by Victor Serge
Praise for Men in Prison
“Novel or autobiography, the book is literature, for Serge was a wonderful writer.”
—New Yorker
“If you know someone headed for prison, this is not the book to give him for a going-away present. It tells what prison is really like.”
—Book World
“No purer book about the hell of prison has ever been written.”
—Martin Seymour-Smith, The Scotsman
“There is nothing in any line or word of this fine novel which doesn’t ring true.”
—Publishers Weekly
“It is a stream of exquisite and refined consciousness undergoing man’s most barbaric experience. Not even in One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich is there such a penetrating and disturbing account of what prison means to the body and soul.”
—John Riley, Los Angeles Times
“Almost hallucinatory vividness of incident …”
—New Society
“This novel, properly so called by its author, being truth worked up as art, is strongly recommended both as a document and as a powerful work of literature.”
—Robert Garioch, Listener
“He was one of those rare political activists who was also an artist, and his book is poetic and ironic, the account of a spiritual experience rather than a factual record….Serge is almost unique (not quite—one remembers Dostoevsky and Koestler) in turning all this into art.”
—Julian Symons, Sunday Times (London)
“Here is Serge, the model upon whom George Orwell fashioned himself in his descriptive essays and in Homage to Catalonia. Here too, I think, must be the original spring of Jean Genet. Consider the homosexual Moure, alone in his cell, dreaming of boy friends called Georgette, Lucienne and Antionette. Moure links the most brutally obscene, obscene to the point of cruelty, with love words and coquettish diminutives…. Serge is not merely a political writer, he is also a novelist, a wonderfully lyrical writer…. He is a writer young rebels desperately need whether they know it or not…. He does not tell us what we should feel; instead, he makes us feel it.”
—Stanley Reynolds, New Statesman
“This lucid and beautiful book…. The cool brevity of Serge’s character sketches covers a deeply running sympathy for all human nature, however distorted and ignoble.”
—Claire Tomalin, Observer Review
“This is a remarkable book…. Capable of Dostoyevskian intensity and power.”
—Francis King, Sunday Telegraph
Editor: Sasha Lilley
Spectre is a series of penetrating and indispensable works of, and about, radical political economy. Spectre lays bare the dark underbelly of politics and economics, publishing outstanding and contrarian perspectives on the maelstrom of capital—and emancipatory alternatives—in crisis. The companion Spectre Classics imprint unearths essential works of radical history, political economy, theory and practice, to illuminate the present with brilliant, yet unjustly neglected, ideas from the past.
Spectre
Greg Albo, Sam Gindin, and Leo Panitch, In and Out of Crisis: The Global Financial Meltdown and Left Alternatives
David McNally, Global Slump: The Economics and Politics of Crisis and Resistance
Sasha Lilley, Capital and Its Discontents: Conversations with Radical Thinkers in a Time of Tumult
Sasha Lilley, David McNally, Eddie Yuen, and James Davis, Catastrophism: The Apocalyptic Politics of Collapse and Rebirth
Peter Linebaugh, Stop, Thief! The Commons, Enclosures, and Resistance
Spectre Classics
E.P. Thompson, William Morris: Romantic to Revolutionary
Victor Serge, Men in Prison
Victor Serge, Birth of Our Power
Men in Prison
Victor Serge. Translated by Richard Greeman
Copyright © 2014 Victor Serge Foundation
Translation and Introduction © 2014 Richard Greeman
This edition © 2014 PM Press
First published as Les hommes dans la prison. Paris: Les Editions Rieder, 1931.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be transmitted by any means without permission in writing from the publisher.
ISBN: 978–1-60486–736-7
Library of Congress Control Number: 2013911528
Cover by John Yates/Stealworks
Interior design by briandesign
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Printed in the USA by the Employee Owners of Thomson-Shore in Dexter, Michigan. www.thomsonshore.com
TO VLADY
Everything in this book is fictional and everything is true. I have attempted, through literary creation, to bring out the general meaning and human content of personal experience.
