by Victor Serge
Table of Contents
Title Page
Introduction
Chronology
During the Civil War - Petrograd: May–June 1919
The Endangered City - Petrograd: Year Two of the Revolution
My road to Russia
Perpetual danger facing Petrograd
The rout
The soldier’s mentality
The Versailles troops have forced a door open
There was a time …
An article by Trotsky
Petrograd by night
The Communists
Attitude of the neutral population
Chaos, improvisation, doubt, anxiety
The republic in danger
The soviet
Moral force
On the streets
Lev Davidovich Trotsky
The law of the sword
At the Peter-Paul Fortress
Reversal
The party’s effort
The anarchists
A gesture
Yudenich: What happened on the other side of the front?
In the circle of iron and fire
Finland and Estonia
The British General Marsh
A democratic government
A national army
Victory and collapse
The causes
The Anarchists and the Experience of the Russian Revolution
Preface
The need to revise our ideas
The new reality in history
A definition of Bolshevism
Lessons of the revolution
The anarchists and the experience of the revolution
The attitude of the Russian anarchists
Centralization and Jacobinism
The revolution is a sacrifice to the future
The danger of state socialism
The state and production
The great confirmations of anarchism
The role of anarchists in the communist movement
The future
Notes
Further reading
Glossary
Also from Haymarket Books
About Haymarket Books
Copyright Page
Introduction
Victor Serge was witness to, and participant in, many of the great political upheavals of the first half of this century. Born in Brussels of Russian revolutionary parents in 1890, he moved as a young man to Paris where he became active in the anarchist movement. Jailed from 1913 to 1917 after defending the anarchist bank robbers of the Bonnot Gang, he participated in the failed syndicalist insurrection of 1917 in Barcelona before going to revolutionary Russia. As a Comintern journalist he observed the defeat of the German revolution in 1923, returned to Russia where he supported the Left Opposition, was sent into internal exile in the remote town of Orenburg, then expelled from the USSR. Back in the West he continued his fight for authentic socialism, helping to expose the counter-revolutionary role of Stalinism in the Spanish civil war. When the Nazis occupied France he took refuge in Mexico, where he died in 1947. The defeats and triumphs of the period are described in his novels, in his magnificent Memoirs of a Revolutionary and his many political writings. In his later years Serge became one of the outstanding critics of Stalinism, but his critique was always rooted in the traditions of the early years of the Russian Revolution.
Serge arrived in Russia in February 1919 and in May he decided to become a member of the Communist Party. To Serge’s comrades in the anarchist movement this must have seemed a highly questionable step; but his writings of the next few years, notably the pamphlets published here, provide a powerful justification for his decision. While throwing himself into the frenetic activity required by the period, Serge maintained and developed his political contacts in France, and over the next few years wrote a large number of articles explaining and defending the Russian Revolution for a range of journals of the French left.
In 1921 he published two short pamphlets, During the Civil War and The Anarchists and the Experience of the Russian Revolution in the series edited by Marcel Martinet, Les Cahiers du Travail (Labor Notebooks).1 The previous year he had written a series of articles in the syndicalist journal La Vie Ouvrière entitled “The Endangered City.” An extended version was published in pamphlet form in 1924.2 These three pamphlets together form a unity; there is much overlap of theme and content, and they provide a unique source of documentation.3 Apart from very short extracts,4 none of Serge’s writing from this period has been available in English.5
There is an important difference between the three texts translated here and Serge’s later works. In the later texts, even when he was recounting the early years of the revolution, he was writing under the shadow of Stalinism. He was aware of the outcome of the revolution, and often seemed to be consciously looking for causes in the earliest years which could help to explain how the monstrosity of Stalinism came about.6
There is no such hindsight present in these pamphlets. They have the freshness of immediacy and, even more, the power of revolutionary enthusiasm. That is not to say that they are naïve or that they lack critical judgment; on the contrary. But they convey a vivid sense of what it was actually like to experience the first years of the revolution. In 1944 Serge wrote: “There is nobody left who knows what the Russian Revolution was really like, what the Bolsheviks were really like—and men judge without knowing, with bitterness and basic rigidity.”7 But perhaps if anything can re-create that historical reality, it is Serge’s vivid and concrete prose.
Serge’s strategy in writing the pamphlets must be seen in the context of the hopes for a rapid spread of the revolution, and in particular of the situation of the French left in 1921. The French Communist Party had been formed in 1920 when the majority of the Socialist Party voted to affiliate to the Communist International. But the winning of the main working-class party to the cause of the October revolution brought with it many problems—not least the fact that the party had brought with it a large number of careerists and opportunists who were going along with the popularity of the revolution but had not abandoned their old habits. (A typical example was the odious Marcel Cachin, who had been a virulent nationalist during the course of World War I and went on to be a pillar of French Stalinism.)
Yet many of the best militants in France had never been members of the Socialist Party. They had been anarchists, or, in many cases, the political cousins of anarchism, revolutionary syndicalists. People like Rosmer, Monatte and Martinet had been at the forefront of opposition to the war in 1914 and had supported the October revolution at the very outset when most of the Socialist Party were still keeping their distance.
