concentration of power in the hands of the state bureaucracy. Following Lenin's death in 1923, Stalin pronounced the policy of "socialism in one country", going against the basic tenets of Marxism to which all the main leaders of the Russian revolution had adhered. Serge recognised this development as representing a decisive break with the traditions of the October revolution and that Russia was now heading down the path towards the restoration of a form of class society. He threw himself into the Left Opposition, led by Leon Trotsky, and began organising the small numbers of other revolutionaries who were prepared to take a stand: "One of my groups, consisting of half a dozen men and women, held its meetings in the shade of low fir-trees in an abandoned cemetery. I would stand on the graves and discuss the confidential reports of the Central Committee, the news from China, and Mao Zedong's articles." Serge and his fellow oppositionists were expelled from the Bolsheviks (now the Communist Party) in October 1927. For the next five years, from 1928 to 1933, Serge was allowed to live at liberty in Petrograd and this proved to be the most prolific period for his writing. However, he was subject to constant surveillance and harassment by the authorities and in 1933 he was arrested and accused of taking part in a conspiracy against the state. In the context of the increasing paranoia of the Stalinist regime this was a very dangerous situation. But Serge's prominence as a writer, particularly in France, meant that he avoided the fate suffered by countless other accused "Trotskyists" in this period. He was subject to internal exile in the Russian city of Orenburg, where he spent a further three years before a campaign by French activists and writers led to his release. Serge left Russia for Belgium and then France, where he stayed until he was forced out by the Nazi invasion in 1940. He died in Mexico in 1947, poverty stricken, without even a decent pair of shoes to his name. Based on a story such as this, you might expect that in Serge's later work the tone of optimistic humanism that pervades novels such as Birth of our Power would have succumbed to the harsh realities that he had suffered through. And there is no doubt that the subject matter of the novels written during his exile is bleak. Works such as Midnight of the Century and The Case of Comrade Tulayev do not hold back in their depiction of the inhuman cruelty of the Stalinist bureaucracy. But what is striking about these works is the extent to which, despite the depictions of suffering they entail, the focus remains on the innate human capacity for resistance. Thus the final chapter of Midnight of the Century, titled "The Beginning", ends with a vision of renewal: of the "Russian earth, the tortured earth of the Revolution...its countless living prisoners, its countless executed ones in graves, its construction sites, its masses, its solitudes and all the seeds germinating in its womb." The continuing hopefulness of Serge's literary output can be explained with reference to the historical works in which he attempts to come to grips with the transition from Soviet democracy to Stalinist totalitarianism. Having been witness to the reality of Soviet power in Petrograd in aftermath of the revolution, he could clearly see the disjuncture between the Bolshevik Party that stood at the head of the victorious Russian working class in October 1917, and the Party that expelled him and his oppositionist comrades in October 1927. In works such as From Lenin to Stalin and Russia Twenty Years After, Serge assembles a formidable volume of evidence for the fact that the ultimate defeat of the revolution, and the rise of the Stalinist bureaucracy, has much more to do with its failure to spread abroad than with this or that policy of the Bolsheviks. Serge asks "what greater injustice can be imagined towards the Russian revolution than to judge it in the light of Stalinism alone? Of Stalinism which emerged from it, it is true, only to kill it, but in the course of thirteen or fifteen years of struggles, by favour of the defeat of socialism in Europe and Asia!" With regard to this point it is instructive to compare Serge's outlook with that of George Orwell, who is in many respects his English-speaking equivalent. Both Serge and Orwell were concerned to expose the crimes of the Stalinist counter-revolution in Russia. But whereas the tone in 1984 (summed up by the line "if there was hope, it must lie with the proles") leans much more towards a passive resignation in the face of the power of the totalitarian system, Serge's emphasis is almost always on the prospect for a renewal of the struggle. Thus in From Lenin to Stalin he asks "does anyone imagine that the bureaucracy will indefinitely maintain its stranglehold on a young people of 170 million souls, which preserves in its memory the heroic legend of the great years - a people with a destiny to be achieved?" One might conjecture that Serge's long experience as an active participant in the revolutionary movement, first in France and Spain, and then in the years following the revolution in Russia, when compared with Orwell's fleeting participation in the revolutionary militias in the Spanish civil war, gave him a much more deeply ingrained sense of the capacity of the working class (the proles) to make their own history. The world of today is one in which the brutal reality of the capitalist system, with its grotesque inequalities, environmental destruction, war and oppression, can seem more powerful than ever. In this context, the work of Victor Serge has a unique capacity to inspire. It furnishes us with the moral strength, the courage and creativity needed to stand against the system. And it does this by evoking the lived experience of revolution, an experience that ingrained a vision of a better future into the minds of millions of workers of Serge's generation. It was this vision that drove Victor Serge, and that forged in him an indestructible belief in the potential of the working class to resist, even in the most desperate of circumstances. Reflecting on his experience in his Memoirs, Serge wrote: "Early on, I learnt from the Russian intelligentsia that the only meaning of life lies in the conscious participation in the making of history. The more I think of that, the more deeply true it seems to be. It follows that one must range oneself actively against everything that diminishes man, and involve oneself in all struggles which tend to liberate and enlarge him. This categorical imperative is in no way lessened by the fact that such an involvement is inevitably soiled by error: it is a worse error to live for oneself, caught within traditions which are soiled by inhumanity."