V.S.
Contents
FOREWORD by David Gilbert
INTRODUCTION by Richard Greeman
ONE Arrest
TWO The Lockup
THREE Transitions
FOUR Architecture
FIVE In a Cell
SIX The System
SEVEN Burial and Victory
EIGHT Yet Life Goes On …
NINE Encounters
TEN Alms and the Almoner
ELEVEN Capital Punishment
TWELVE The Souricière and the Conciergerie
THIRTEEN Drunken Boat
FOURTEEN Arrival
FIFTEEN The Mill
SIXTEEN The Workshop
SEVENTEEN The Will to Live
EIGHTEEN Some Men
NINETEEN The “Men”
TWENTY The Mind Resists
TWENTY-ONE The Round
TWENTY-TWO Night
TWENTY-THREE The Guards
TWENTY-FOUR The Years
TWENTY-FIVE The War
TWENTY-SIX Discipline
TWENTY-SEVEN Latruffe
TWENTY-EIGHT The Sick
TWENTY-NINE Dying
THIRTY Surviving
THIRTY-ONE Letters
THIRTY-TWO More Deaths
THIRTY-THREE The Innocent
THIRTY-FOUR The Voice of the Living
THIRTY-FIVE About to Be Discharged
THIRTY-SIX The World Between
SERGE IN ENGLISH
THE LIFE OF VICTOR SERGE
Foreword
by David Gilbert
Men in Prison tells it like it was—and in too many ways still is—behind bars. Victor Serge is an inspiring example of revolutionary courage and principles. He gave his all and risked his life to defend the Soviet Republic as a proletarian revolution under ferocious attack by White Russians backed by troops from fourteen imperialist powers. He also gave his all and risked his life to defend dissidents and to oppose the rising repression and brutality of the Russian Communist Party.
Before being deported to Russia, Serge was an anarchist political prisoner in France from 1912 to 1917. This novel is based on those five years. His prose comes across seamlessly in Richard Greeman’s fluid and lively translation. And Serge could write! No “socialist realism” here as we see the nuances, the quirks, and the resiliencies of a variety of individuals. The convicts we meet are neither demonized as depraved monsters nor romanticized as the noble oppressed. Some are sordid, many simply sad; almost all are poor; and a handful are conscious political prisoners.
“The Mill” where Serge did his time was an application of the “Auburn System,” designed one hundred years earlier—the same two-hundred-year-old Auburn Correctional Facility in New York State where I’m being held today. Of course current conditions in the United States are not exactly the same as in France a century ago. The book’s title would have to change “Men
” to “People,” as the United States now has over two hundred thousand women behind bars, their numbers growing at a faster rate than men’s. The rights of lesbian, gay, and transgender prisoners are a much more explicit struggle. Serge’s brief mentions of gays are condescending if not negative. That’s not surprising given the dearth of open struggle back then, but nonetheless totally inadequate and unacceptable today.
The rate of incarceration in the United States is totally unprecedented and astronomical at 1 percent of the adult population, with 2.3 million human beings in prisons and jails. Most telling, based on the history of genocide, slavery, and conquest, the U.S. criminal justice system is at the center of the surrounding stinking swamp of racism. The racism isn’t just coincidental. The hyperexpansion of incarceration in the United States—with the number behind bars today eight times what it was in 1970—developed in response to the Black Liberation Movement, which was an inspiration and spearhead for a range of struggles and advances by the oppressed. The United States now jails Black males at four times the rate South Africa did under apartheid. The United States also locks up an unconscionable number of women. But the impact of the criminal justice system on women is far more pervasive as many more carry the burden of being single parents in impoverished communities decimated by incarceration, with one in nine Black males between the ages of twenty and thirty-four behind bars. The Latino/a community has also been hit disproportionately hard, and the U.S. mania for mass incarceration has swept up many poor whites as well.