Potentially such militants had a key role to play in building a genuine revolutionary communist party in France. Trotsky recounts a meeting with Lenin when the latter said to him: “Could we not advise the French communists to drive out those corrupt parliamentarians Cachin and Frossard and replace them with the [syndicalist] Vie ouvrière group?”8 This strategy in turn must be placed in the context of the Bolshevik efforts to win syndicalists and anarchists to the cause of the Communist International—especially through the founding of the Red International of Labor Unions.9
The person directly responsible for publishing two of the three pamphlets was Marcel Martinet (1887–1944), a significant figure on the French left around 1920.a He had been associated with the small group of revolutionary syndicalists who had opposed the war from the first day in 1914; he had known Trotsky during his time in Paris—Trotsky wrote that “his whole person breathed simplicity, intelligence, nobility of soul.”10 He was an accomplished poet; his anti-war poems Les Temps Maudits (Accursed Times) were banned in France during the war bu
t circulated clandestinely; with the assistance of Marguerite Rosmer copies were typed on thin paper and enclosed in letters sent to soldiers at the front. He was also a gifted dramatist 11 and novelist.12 He was a founder member of the French Communist Party and in 1921 became editor of the cultural page in the party’s daily paper, L’Humanité. He was an advocate of the idea of “proletarian culture”—though he used the term somewhat differently to the way in which it was used in the contemporary debates in Russia, seeing it rather in terms of a struggle to raise the cultural level of the proletariat. To this end he launched the Cahiers du travail , a series of fortnightly pamphlets, in 1921. Only twelve issues appeared, but as well as Serge’s two pamphlets Martinet published Rosa Luxemburg’s Letters from Prison, and texts by the former French syndicalists Rosmer and Monatte and the Bolsheviks Shlyapnikov and Lozovsky. Martinet abandoned active politics from 1924 for health reasons, but he remained close to the anti-Stalinist left and wrote a pamphlet in defense of Serge at the time of the campaign to release him from exile in Russia.13
The Russia in which Serge found himself in 1919 faced appalling dangers. In 1917, amid the horrors of trench warfare, the October revolution had given millions of soldiers and working people the hope of a real alternative. Over the next three or four years world revolution seemed like a very real short-term possibility; it is only in the context of that possibility that we can understand why so many from different traditions were prepared to stand and fight alongside the Bolsheviks.
For that very reason the October revolution inspired fear and fury among the ruling classes of the West. On the day before the armistice in 1918 Winston Churchill told the war cabinet it might be necessary to rebuild the German Army to fight against Bolshevism. Two weeks later he told a meeting:Civilization is being completely extinguished over gigantic areas, while Bolsheviks hop and caper like troops of ferocious baboons amid the ruins of cities and the corpses of their victims.14
As a clear-sighted adversary of the working class, Churchill knew who his real enemies were. (He also, of course, knew his real friends; it was the same Churchill who, in 1944, sat down with Stalin to carve up Eastern Europe on a half sheet of paper.15)
The reactionary Russian generals who were waging war against the Bolshevik regime received massive assistance from the capitalist world. Fourteen nations—including Britain, France, the USA, Canada, Czechoslovakia and Japan—sent military forces totaling many tens of thousands of men to assist in the onslaught against the newly established workers’ state.
Knowing that their whole future was at stake, the defenders of the old order fought with utter ruthlessness. Even the minimal conventions of military decency that had been observed in the World War I were abandoned. A correspondent of the Manchester Guardian reported on the behavior of the counter-revolutionary White armies in 1919:It was difficult to know what was done with prisoners … When questioned on the subject, the White officers always said: “Oh, we kill all of them that are Communists.” Jews and commissaries stood no chance, of course, but it was somewhat difficult to ascertain which of the others were Communists. The system generally followed was this. From among the prisoners a man who “looked like a Bolshevik” was led aside, accused with great violence of being a notorious Communist, but afterwards promised that his life would be spared if he gave the names of all those among his companions whom he knew to belong to the Bolshevik Party. This ingenious scheme, which was tried on more than one victim in each party of prisoners, generally resulted in a number of Red soldiers being executed.16
The US commander in Siberia in 1919, General William S. Graves, testified that “I am well on the side of safety when I say that the anti-Bolsheviks killed one hundred people in Eastern Siberia, to every one killed by the Bolsheviks.”17
In this situation Serge had no doubts about which side he was on. The revolution was engaged in a war to the death with its bitterest enemies, and the whole future of the world seemed to depend on the outcome of that war. Only by grasping the profound international significance of the events in Russia can we understand how a former anarchist was able to accept Bolshevik terror. Whatever his reservations about Bolshevik theory and practice, Serge aligned himself unconditionally with the Bolshevik side. As he wrote many years later: “the most outraged observations of the anti-Bolshevik intellectuals only revealed to me how necessary Bolshevism was.”18
These pamphlets are a striking testimony to Serge’s commitment. What shines through every line of the text is Serge’s enthusiasm for the revolution, its achievements, its leaders and its ideals.
