Birth of Our Power (39 page)

French novelist François Maspero, whose leftist publishing house revived Serge's books (all but forgotten in postwar France) in the wake of the May 1968 near-revolution, remarks: “There exists a sort of secret international, perpetuating itself from one generation to the next, of admirers who read, reread [Serge's] books and know a lot about him.” As Adam Hochschild notes in his foreword to Serge's
Memoirs,
‘It is rare when a writer inspires instant brotherhood among strangers.' As Serge's translator, it is my great pleasure (and revolutionary duty!) to welcome you into the growing ‘English-language section' of this Invisible International.

1
   See Richard Greeman, “History and Myth: Victor Serge's Russian Heritage,”
The Massachusetts Review
53, nos. 1, 2, and 3 (2012).

2
   See the anthology of Serge's anarchist writings, trans. Mitch Abidor,
Anarchists Never Surrender
(Oakland: PM Press, 2015).

3
   Serge,
Men in Prison,
trans. Richard Greeman (Oakland: PM Press, 2014).

4
   See Victor Serge,
Revolution in Danger: Writings on Russia, 1919–1921,
trans. Ian Birchall (London: Redwords, 1997).

5
   Serge,
Conquered City,
trans. Richard Greeman (New York: NYRB, 2011).

6
   Serge,
Unforgiving Years,
trans. Richard Greeman (New York: NYRB, 2008).

7
   Cronstadt later became a bone of contention between Serge and Trotsky in exile.

8
   Translated by Ian Birchall (London, Redwords, 1997)

9
   I was privileged to know Vlady from 1963 until his death in 2004, and he is the source of much of my information about his father. Please see
http://www.vlady.org
.

10
The manuscripts have never been recovered, despite diligent searches of recently opened Soviet archives. See Richard Greeman, “The Victor Serge Affair and the French Literary Left,”
Revolutionary History
5, no. 3 (Autumn 1994).

11
Trans. by Richard Greeman (NYRB Classics, 2014).

12
All three have been published in English translation by NYRB Classics.

13
Susan Weissman,
Victor Serge: A Political Biography
(New York: Verso, 2013), previously published as
The Course Is Set on Hope
(New York: Verso, 2002), 67. The book's main argument is that “Serge's critique of Stalinism was the core of his life and work” (p.6), and she gives short shrift to his anarchist years, his poetry, and his fiction, which she finds ‘useful' in understanding Stalinism.

14
Serge is better known in U.S. and British departments, with two PhD theses: my own (Columbia) and Bill Marshall's (Oxford), later published as
Victor Serge: The Uses of Dissent
(New York: Berg, 1992).

15
Serge went to see Gorky as soon as he arrived in Russia in 1919, but declined an offer to join the staff of Gorky's newspaper. During the Civil War, Serge depended on Gorky's relationship with Lenin to intercede to save anarchist comrades from being shot by the Cheka.

16
See Victor Serge,
Collected Writings on Literature and Revolution,
trans. Al Richardson (London: Francis Boutle, 2004)

17
Neil Cornwell, review of
Midnight in the Century, Irish Slavonic Studies
4 (1983).

Victor Serge was born into the revolutionary movement as some people are said to be born “to the manor.” His parents were part of the emigration of Russian
intelligenti
which streamed into Western Europe during the dark decade of repression that followed the assassination of Czar Alexander II by the terrorist arm of the populist “Narodnik” party on March 1, 1881. He was born Victor Lvovich Kibalchich (Serge was a pseudonym) in Brussels on December 30, 1890, a child of want, exile, and revolt.

Serge's earliest memories were of adult conversations dealing with “trials, executions, escapes and Siberian highways, with great ideas incessantly argued over, and with the latest books about these ideas.” Idealism and readiness for sacrifice were the values that reigned in his parents' milieu. “On the walls of our humble and makeshift lodgings,” he recalled in his
Memoirs of a Revolutionary,
“there were always the portraits of men who had been hanged.” Serge's father had barely escaped hanging for his part in the 1881 attack on the Czar, and one of Russia's most famous martyrs was Serge's relative on his father's side, Nikolai Kibalchich, the genial chemist who fashioned the bombs that were used against Alexander II.

