Birth of Our Power

by Greeman, Richard, Serge, Victor

  Yet, as the text unfolds, the same destructive energy of the flames which “devour” Tome XXVII of the Laws is revealed as the “friendly warmth” toward which the young girl stretches out her hands, while the final image, that of “Landed Property” and “the rights of collateral heirs” framed in the “incandescent lace” of the flames suggests yet another possibility: that the social class represented by the Levine family, merely in order to survive, to keep warm, has been obliged to obliterate the society based on property and all its heirs (the class represented by the senator’s family) in the course of its struggle for existence.

  The passage evokes a whole complex of interconnected social, political, and historical relationships of individuals and classes which can be understood only in terms of an actual historical event outside of the text (the transfer of power of 1917)—an event which is in turn illuminated and made comprehensible for the reader with greater force and with more complexity through this purely “literary” text than it could be through any amount of abstract historical analysis. It is within this context that the passage’s climax (beginning with the exclamation “The laws are burning!”) acquires a richness and symbolism that goes far beyond its purely “realistic” function as an authenticating petit fait vrai.

  Victor’s achingly romantic vision of his beloved Liouba as she must have appeared in 1919 comes through in this climactic passage, which must, for the author, have already been tinged with nostalgia. For by 1930, when Serge penned this touching portrait of a fearful child-woman, Liouba had already been diagnosed as insane, essentially driven mad by the persecutions to which she and her family had been subject as a result of her husband’s refusal to renounce his principled opposition to Stalinism. This is as close as Serge gets to confessional in this ‘autobiographical’ novel, whose principle literary quality is its ‘restraint.’

  Serge thus brings his final chapter to a climax on a note of ironic lyricism, but it is not the traditionally triumphal lyricism of Red Armies marching into the sunset. The vision is rather one of a necessary but ambiguous victory, of a new class placed precariously and uneasily in the seat of power, beset by internal and external threats and ironically conscious that the power which has been sought for so long and at such great cost will present greater problems in the future than any the powerless have ever dreamed of. Here Serge brings the stamp of authenticity to his literary text and then moves beyond the mimesis of reality to a realm of vision which includes history and poetry as its poles and where the text can be said to ‘authenticate’ history as much as history authenticates the text.

  Thus concludes Serge’s epic tale of two cities, his fictional Odyssey from Barcelona, where ‘we’ could not take power, to Petrograd, where holding onto ‘our power’ turns out to be problematical. The hopeful Barcelona theme of ‘victory-in-defeat’ is superseded by the ironic Petrograd theme of ‘defeat-in-victory.’ And the problem of revolutionary power posed by Serge’s fiction remains an open one in our internet age of international revolution (think ‘Arab Spring’) and globalized counterrevolution.

  1 Please see the postface in this volume, “Victor Serge, Writer and Revolutionary,” for an overview of his life and works.

  2 The once and future ‘St. Petersburg.’ In Soviet times, ‘Leningrad.’

  3 Memoirs of a Revolutionary (New York: NYRB Classics, 2012), 53.

  4 Memoirs of a Revolutionary, 63.

  5 The setting for his first novel, Men in Prison (Oakland: PM Press, 2014).

  6 Victor Serge, “Un zar cae,” Tierra y libertad, Barcelona, April 4, 1917, 1.

  7 Memoirs of a Revolutionary, 64–65.

  8 Review of Birth of Our Power by Marcel Martinet, the poet and theoretician of of proletarian culture in France, Comptes rendus, Europe 105, no. 15 (September 1931): 122–23.

  9 See his website at http://www.vlady.org. ‘Vlady’ (as he signed himself) grew up as Serge’s companion in deportation and exile, one of the ‘comrades.’ In Mexico, where his father died in 1947, he became a well-known painter and muralist. Part of his work is dedicated to his father, and in the course of many conversations over the years, helped me to understand Serge’s life and works.

