Birth of Our Power

by Greeman, Richard, Serge, Victor

  Released from prison in 1917, Victor is expelled from France and comes back to life in Barcelona, where he works as a printer, participates in a revolutionary uprising, and publishes his first article, signed “Victor Serge.” The title: “The Fall of a Czar.”

  Soon Serge attempts to reach revolutionary Russia via Paris, where he is arrested a ‘Bolshevik suspect’ and held for over a year as in a typhus-infested concentration camp. It is his first contact with Bolshevism. After four bloody years the First World War finally comes to an end in November 1918. Exchanged for a French officer held by the Soviets, he arrives in St. Petersburg (then called Petrograd, later Leningrad) in January 1919. He would fictionalize these experiences of class struggle in Spain, detention in wartime France, and arrival in Red Russia in his second novel, Birth of Our Power (1931). This odyssey from Barcelona to Petrograd completes his evolution from ‘Maverick,’ the anarcho-individualist rebel, to ‘Victor Serge’ the revolutionary.

  Victor joins in the defense of the frozen, starving Red capital, besieged by Western-backed White armies, and chronicles the siege in the French left-wing press.4 Petrograd under siege would be the subject of Serge’s third novel, Conquered City (1931).5 Twenty-odd years later, he would draw on his memories of the 1919 siege to describe the Germans’ World War II siege of Leningrad in Unforgiving Years.6

  Despite misgivings about Communist authoritarianism, he joins the Party in May 1919, at the very moment when the Revolution seems about to go under. Serge is drawn to the Bolsheviks’ heroic energy and participates in the creation of Press Service the Communist International (or Comintern) from its inception. By the spring of 1921, however, Serge’s loyalties are severely torn when anarchist and dissident Communist sailors rebel and seize the island fortress of Cronstadt. Serge joins in the thwarted attempt by Emma Goldman to mediate the conflict and then looks on in horror as the rebels and volunteer Communists massacre each other in a fratricidal combat across the melting ice floes.7

  After withdrawing briefly from politics, Serge accepts a Comintern assignment in Germany where the promise of a new revolution poses a last hope for saving the isolated Soviets from smothering under increasing bureaucratic dictatorship in Russia. In Berlin Serge serves the Comintern both as journalist and under various identities as a militant or ‘agent’ (in those days there was little distinction). Serge’s Berlin articles (signed ‘R. Albert’) report on galloping inflation, mass unemployment, mutilated veterans begging, strikes, and abortive putsches were later collected as Witness to the German Revolution.8 This experience introduced him into the world of secret agents he explores in his last novel, Unforgiving Years, while his familiarity with the desperation of the German people living through the post-World War I crisis helped him recreate the atmosphere of Berlin at the end of World War II in the third movement of that novel.

  In March 1923, the German Communists are outlawed after the fiasco of their aborted Hamburg putsch, and Serge flees with his family to Vienna, where he works for the Comintern and dialogues with Georg Lukacs and Antonio Gramsci. In 1925, despairing of a renewal of revolution in the West, Serge makes the insanely idealistic decision to return to Russia and join in the last-ditch antibureaucratic fight against Stalin as a member of the doomed Left Opposition led by Trotsky. Expelled from the Party in 1928, Serge turns to full-time writing after a near-death experience. In quick succession he publishes three novels and a well-documented history of Year One of the Russian Revolution in Paris before being arrested and deported to the Ural in 1933.

  In a letter smuggled out of Russia and published after his arrest, Serge defends democratic freedom as essential to workers’ socialism and describes Stalinist Communism as ‘totalitarian.’ After months of interrogation in the notorious Lubianka prison, Serge is deported to the Ural, where he is joined by his teenaged son, the future artist Vlady.9 Serge’s wife Liuba Russakova, driven insane by the Stalinist terror, is confined to an asylum. In 1936, protests by French trade-unionists and writers (including André Gide and Romain Rolland) lead to Serge’s release from Russia, but the two novels he completed in captivity (“the only ones I had time to polish”) are seized by the GPU at the Polish border.10

  From precarious exile in Brussels and later in Paris, Serge struggles to support his wife and their two children while writing furiously to unmask the ‘big lie’ of the Moscow show trials and Stalin’s murderous intrigues in Republican Spain. His scrupulously documented eyewitness books and articles are greeted with silence by complacent intellectuals hypnotized by the ‘antifascism’ of Communist-manipulated popular fronts. Serge is obliged to fall back on his old prison-trade of proofreader and find work in the print-shops of socialist papers that boycott his articles. Meanwhile, Serge and his comrades are living in a “labyrinth of pure madness” as Stalin’s agents kidnap and murder Trotsky’s supporters in the middle of opulent, indifferent Paris. “The Secret Agent,” the first section of Serge’s posthumous novel, Unforgiving Years, is an eerie evocation of a doomed world capital paralyzed before the looming threat of war.

