Birth of Our Power

by Greeman, Richard, Serge, Victor

  “It’s always like that with them,” she said.

  Slowly, with an inexperienced finger, on the reverse side of a bill of lading of the firm V.I. Kozmine-Kataev and Son, Wholesale Grain Dealers, she typed the words “Housing Order.” And, in a nasty voice:

  “That’s how it is. I type out orders and there is no housing. The whole city is empty and sacked and there is no housing! Do you think that this can go on much longer?”

  We had already visited a half-dozen institutions, covered miles through the snow, stomachs empty, through silent streets where the rare passers-by dragged their feet, some carrying sacks, others their meager dinners in little greasy pots. Already, in a few hours, we had learned more about the revolution than in many long meditations. And it had appeared to us under aspects very different from those suggested by our imagination, shaped by legend and by history, which is very close to legend. We had been thinking of the squares transformed into tumultuous forums, of the excited clubs of ’92; of the blossoming of many little journals, each crying out its own solution, its system, its fantasy; of the great “days” of the Soviets, like Conventions. In the language, in the slogans posted everywhere, in the only two newspapers published, among the men, we discovered one enormous uniformity of a single way of thinking, imperious, almost despotic, but supreme, terribly true, made flesh and blood at each moment through action. We found not the passionate mobs going forward under new flags to struggles begun anew each day in tragic and fruitful confusions, but a sort of vast administration, an army, a machine in which the most burning energies and the clearest intelligences were cold) integrated and which performed its task inexorably. And that task was to strain ceaselessly; for commonplace, often invisible achievements, with forces which, each day, seemed to be the last; to live and to persevere day after day; it was also to make an exhausted country, on the point of falling back into inertia, rise, above itself; it was, finally to resist and to conquer everywhere, at every moment, transcending all logic.

  We had glimpsed that vast city—not at all dead, but savagely turned in on itself, in the terrible cold, the silence, the hate, the will to live, the will to conquer; that city divided by broad rectilinear perspectives at the end of which you could see the dull, frozen glint of golden spires that made you think of elegant swords … We were beginning to understand the faces of its empty white streets, lined with closed or shattered shop windows.

  The silence of the houses, the emptiness of the straight avenues no longer distressed us. We knew that within all those glacial houses, in the depths of their souls, they were burning bushes of anger, of fury, of perfidy; that the ground was mined everywhere under our feet; that people were waiting—unatonable vengeances slowly ripening in brains debilitated by famine and terror—for the uprising brought on by hunger or the onslaught of the Finns, implacable wolf hunters who would massacre us like wolves; that the workers’ quarters were being slowly drained of their living strength by the Army, the supply services, the State; that the dregs were rising and overflowing around the men of energy and truth: a swarm of adventurers, profiteers, speculators; the slow conquest of the factories by those without faith or devotion; that there were only enough foodstuffs for three days, not enough munitions for more than twenty-four hours of combat if the Finnish invasion took place, only enough combustibles—some wood cut last week—for five days on the Moscow railway …

  We had stopped for a moment in the middle of these white splendors, in front of the granite-banked Neva, a river of ice on which human ants were moving back and forth on yellowing paths. Behind us rose the Marble Palace, as dead as the Theban tombs, all in stern, sharp outlines, all in flat, polished surfaces of a light, dusk like gray. “Men,” said Gregor, “move across that hard ice never thinking of the deep river rolling along beneath. The revolution lives on a layer of ice too, and we do not know what dark ocean lies beneath, ready to engulf us tomorrow.” Engulf us, eh? What of it! As if it were we who really mattered … But no, on the contrary, it is we who matter, we who must obstinately persist in living, in holding out despite everything, in doing at last what we have so much wanted to do … The times when it was necessary for us to know how to accept prison, exile, poverty, and—the best, the strongest of us—death itself are in the past. From now on we must persist obstinately in living and only consent to everything for that! We were looking at a tall gold spire atop a church dome, surmounted by a lantern of delicately sculpted filigree, which rose over the old stone-colored bastions of the fortress, lying low across the opposite bank. We repeated to ourselves: “This is Peter and Paul.” Those who, in these bastions, had waited ten years, fifteen years, twenty years, until madness, until death, for the days which we were living; those who had been led along the battlements to the scaffold, those who had been allowed to die of hunger or to disappear there—but where was the Alexis ravelin? our eyes searched into the distance for the emplacement of its dungeons—had thus been right! Now it was our turn to be right, whatever the thickness of the ice might be! “Yes, but it’s much more difficult,” the youngest among us said naively. We burst into laughter.