  10 The title Memoirs of a Revolutionary was invented by the publisher.

  11 By the end of Serge’s life, most of the comrades in Europe and Russia whom he had immortalized as a collective hero had been exterminated by Hitler’s Gestapo and Stalin’s GPU. Serge’s posthumous novel, Unforgiving Years, depicts the fate of a few survivors of this hecatomb.

  12 Serge, Memoirs of a Revolutionary, 346.

  Historical Note

  The opening pages of Birth of Our Power are steeped in symbolism and poetic beauty, but they may prove exasperating for the reader who does not share the author’s intimacy with Spain and Spanish revolutionary history. To point up the universality of his story, for instance, Serge never refers to Barcelona, the setting for the first half of the novel, by name, only as “this city.” And it is only through passing references to World War I that the reader is able to place the events in the early chapters historically.

  For most of us, the phrase “Spanish Revolution” brings to mind the 1936–39 Civil War. But in fact the Spanish revolutionary tradition, with all its passion and brutality, goes back much further, to Napoleonic times (cf. Goya’s “Disasters of War”). Throughout the nineteenth century, repeated attempts to establish liberal government in Spain resulted only in bloody fusillades and paper reforms. Spain entered the twentieth century, after its stunning defeat by the United States in 1898, as a backward, corrupt, priest- and soldier-ridden monarchy. The anarchism of the Russian Bakunin caught the imagination of the peasants and of the workers in the new industrial centers like Barcelona, and their revolt took the form of jacqueries and individual terrorism (a situation quite similar to that in Czarist Russia). The government’s response to social unrest was the establishment of a new Spanish Inquisition that was responsible for wholesale arrests and executions, and for the brutal torture of anyone even remotely connected with the revolutionary movement. The judicial murder at Montjuich of Francisco Ferrer, the progressive educationalist, after the 1909 general strike, raised a worldwide storm of protest. Spain was again a land of martyrs.

  In Birth of Our Power, the citadel of Montjuich, where many rebels had been tortured and shot, becomes the symbol both of the revolutionary past and the oppressive power of the present. Under the shadow of Montjuich, the masses, led by a handful of anarchists, awaken to their power and prepare to do battle for a better life. Many of the characters are real personages; Dario, Serge’s hero, was modeled on the syndicalist leader, Salvador Seguí, who was murdered by government scabs in 1922. The events are all historically true. The confused day of street fighting, described in Chapter 9, took place on July 19, 1917. It was followed by a full-scale insurrection in August.

  Neutral Spain had been trading profitably with both sides in World War I, but the ancient political forms had not kept pace with the rapidly developing economy. Both the liberal parliamentarians and the anarchistic workers felt that the time had come to put forward their demands. The revolt failed because the liberals abandoned their alliance with the workers at the last minute, leaving them to face the government alone, and because the Barcelona workers were so poorly organized. The workers had failed to co-ordinate their movement with groups in other parts of Spain, and were (with the possible exception of Seguí) so anarchistic that they had no idea what they would do if they actually managed to win.

  What is most remarkable in these half-forgotten pages of history is the extent to which the Spanish workers were inspired by the February Revolution in distant Russia, and the fact that the demands of the Comité Obrero in Barcelona actually prefigured those of the Soviets in October 1917. On the basis of this historical “coincidence,” Serge develops his theme of power in complex counterpoint. The two cities, Barcelona and Petrograd (the setting for the last part of the novel), at opposite ends of Europe, comp
lement one another. In the first, “that city that we could not take,” the accent is on the revolution in expectation, and on the sudden discovery by the masses that they possess power—a victory that transpires the actual defeat of the insurrection. In Petrograd, the theme of power takes on an entirely new, and terrifying, aspect; the question implicit in the Barcelona chapters—“Can we seize power?”—is replaced by another, truly awesome question—“What will we become when we do take power?”