While the numbers and the racial dynamics have changed, the continuities are amazing, and much of what Serge describes rings true today: the humiliations and degradations; the frisks where you have to bend over and spread; the obstacles to maintaining basic hygiene; the totally arbitrary authority the often contemptuous guards have. Serge writes of the terrible boredom; and to counter that, “it is a fundamental rule of mental hygiene to work at all costs, to occupy the mind” (p.36). Men in Prison also provides a couple of delightful vignettes of the creative little ways prisoners find to resist the restrictions and regimentation. Visits often provide warm rays of sunshine, and the vast majority of visitors are women. This holds true at today’s women’s facilities too, as men generally don’t do nearly as well at standing by loved ones.
At the same time, there have been some notable changes due to the prisoners’ rights struggle that flowed out of the Civil Rights and Black Power movements. We are now a little less isolated from the outside world because, even though there’s still censorship, we have access to wider range of reading material, visits, and phone calls. We have more, albeit still minimal, educational programs. Those in general population are allowed to socialize, no longer facing enforced silence twenty-four hours a day. On the other hand, Serge’s cell was 60 percent larger than mine, and back then there was a limit on how long someone could be sent to the total isolation of “the hole”—ninety days. It was recognized then that even that amount of time could do serious damage. As Serge puts it, “Madness [is] the inevitable result of idle solitude” (p.60). In the United States today there are eighty thousand prisoners subjected to isolation, which many psychologists deem a form of torture, hundreds of whom have been held for years and even decades in segregation units at places such as Pelican Bay State Prison in California and the federal supermax in Florence, Colorado. In a 2008 report, the UN Special Rapporteur to the Human Rights Council expressed grave concerns about the widespread use of prolonged solitary confinement in U.S. prisons.
The guards we meet in Men in Prison range from friendly to sadistic. In 1913 France, as in the United States today, many of the guards are ex-soldiers just returned from brutal colonial wars. As we now know, cruelty and dehumanization have a synergy that flows in both directions, domestic and international. It’s no accident that Charles Graner Jr., the ringleader of the soldiers who tortured prisoners in Abu Ghraib, Iraq, went into the army straight out of a job as a prison guard in Pennsylvania.
Serge’s powerful meditation on capital punishment, which has since been abolished in France, serves as a ringing condemnation of the contemporary U.S. prison system, which has over three thousand human beings on death row. In the same paragraph that he condemns the state’s use of the death penalty as a weapon against working people, he also squarely faces the duty of a true revolutionary to oppose any cruelty or misuse of power within our movements by stressing that even in the heat of intense class warfare, we must maintain “the greatest humanity” and fight “to build a new world, forever cleansed of killing machines” (p.83).
As gruesome as the guillotine is, Serge writes that many on the inside see life imprisonment as “worse, in reality, than death” (p.83). What would he think of the United States today, with over 159,000 individuals serving life, nearly 50,000 of whom are serving sentences of “life without parole” (LWOP), with no chance of ever being released? For older prisoners, any long sentence is in effect LWOP. The post-1970s penchant for draconian sentences has led to an explosion in the number of convicts fifty-five years old and above—roughly 125,000 today—despite the high costs of holding them and the miniscule re-offend rate of elders who do get paroled.
Men in Prison shows how “jail is a machine for grinding up lives slowly” (p.84), designed to stultify and efface people’s humanity. Already perfect for that function, prisons aren’t further perfectible; therefore, “there is nothing left but to destroy them” (p.43). Abolishing prisons is a monumental challenge for us today, but we can take big strides toward that ultimate goal with campaigns to decarcerate, to radically reduce the prison population, and most important of all to build the healthier, stronger communities needed to provide the only viable basis for safety, well-being, and justice.
Prisons are neither an insignificant nor an exotic sideshow but rather serve as a frontline of the rulers’ offensive against the oppressed and their struggles. In this historical novel, a wonderfully principled revolutionary and vibrant writer takes us into the culture and realities behind bars in a different time and place but in ways that still resonate with relevance today.