  Amid a great clatter of clanking metal, a filthy streetcar—on whose windows the frost had traced a luxuriant flowering of delicate ferns—so overcrowded that you couldn’t even move—so that an odor of grease, of sweat, of stale cloth and wet leather suffocated you—brought us, Sonnenschein and myself, back toward the Smolny Institute, the seat of government. The dreary façade was already disappearing into the fog. The narrow muzzles of cannon, placed between the columns of the peristyle, pointed their blind menace into the cold night. At the foot of a white staircase down which a double file of young ladies wearing the wide, brilliant collarettes of daughters of the nobility had only lately trod, stood a soldier wearing a banker’s fur cape, the velvet collar raised, filing slips of pink paper on the blade of his bayonet. In the commander’s absence, a young lad armed with a revolver was writing out these passes in a room on the ground floor. At his worktable, surrounded by telephones, alone in a huge room from whose windows you could see the icy river and the boundless solitudes, we discovered a man wearing an old unbuttoned uniform tunic who told us, between two phone calls:

  “Ah so! You’ve begun to run the rounds of the offices! I sympathize with you. You will discover that they are no good for anything yet. Nests for saboteurs, scoundrels, thieves, incompetents, do-nothings, idiots, and little young ladies with powdered noses. We’ll put them in order in time, if they don’t hang us on the way.”

  He stamped a huge red seal on a piece of notepaper covered by a few lines of writing.

  “Take this and run over to Social Aid before they close. Take the Secretariat’s car. I’ll tell the commander.”

  We were obliged to abandon that worn-out luxury car—its flower holders stuffed with cigarette butts—along the way, for its motor stopped dead every five minutes after a pitiful series of explosions. The chauffeur disappeared into a nearby house, looking for a telephone from which to ask for reinforcements from the central garage, which was called, in order to emphasize its importance, the Auto Combat Service. After a few minutes wait, the huge red seal opened the oak doors for us, guarded by an old footman in livery. For twenty-seven years he had been attached to this corner of the universe, that is to say to this corner of the corridor at the top of a marble stairway, and he was still there, full of a distressed scorn, already ministering to the seventh revolutionary institution in fourteen months. There, by an accident which seemed to us to touch upon the marvelous, we found a suite of impeccably kept offices functioning noiselessly under the direction of a woman with close-cropped gray hair. Her cold blue eyes fixed us with a sharp stare (already, I thought, the habit of making judgments; already the necessity, among us who call each other “comrades,” far a great deal of mistrust; already the second thought that we may be lying … ) “Where do you come from? Who are you? What do you want?” Then her face changed, as the water brightens when the clouds have passed, reveal
ing the vast shining circles which cavort on its surface.

  “Heavens, where are we going to lodge your families? Four, you say? Would you like the Grand Duchesses’ rooms in the Winter Palace? You’d never be able to heat them. Besides, you would find nothing to burn there but the furniture, which would be too bad even though it is in very bad taste … I think I still have the apartment of a Counselor of the Empire …”