  The collective “we” of these questions brings up another important facet of Serge’s work. “The word ‘I,’” wrote Serge, “is repellent to me as a vain affirmation of the self which contains a large measure of illusion and another of vanity or unjustified pride. Whenever it is possible, that is to say when I am able not to feel myself isolated, when my experience illuminates in some manner that of the men to whom I feel tied, I prefer to use the word ‘we,’ which is more general and more true.” The word “Our” in Serge’s title reveals this preoccupation. And it is the opposition of “them” and “us,” of “their city” and “ours,” that in fact forms the basic framework for, and gives a consistent point of view to, Birth of Our Power. “We”—the collective hero of Serge’s novel—are the men to whom the narrator is tied, the poor, the exploited, the downtrodden, the rebels of all places and all times; “they” are the exploiters and the complacent. However, the former are never idealized, and the latter are often treated with great delicacy. Moreover, the basic opposition becomes richly ironic in the final section of the novel when “we” have at last taken power in Russia, and the narrator discovers that “the danger is within us.”

  With Birth of Our Power, Serge created both a compelling portrait of modem revolution and a probing examination of the problems that attend it. The novel captures in a lyrical, yet powerfully direct, manner the enormous vigor and excitement of the revolutionary spirit of our century, and it is at the same time an historically valuable study of humanity at the crucial moment of upheaval and social change—a study that speaks with the eloquence of deeply felt experience and is full of important implications for our times. For Victor Serge, the revolution did not end with the defeat of the revolution of 1917 or of 1936 in Spain (or with the transformation of the Russia of 1917 into its opposite); in Birth of Our Power he wrote, “Nothing is ever lost…. Tomorrow is full of greatness. We will not have brought this victory to ripeness in vain. This city will be taken, if not by our hands, at least by others like ours, but stronger. Stronger perhaps for having been better hardened, thanks to our very weakness. If we are beaten, other men, infinitely different from us, infinitely like us, will walk, on a similar evening, in ten years, in twenty years (how long is really without importance) down this rambla, meditating on the same victory. Perhaps they will think about our blood. Even now I think I see them and I am thinking about their blood, which will flow too. But they will take the city.”

  Let us hope that, after years of exile, Serge’s works find the audience they deserve: those “other men, infinitely different from us, infinitely like us” who are carrying on the struggle today.

  Richard Greeman

  New York, 1966

  ONE

  This City and Us

  A CRAGGY MASS OF SHEER ROCK—SHATTERING THE MOST BEAUTIFUL OF HORIzons—towers over this city. Crowned by an eccentric star of jagged masonry cut centuries ago into the brown stone, it now conceals secret constructions under the innocence of grassy knolls. The secret citadel underneath lends an evil aspect to the rock, which, between the limpid blue of the sky, the deeper blue of the sea, the green meadows of the Llobregat and the city, resembles a strange primordial gem … Hard, powerful, upheaval arrested in stone, affirmed since the beginning of time … stubborn plants gripping, hugging the granite, and rooting into its crevices … trees whose obdurate roots have inexorably-cracked the stone and, having split it, now serve to bind it … sharp angles dominating the mountain, set in relief or faceted by the play of sunlight … We would have loved this rock—which seems at times to protect the city, rising up in the evening, a promontory over the sea (like an outpost of Europe stretching toward tropical lands bathed in oceans one imagines as implacably blue)—this rock from which one can see to infinity … We would have loved it had it not been for those hidden ramparts, those old cannons with their carriages trained low on the city, that mast with its mocking flag, those silent sentries with their olive-drab masks posted at every corner. The mountain was a prison—subjugating, intimidating the city, blocking off its horizon with its dark mass under the most beautiful of suns.