  By 1939, Serge is on the verge of literary success with a novel about deported oppositionists in Stalin’s Gulag: Midnight in the Century.11 At the outbreak of the war, however, his books—considered subversive—are withdrawn from publication. When Paris falls to the Nazis, Serge, penniless, joins the exodus on foot—accompanied by his young companion Laurette Séjourné and his son Vlady. They survive a Luftwaffe strafing attack on the Loire and eventually find refuge in a Marseille villa rented by Varian Fry of the American Refugee Committee and shared with André Breton and his family. Aided by Dwight Macdonald in New York and by exiled comrades of the Spanish POUM settled in Mexico, Serge and Vlady board the last refugee ship out of Vichy France and end up in Mexico City in 1941, a year after Trotsky’s assassination. Here Serge finds himself politically isolated—cut off from Europe by the war, unable to publish, boycotted, slandered, and physically attacked by Stalinist agents.

  Nonetheless, it is in Mexico that Serge completes his most enduring work: Memoirs of a Revolutionary, The Case of Comrade Tulayev, and Unforgiving Years, which he finishes in 1946.12 He also studies psychoanalysis, writes a manuscript on pre-Columbian archaeology and meditates on consciousness and death. He explores the meaning of the war not only in theoretical and political ‘theses’ but also terms of dreams, earthquakes, volcanoes, and luxuriant vegetation. In 1947 his heart gives out, stressed by the altitude and exhausted by years of prison and privation. Penniless and stateless as usual, Serge is buried in a pauper’s grave. In his posthumously published Memoirs of a Revolutionary he reflects: “Of this hard childhood, this troubled adolescence, all those terrible years, I regret nothing as far as I am myself concerned…. Any regret I have is for energies wasted in struggles which were bound to be fruitless. These struggles have taught me that, in any man, the best and the worst live side by side, and sometimes mingle—and that what is worst comes through the corruption of what is best.”

  Serge’s books have had almost as hard a life as their author. At the end of World War II, when Serge began Unforgiving Years, he was painfully aware of writing “exclusively for the desk drawer”—in which his classic Memoirs and Comrade Tulayev were already languishing, unpublished. Little hope in postwar Paris, what with paper shortages and the influence of the Communists in publishing. No luck either in New York and London, even with the help of Dwight Macdonald and George Orwell. With at least one Stalinist and two conservatives in every publishing house, “I’m at the point where I wonder if my very name will not be an obstacle to the novel’s publication.”

  Although Tulayev and the Memoirs eventually did achieve the status of ‘classics’ (albeit neglected classics), for a variety of reasons Serge the novelist has remained marginalized. Yet he is arguably as important a novelist in the political genre as Malraux, Orwell, Silone, Koestler, and Solzhenitsyn. Nonetheless, Serge’s radical socialist politics continue to disturb the consensus, while his prestige as a revolutionary
participant-witness, oft-quoted by historians and political scientists, has tended to obscure his status as a literary artist. For example, political scientist Susan Weissman’s recent book on Serge takes the position that “writing, for Serge, was something to do only when one was unable to fight.”13 Another reason for Serge’s neglect is his nationality, or lack thereof. As a stateless Russian who wrote in French, he apparently fell through the cracks between academic departments organized around national notions of French or Russian Literature. As a result, as yet no PhD theses on Serge have been written in any French university, nor will you find “Serge, Victor” listed in French biographical dictionaries and literary manuals.14

  To be sure, although he wrote in French, Serge is best situated in the Russian intelligentsia traditions of his expatriate parents. He inherited his father’s scientific culture—physics, geology, sociology—while his literary culture came from his mother, who taught him to read from cheap editions of Shakespeare, Hugo, Dostoyevsky, and Korolenko and whose family was apparently connected with Maxim Gorky.15 By his concept of the writer’s mission, Serge saw himself “in the line of the Russian writers” who wrote about life in prison (Dostoyevsky’s House of the Dead) and The Lower Depths (Gorky). And although he borrowed freely from cosmopolitan and modernist influences like Joyce, Dos Passos, and the French Unanimists, Serge developed as a writer within the Soviet literary ‘renaissance’ of the relatively free NEP period.

  Indeed, during the 1920s, Serge was the principal transmission belt between the literary worlds of Soviet Russia and France. Through his translations and regular articles on Soviet culture in the revue Clarté he introduced French readers to the postrevolutionary poetry of Alexander Blok, Andrei Biely, Sergei Yesenin, Ossip Mandelstam, Boris Pasternak, and Vladimir Mayakovsky as well as to fiction writers like Alexis Tolstoy, Babel, Zamiatine, Lebidinsky, Gladkov, Ivanov, Fedin, and Boris Pilnyak—his colleagues in the Soviet Writers Union.16

  By the mid-1930s, all of Serge’s colleagues had been reduced to silence (suicide, censorship, the camps). “No PEN-club,” wrote Serge in exile, “even those that held banquets for them, asked the least question about their cases. No literary review, to my knowledge, commented on their mysterious end.” Of that great generation of Soviet writers, only Serge—because he wrote in French and was rescued from the Gulag by his reputation in France—managed to survive. Only Serge had the freedom to further develop the revolutionary innovations of Soviet literature and to submit the world of Stalinism to the critical lens of fiction in novels like Midnight in the Century, The Case of Comrade Tulayev, and Unforgiving Years. As one Russian scholar put it: “Although written in French, Serge’s novels are perhaps the nearest we have to what Soviet literature of the 30s might have been.”17

  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: Biographical Note

  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 adolesce
nt 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.”