  The Levines moved in there two hours later. It was on the second floor of a tall gray house, a series of twelve rooms abandoned to the cold, the darkness, the strange desolation of places where life has suddenly come to a halt. The grand salon seemed to have been turned topsyturvy in a brawl. The grand piano, covered with a layer of dust, had been pushed out into the middle of the floor. The naiad coming out of her bath, attributed to Bryulov, which had smiled down for twenty years on several generations of ladies, was hanging crooked … A cooking pot full of mold was standing on the marble windowsill. In the open drawers of a little mahogany secretary you could see a jumble of photographs of children and schoolboys, seashells from the Lido, cards postmarked Wiesbaden, a whole pile of those dusty nothings to which our memories cling: favors, ribbons, sachets, trinkets, calendars, old-fashioned jewelry. And fragments of letters: “… met Mama on the Promenade des Anglais …” In Counselor of the Empire Benedick Illarionovitch Stavski’s study, behind the master’s straight-back armchair bearing a carved monogram, the back wall was entirely covered by a glassed-in bookcase in which the massive volumes of the COLLECTION OF THE LAWS OF THE EMPIRE, boxed in green cardboard, were lined up. One could easily imagine the late master, as he appeared on a photograph which had been used to pick up sweepings in the next room standing behind that table: narrow forehead, stern monocled eye; an intelligent, egotistical industrialist, resembling a Roman senator; and a little girl bursting into that austere study clapping her hands: “Papa, little Papa, it’s the revolution! If you knew how happy everyone is in the streets. I saw some soldiers with red ribbons, how pretty it is!”

  I arrived there in the middle of the night. Darkness reigned over the city. Not a light anywhere. It was a necropolis buried under snow; but at times you could make out the uncertain glow of a night light in some window where people were awake. On a square, in front of the Opera, I stumbled against the carcass of a horse lying at the foot of an unrecognizable monument between two banks of hardened snow. Far off in the distance a gunshot reverberated for a long time in a silence as deep as the darkness. Perhaps a sailor, guarding a woodpile, shooting suddenly, without knowing why, at the shadows or at the shadow of an enemy. There were no stars. The emptiness seemed to stretch out over the city and, slowly, irresistibly, in a frozen dizziness, to draw it in: the dark stones and the snow, blending together, seemed about to vanish …

  An old woman wearing pince-nez, and a peevish man, whose features I could not make out but whom the old woman called “Doctor,” were on guard at the threshold of the house. They struck a light in order to stare at me. The Levines had gathered in the smallest of the rooms, probably a nursery, furnished with two iron bedsteads with gilded balls on which only the mattresses remained … (one of them appeared to be stained with blood). This candle-lit room was like a corner in steerage on an immigrant ship. The children had fallen asleep on the baggage, rolled up in blankets. The mother was resting in a low armchair. The young woman, like a solemn child, with large limpid eyes which seemed by turns distended by fear and then victorious over the fleeting shadows, was dreaming before the open stove, the reddish glow of which illuminated from below her graceful hands, her thin neck, and her fine features. Old Levine’s footsteps echoed on the floor of the grand salon, plunged in darkness. He entered, his arms loaded with heavy green-covered books which he dropped softly next to the stove. Silent laughter illuminated his ruddy face.

  “The laws are burning!” he said.

  The friendly warmth in front of which the young woman was stretching out her hands came from the flames devouring Tome XXVII of the COLLECTION OF THE LAWS OF THE EMPIRE. For fun, I pulled out a half-burned page, edged with incandescent lace. The flames revealed these words forming a chapter heading: CONCERNING LANDED PROPERTY … and, farther down: “… the rights of collateral heirs …”