  We often climbed the paths which led upward toward the fortress, leaving below the scorched boulevards, the old narrow streets gray and wrinkled like the faces of hags, the odor of dust, cooking oil, oranges, and of humanity in the slums. The horizon becomes visible little by little, with each step, spiraling upward around the rock. Suddenly the harbor appears around a bend: the clean, straight line of the jetty, the white flower of a yacht club, floating in the basin like an incredible giant water lily. In the distance, heaps of oranges—like enormous sunflowers dropped on the border of a gray city—piled up on the docks … And the ships. Two large German vessels: immobile. Under quarantine for several years now, they catch the eye. A six-master, under full sail, glittering in the sun, sails slowly into the harbor from the ends of the sea. Her prow, fringed with dazzling foam, cuts serenely through the amazing blue of liquid silk. She opens horizons even more remote, horizons which I can suddenly see, and which by closing my eyes I see more perfectly: Egypt, the Azores, Brazil, Uruguay, Havana, Mexico, Florida … From what other corners of the earth did these golden sails come? Perhaps only from Majorca. The ship probably bears the name of an old galleon, the name of a woman or a virgin as sonorous as a line of poetry: Santa Maria de Los Dolores … Christopher Columbus on his column is now visible above the harbor. Looking out from the city over the sea, the bronze explorer welcomes the sailing ship as she moves in toward him from a past as moving, as mysterious, and as promising as the future.

  The city is most attractive in the evening, when its avenues and its plaza light up: soft glowing coals, more brilliant than pearls, earthly stars shining more brightly than the stars of the heavens. By day, it looks too much like any European city: spires of cathedrals above the ancient streets, domes of academies and theaters, barracks, palaces, boxlike buildings pierced by countless windows—A compartmentalized ant heap where each existence has its own narrow cubicle of whitewashed or papered walls. From the very first, a city imparts a sense of poverty. One sees, in the sea of roofs compressed into motionless waves, how they shrivel up and crush numberless lives.

  It is from the height that one discovers the splendors of the earth. The view plunges down to the left into the harbor, the gulf lined with beaches, the port, the city. And the blue-shadowed mountains, far from shutting off the distances, open them up. The vast sea laughs at our feet in foamy frills on the pebbles and sand. Plains, orchards, fields marked as sharply as on a surveyor’s map, roads lined with small trees, a carpet of every shade of green stretches out to the right on the other side of the rock down to the gently sloping valley, which seems a garden from that height. Mountains on which, when the air is clear, pale snow crystals can be seen at the peak—where earth meets sky—extending our horizons toward eternity.

  But our eyes, scanning the faraway snowcap at leisure, or following a sail on the surface of the sea, would always light on the muzzle of a cannon, across the thicketed embankment. Our voices would suddenly drop off, when, at a bend in the path, the stark, grass-covered corner of the citadel’s ramparts loomed up before us. The name of a man who had been shot was on all our lips.1 We used to stop at certain places from which we could see the narrow confines of the dungeons. Somewhere within these fortifications, men like us, with whom each of us at one time or another identified ourselves, men whose names we no longer remembered, had undergone torture not long ago. What kind of torture? We did not know precisely, and the ve
ry lack of exact pictures, the namelessness of the victims, the years (twenty) that had passed, stripped the memory bare: nothing remained but a searing, confused feeling for the indignities suffered in the cause of justice. I sometimes used to think that we remembered the pain those men suffered as one remembers something one has suffered oneself, after many years and after many experiences. And, from that notion, I had an even greater sense of the communion between their lives and ours.

  Like them—and those ships we saw coming into the harbor—we came from every corner of the world. El Chorro, more yellow-skinned than a Chinese, but with straight eyes, flat temples, and fleshy lips, El Chorro, with his noiseless laugh, who was probably Mexican (if anything): at any rate he used to speak at times familiarly and with admiration of the legendary Emiliano Zapata, who founded a social republic in the Morelos mountains with his rebellious farmers—descendants of ancient bronze-skinned peoples.

  “The first in modern times!” El Chorro would proclaim proudly, his hands outstretched. At which point you noticed that he was missing his thumb and index finger, sacrificed in some obscure battle for the first social republic of modern times.

  “A little more,” he’d say, “and I would have lost my balls as well. A stinking half-breed from Chihuahua nearly snatched them from me with his teeth …”

  “Si hombre!” he would add, breaking into loud and resonant laughter, for the joy of that victory still vibrated through his body.