In particular he stresses the moral superiority of the Bolsheviks. Nowadays morality is all too often nothing but a cliché for politicians who lack any concrete policies. Serge’s concept of morality is very different; he sees it as a corrective to a Marxism which, in the epoch of the Second International, had often excluded morality in favor of a mechanical economic determinism.
Serge insists that it is the “moral force” of the proletariat which underpins its historical superiority and guarantees its victory. His account of the enormous sacrifices made by the inhabitants of Petrograd, of the mass mobilization made in the defense of the city, gives a striking account of how material and moral factors complement and reinforce each other.
At the same time he recognizes the grim necessities of revolutionary defense. In particular he is concerned to analyze the origins of revolutionary terror. Serge recognized that the Bolsheviks were exercising a rule of terror in many ways comparable to that exercised in France during the Great Revolution in 1793–4. The exercise of such terror, and the repressive means used by the Bolshevik state inevitably aroused grave misgivings among anti-authoritarian revolutionaries in France. Serge shows clearly and concretely how the circumstances of the civil war and the ruthlessness of the revolution’s enemies made such measures sadly but completely necessary. Even the most distasteful methods—such as using the wives and children of army officers as hostages in the event of their going over to the other side—are shown to be justified in the context of bitter all-out war. Yet there is an ambivalence about Serge’s writings on terror that recalls some of the best writings of Rosa Luxemburg: a combination of the recognition of the necessity for revolutionary terror and a profound hatred of authoritarianism and violence. This ambivalence does not qualify Serge’s defense of revolutionary terror; on the contrary it suggests that only those who recognize this ambivalence are entitled to actually exercise terror.
Serge’s ambivalence was rooted in the very real contradictions of the revolution. For a revolution fighting for its very life, the terror and such instruments as the Cheka were a necessity. That does not require us to deny that specific actions of the Cheka manifested incompetence, overzealous sectarianism and pure vindictiveness. Serge knew that unless he compromised with Bolshevism he would be condemned to moralizing impotence. Yet it was a real compromise, and it entailed contradictions that were not always easy to handle.
Serge himself later formulated the problem in terms of what he called the “double duty” of the revolutionary, who must defend the revolution against both its external enemies and its own internal weaknesses.19 So it is not surprising that a number of those who knew Serge during the early years of the revolution—the anarchists Gaston Leval and Mauricius, or the French communist Marcel Body who worked closely with Serge—testify to the fact that while his writings were solidly in support of the revolution, in private conversation with those he thought he could trust he made sharp criticisms of the Bolshevik regime. Leval quotes him as saying: “We are obliged to lie to save what can be saved of the revolution.”20
Peter Sedgwick has written that “the contrast is obvious between the Serge of libertarian reputation and the author of these manifestos for the elite leadership of the Bolsheviks.”21 Certainly there are contradictions, but Sedgwick too easily ignores that there were libertarian as well as necessarily authoritarian currents in Bolshevism. There is a consistency in Serge’s position, though
it was one achieved at the price of considerable torment. Certainly Serge did not act out of cowardice or careerism; there were precious few material advantages to being a Bolshevik in the early years of the revolution, when even a small allocation of food seemed like a luxury. And when the time came Serge showed no lack of courage in supporting the Left Opposition. If he wrote in defense of Bolshevism, it was because he believed passionately that the revolution was worth defending.
The contradictions were at their most acute in the case of the Russian anarchists. All three pamphlets refer to anarchism and the third is devoted entirely to the subject. As one who had grown up in the anarchist tradition, Serge clearly felt a strong attachment but also a profound ambivalence towards anarchist politics. He saw anarchism as being a current within the revolutionary movement, one that had much to contribute, but only on condition that it played its part within the revolutionary process rather than standing outside in the name of an abstract purism.
However, the early years of the Russian Revolution saw a continuing divergence between Bolsheviks and anarchists. Initially anarchists had cooperated closely; there were four anarchists—including Bill Shatov, who appears in Serge’s account—on the Military Revolutionary Committee which organized the 1917 insurrection in Petrograd. A good number of anarchists joined the Bolsheviks or worked closely with them. But many anarchists opposed the Brest-Litovsk agreement, and in April 1919 Moscow anarchists staged an unnecessary provocation by stealing the car of a sympathetic American, Colonel Raymond Robins. The Cheka overreacted with a raid in which about forty anarchists were killed or wounded. In 1918 a group of anarchist Black Guards discussed seizing power in Moscow, and in 1919 anarchists bombed the headquarters of the Moscow Communist Party, killing twelve and injuring many more, including Bukharin.
Lenin’s policy, repeated to various Russian and foreign anarchists, was that there should be full freedom for “anarchists of ideas,” but that those who organized armed resistance to Bolshevik rule would be repressed. In practice the distinction was very hard to make, and often the Cheka does not seem to have tried very hard to make it.22