Serge's birthright was a tradition of rebellion and sacrifice in the face of Czarist autocracy and repression, a tradition begun by the Decembrists in 1825, passed on through Chernyshevsky, Herzen, Bakunin, and the generation of students who had gone “to the people” in the 1870s, to culminate in the terrorism of 1881, a tradition that combined the most intellectualized idealism with danger and desperate deeds.

Growing up in comfortable, complacent Brussels, but in a household where extreme poverty caused the death of his younger brother and where the atmosphere was charged with revolutionary fervor, Serge,
even as a child, became obsessed with the idea that he was living in a “world without possible escape,” and determined that the only acceptable career would be that of the professional revolutionary. Since his father, an impoverished scholar, despised public education—he called it “stupid bourgeois instruction for the poor”—Serge never went to school. He learned to read in his father's library of revolutionary books and learned about life in the slum streets of Brussels. As an adolescent he worked as a photographer's apprentice. He was active in the Socialist
Jeunes-Guardes
but still found it “impossible to live” in a city where even the “revolutionaries” believed in gradual reform. In 1908, after a short stay in a Utopian colony in the Ardennes, he heeded the call of Paris, “the Paris of Salvat, of the Commune, of the CGT, of little journals printed with burning zeal; the Paris where Lenin edited
Iskra
from time to time and spoke at emigré meetings in little co-operative houses.”

Disgusted with the watered-down Marxist and reformist-socialist doctrines of the day which promised “revolution for the year 2000” but neglected the impossible here-and-now, Serge and his young comrades in Paris were drawn to theories of anarchist-individualism, the personal rebellion and “conscious egotism” of Nietzsche and Stirner: “Anarchism swept us away completely because it both demanded everything of us and offered everything to us.” The revolution was to be personal, total, immediate. But in Paris, just as in Brussels, it was “impossible to live.” There, poverty and hunger were the daily “impossibilities,” and many of the young individualists were soon converted to the theory (and practice) of “individual expropriation” based on Proudhon's idea that “legal” property is merely “theft.” Driven by want, disease, and desperation, and inspired by half-digested revolutionary ideas, many of Serge's young comrades banded together and embarked on what was probably the most bloody and tragic series of bank robberies in modern times. Known as the “Bonnot Gang” and the “Tragic Bandits,” they terrorized Paris for almost a year; all of them met violent ends—in gun battles, by suicide, and on the guillotine. Serge, then editor of
l'anarchie,
was repelled by the slaughter and revolted by the excesses to which their idealistic theories had led. But he refused to break with his comrades and turn informer; after a sensational trial, the French state rewarded his silence with a five-year prison sentence as an “accomplice.”

Of his term in prison (1912–17), Serge wrote: “It burdened me with an experience so heavy, so intolerable to endure, that long afterward, when I resumed writing, my first book [Men
in Prison,
a novel] amounted
to an effort to free myself from this inward nightmare, as well as the performance of a duty toward all those who will never so free themselves.”

Released from prison at the height of World War I and banned from France, Serge made his way to Barcelona, a city “at peace,” busily turning out weapons for both sides in the great conflict. It was there that he abandoned individualism, and began to agitate in the ranks of the syndicalists. In Barcelona, he wrote his first article signed “Victor Serge,” and Barcelona on the eve of insurrection (twenty years before the great Spanish Revolution and Civil War) is the setting for the first half of
Birth of Our Power.