Introduction
The author of Men in Prison was no stranger to his grim subject. Victor Serge spent more than ten of his fifty-seven years in various forms of captivity, generally harsh. He did five years’ straight time (1912–17) in a French penitentiary (‘anarchist bandit’); survived nearly two years (1917–18) in a World War I concentration camp (‘Bolshevik suspect’); suffered three months’ grueling interrogation in the Lubianka, Moscow’s notorious GPU prison (‘Trotskyite spy’); and endured three years’ deportation to Central Asia for refusing to recant his oppositional views or confess to trumped-up charges (1933–36).
The present novel, completed in 1930, is based on Serge’s experience of 1,825 days in a French penitentiary (solitary confinement, rule of absolute silence, chronic undernourishment) to which he was sentenced essentially as punishment for his refusal to testify against his comrades at the infamous 1913 trial of the ‘Tragic Bandits’ of French Anarchism. Like Alexander Berkman’s better-known Prison Memoirs of an Anarchist, Serge’s book is a cry for justice fueled by bitter experience and personal sacrifice. Yet at the same time, Serge’s novel is also literature, a fiction created by a serious novelist. “Everything in this book is fictional and everything is true,” wrote Serge in the epigraph to Men in Prison. “I have attempted, through literary creation, to bring out the general meaning and human content of a personal experience.”
As Serge recalled in his Memoirs, “While I was still in prison, fighting off tuberculosis, insanity, depression, the spiritual poverty of the men, the brutality of the regulations, I already saw I kind of justification of that infernal voyage in the possibility of describing it. Among the thousands who suffer and are crushed in prison—and how few men really know that prison!—I was perhaps the only one who could try one day to tell all … For me, that is the raison d’être of this novel. I emphasize that it is a novel, for the convenient use of
the first person singular may lead to misunderstanding. I don’t want to write memoirs. This book is not about me, but about men … There is no novelist’s hero in this novel, unless that terrible machine, prison, is its real hero. It is not about ‘me,’ about a few men, but about men, all men crushed in that dark corner of society.”
Ironically, Serge returned to writing (after a long career as a revolutionary activist) upon his release from another spell in prison—this time in the same Communist Russia for which he had fought in the Civil War (1919–21) and whose revolutionary promise glimmers in Men in Prison like a candle at the end of the long, dark tunnel of incarceration. In 1928 Serge was arrested and interrogated by the GPU secret police for his declared opposition to the bureaucratic tyranny of Stalin’s monolithic Communist Party. Writing under the shadow of another arrest, Serge sent his chapters abroad one by one as soon as he finished them. Serge managed to complete Men in Prison and two other novels in what he called ‘semicaptivity’ before being re-arrested and deported to Central Asia in 1933.
Reviewers have compared Serge’s classic prison novel to Dostoyevsky’s House of the Dead, Koestler’s Spanish Testament, Genet’s Miracle of the Rose, and Solzhenitsyn’s One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich. Nonetheless, his notoriety as a revolutionary has always overshadowed his achievements as a writer. We will return to the literary qualities of Men in Prison, but first let us look at the remarkable life of the man behind the novel.
The Life of a Revolutionary Maverick
The briefest chronological summary of Serge’s career as a rebel reads like a roll call of the radical movements and revolutionary uprisings of the first half of the twentieth century.1 Born Victor Lvovitch Kibalchich in 1890 in Brussels to an unmarried couple of penniless Russian revolutionary refugee students, Serge was by birth a stateless exile and remained a lifelong internationalist. From his parents he inherited the critical spirit of the radical Russian intelligentsia and the heroic ideals of the Narodniki—the Party of the People’s Will who executed Czar Alexander II in 1881. By his mid-teens, Victor was already an activist, signing his radical articles Le Rétif (Maverick). Alone in the world after his parents’ breakup, he bonded with his crew of teenage comrades. They were “closer than brothers,” idealistic, overworked apprentices, who devoted their rare free time to reading dangerous books and hardening their bodies through all-night hikes. They all met tragic ends.