  It was only then, after thirty harassing hours, that I remembered the letter I had received the previous day. I had carried it through this unknown city, hereafter ours, without doing more than glancing at it very superficially, so absorbed had I been by the at times forbidding novelty of things. (Besides, I wasn’t expecting news from anyone, not having left any particular ties behind me.) The letter was postmarked Spain. With the laws burning, I sat down on a stool near the stove, in that comforting warmth and that sudden peace, in which only the even breathing of the children was audible. Dario, El Chorro, José, Joaquin, Comrades, how I remembered you all at once! How I remembered the city which we had not been able to take, our hope, our will, our power, our real power, since I was about to go to sleep at last in a conquered city where everything was booty taken in the height of battle—everything, even this moment, this shelter, this warmth which allow me to think of you. All at once it seemed to me that Dario was about to walk in, to shrug his invisible burden off his shoulders, to say, in that joyful tone of voice reserved for glad evenings spent together, “Brrr! What cold, my friends!” then to turn toward me, his palms open, his eyes full of mischief, “Well, old man, what was I telling you? You see that we can take cities! and it’s not over yet, and we will take the world!” I unfolded the letter. It was in El Chorro’s uneven but forceful script. “Gusano sends his regards. He’s sure you haven’t forgotten him, for people only forget whole men, he says …” No, I haven’t forgotten you, Gusano—a more complete man in what is left of your mutilated flesh than many of those who pity you because they still have all four of their slaves’ or Pharisees’ limbs. Perhaps I hesitated to read on. I skimmed over those four pages of writing once more, at a glance, and I stumbled upon one line, no different from all the others in the forest of symbols, which said:

  “… ever since they killed our Dario …”

  Leningrad, 1929–30

  Translator’s Acknowledgments

  Of the many people who were helpful in making this publication possible, I would like to thank the following:

  Raya Dunayevskaya, a genuine American Marxist-Humanist, who first introduced me to the works of Victor Serge;

  The Columbia University Libraries which supported me financially in gathering rare and out-of-print works by Victor Serge;

  Peter Sedgwick, the British translator of Serge’s Memoirs of a Revolutionary, who unselfishly helped and encouraged me;

  Vladimir Kibalchich, Victor Serge’s son, a good comrade and a fine artist;

  Eugene Eoyang, a book editor who likes good books;

  Daniel Aaron, Daniel Bell, Erich Fromm, Robert Herbert, Irving Howe, Dwight Macdonald, Henry L. Roberts, I.F. Stone, and Bertram D. Wolfe, who were kind enough to write letters supporting the publication in English of Serge’s early novels;

  Professor Jean-Albert Bédé of Columbia University, who encouraged and guided my research, both for my doctoral dissertation on Serge and on this book;

  My wife Julie, who worked with me at every stage of translating.

  POSTFACE

  Victor Serge: Writer and Revolutionary

  Serge (pseudonym for Victor Lvovich Kibalchich, 1890–1947) was born ‘by chance’ in Brussels, Belgium, the son of an unmarried couple of anti-Czarist Russian refugees wandering Europe “in search of good libraries and cheap lodgings.” Home-schooled by these penniless, idealistic exiled scholars, young Victor imbibed the heady revolutionary traditions of the Russian intelligentsia while growing up poor on the streets of Brussels. His father had been close to the terrorist People’s Will Party and proudly bore the name of one of the assassins of Czar Alexander II, N.I. Kibalchich, who was hanged in 1881 and whose portrait adorned his parents’ ‘makeshift lodgings.’1

 
They were so poor that at age eleven he watched horrified as his younger brother died of malnutrition, while he survived on pilfered sugar soaked in coffee that little Raoul refused to eat. “Throughout the rest of my life,” he recalled, “it has been my fate always to find, in the undernourished urchins of the squares of Paris, Berlin and Moscow, the same condemned faces of my tribe.”

  At age fourteen Victor is a militant Socialist Young Guard, and at fifteen a member of a rebel gang of Brussels apprentices writing and printing their own radical anarchist sheet The Rebel (pseudonym Le Rétif: ‘The Maverick’).2 At eighteen he is starving in Paris, devouring the contents of the Sainte-Geneviève library, editing l’anarchie, lecturing on individualism and translating Russian novels to survive. At twenty-one Kibalchich is sentenced to five years in a French penitentiary for refusing to rat on his Brussels buddies who, impatient of waiting for Utopia, terrorized Paris as the “tragic gang” of anarchist bank-robbers. The experience of five years in the harsh French prison system (a regime of total silence, collective work, solitary confinement) tempered his soul. Ten years later, when he became a writer, his first novel, Men in Prison, was an attempt to rid himself of that suffering and to testify for all those prisoners whose voices are stifled in that “machine for grinding up men.”3