Involved as he was in Spain, it was the Russian Revolution, which had just erupted at the other end of Europe, that was for Serge “my” revolution, the end of that “world without possible escape.” He left Barcelona and attempted to join the Russian Army in France in order to be repatriated to the homeland, as it were. But he succeeded only in getting himself thrown into a French concentration camp as a “Bolshevik suspect.” After the Armistice, he was sent to Russia as a hostage in exchange for some French officers interned by the Soviets. He arrived in Red Petrograd (the setting for the final chapters of
Birth of Our Power
and for
Conquered City)
in January 1919, at the height of the Civil War and famine. It was here that the evolution from Victor Kibalchich, homeless exile and anarchist-individualist, to Victor Serge, spokesman for Soviet power, was completed.

Serge's libertarian sympathies made him, from the start, wary of the authoritarian nature of Bolshevik rule. But, as a revolutionary, only one course was open to him: he threw himself, body and soul, into the work of defending and building the Soviet Republic. During the Civil War, he served as a machine gunner in a special defense battalion, collaborated closely with Zinoviev the founding congresses of the Communist International, became a Commissar in charge of the czarist secret police archives (under Krassin), and eventually a member of the Russian Communist Party. At the same time, however, he openly criticized Bolshevik authoritarianism, frequented anarchist, Left-Menshevik, and Left-Socialist circles, and interceded in favor of many prisoners of the Cheka (predecessor of the GPU and the NKVD). At this time, too, Serge was translating into French the works of Lenin, Trotsky, and Zinoviev. Among poets and writers, he was friendly with Yessenin, Mayakovsky, Pilnyak, Pasternak, Panait Istrati, and Maxim Gorky (a distant relative on his mother's side).

By 1923, he was a confirmed member of the Left (Trotskyist) Opposition; at that date it was still possible to be simultaneously “loyal” and an “oppositionist” in Soviet Russia. But his presence in Russia was troublesome; he was made editor of the
International Communist Bulletin
and sent off to Germany and the Balkans to agitate, a task which he performed with perfect loyalty and discipline.

When Serge returned to Moscow in 1926 to take part in the inner-Party struggle against Stalin, however, the political climate was greatly changed. A little over a year later, he was expelled from the Party and held in prison for several weeks; his relatives, including many who had no political affiliations, were also made to suffer. It was during this period (1928–33) that, relieved of all official functions and systematically deprived of any means of earning a living because of the Stalinist “blacklist,” Serge turned to serious writing. Already known in France for his pamphlets and political articles, he soon attracted a larger audience there as an historian
(Year One of the Russian Revolution,
1930) and novelist (Men
in Prison,
1930;
Birth of Our Power,
1931;
Conquered City,
1932).

Surely no writer has ever produced under more difficult conditions, and the vivid tension and rapid episodic style of his works may well have been dictated in part by his personal situation. “I knew that I would never have time to polish my works properly. Their value would not depend on that. Others, less involved in struggle, would perfect a style; but what I had to tell,
they
could not tell. To each his own task. I had to struggle bitterly for my family's daily bread [Serge had married soon after arriving in Russia] in a society where all doors were closed to me, and where people were often afraid to shake my hand in the street. I asked myself every day, without any particular feeling, but engrossed by the problems of rent, my wife's health, my son's education, whether I would be arrested in the night. For my books I adopted an appropriate form: I had to construct them in detached fragments which could each be finished separately and sent abroad posthaste; which could, if absolutely necessary, be published as they were, incomplete; and it would be difficult for me to compose in any other form.”

Serge was arrested again in 1933, and this time sent to Orenburg where he was joined by his young son, Vlady. He might well have perished there, like so many other Soviet writers, during the period of the great purges, had it not been for his reputation in the West. A group of young Parisian intellectuals campaigned openly for his freedom, and his plight was brought to the attention of pro-Soviet luminaries like
Romain Rolland, André Gide, and Audré Malraux, some of whom may have interceded in his favor with Stalin. In 1936 he was removed from Orenburg, but he was also deprived of Soviet citizenship, relieved of his manuscripts (both actions in violation of Soviet law), and expelled from the Soviet Union. His return to Europe was heralded by a vicious slander campaign in the Communist press.