by Victor Serge
Serge’s plea for a fruitful synthesis of Bolshevism and anarchism seems to have been doomed to failure. In a highly confidential letter to the French syndicalist Michel Kneller, he wrote of the “heart-breaking, indescribable bankruptcy of the Russian anarchist movement,” while deploring the “absurd and criminal persecution.” 23 But Serge always maintained his contacts with anarchist circles; at the time of Kropotkin’s funeral in 1921 he was the only party member to be seen as a comrade by the anarchists. He used his influence with the Bolsheviks to save anarchists from repression, notably helping to save the life of Voline, who had fought with Makhno in the Ukraine.24
In early 1921 the events at Kronstadt finally put an end to any hope of the sort of cooperation Serge advocated.25 Yet even as late as 1938 Serge was still advocating a “synthesis” of “libertarian socialism” and “scientific socialism,”26 still defending a socialism whose essence was human freedom.
These early pamphlets stand as a testimony to a moment at which the revolution was not yet lost, when the outcome still hung in the balance. In his depiction of the moral and material forces of the revolution, Serge reminds us that the defeat was not inevitable, that victory could have been generated out of the horrors of the early years of the revolution. His pamphlets will stand as an inspiration to those who aspire to emulate in the conditions of our own epoch the achievements of 1917—but with a very different outcome.
These writings were written and published in haste, and it is not surprising that a number of errors found their way into the published texts. I have corrected only what seem to be obvious misprints or mistakes about names and have otherwise tried to stay as close as possible to Serge’s originals. For example, Serge may easily be forgiven his reference to “Lord Churchill”; he had more important things on his mind than the subtleties of the British peerage system. Wherever possible, I have used the most familiar forms of Russian personal names, and the current modern forms of place names—thus Helsinki rather than Helsingfors. I have not attempted to preserve the eccentricities of Serge’s punctuation.
Several people helped me in completing this project. Richard Greeman, hard at work on the definitive biography of Serge, found time to give encouragement and stern criticism, both equally valuable. Mike Haynes assisted with some points of translation and Sharon O’Nions and Lovejeet Chand made useful comments on editing. The late Dave Widgery would never have allowed us to publish a volume by Serge without acknowledgement to the late Peter Sedgwick, who introduced so many of us to Serge in the sixties.
Ian Birchall
April 1997
Chronology
(all dates in the Gregorian calendar)
1917
November 7: Bolsheviks take power in Petrograd
December 20: Formation of Cheka
1918
March 3: Brest-Litovsk Peace signed
April 11-12: Cheka raid on Moscow anarchists
August 2: Allied forces occupy Archangel
November 11: Armistice—end of World War I
1919
January 11: Murder of Luxemburg and Liebknecht
February: Serge arrives in Petrograd
March 2-7: First Congress of Communist International
March 21: Soviet rule in Hungary
May: Beginning of Yudenich’s offensive against Petrograd
August 1: Collapse of Hungarian Soviet Republic
September 25: Anarchists bomb Moscow Communist headquarters
October 11-22: Yudenich starts drive on Petrograd: pushed back
1920
November 14: Wrangel evacuates Crimea —end of civil war
November 26: Red Army attacks Makhno
1921
February 3: Funeral of Kropotkin
March 2-17: Kronstadt Rising
July 3-19: Founding Congress of Red International of Labor Unions
During the Civil War
Petrograd: May–June 1919
Some time in the future other people will write the history of the civil war and theorize about it. In these brief notes, hastily put down on paper at a time when we scarcely had the leisure to keep a diary, and completed later with hindsight, my aim is above all to paint a picture, to sketch a few portraits, to conjure up the atmosphere of some of the gravest hours that the Russian Revolution lived through. I hope that these pages will be of value to militants who did not themselves experience the social war and find it hard to imagine it. Certain necessities of struggle, which it is always difficult to accept in the abstract, stand out clearly just as they followed logically from the events. It is a question, as always, of revolutionary terror, which you can only understand if you have seen it growing irresistibly out of the surrounding circumstances, as one of the most unavoidable manifestations of the laws of history. It is a question, too, of the necessity of dictatorship and of revolutionary defense.
May 25, 1919
Towards the end of May 1919 there was nothing to indicate that new battles in the civil war were imminent. The counter-revolutionary elements in the Petrograd population were cherishing great hopes, but they did not make them public. The attention of the Communists was mainly fixed on the eastern front, where Kolchak was threatening the Volga region, and on the unstable situation in the Ukraine, ravaged by the anti-Semitic forces and demoralized by bad Communists, against whom draconian measures were about to be taken. Petrograd was calm, although from time to time there was talk of an impending Finnish attack. We had talked about it so much without seeing anything materialize that we ended up by no longer believing in it. Moreover, we were confirmed in our feeling of confidence by certain excellent arguments. If the Finns had occupied Petrograd, they would have to feed it: something that would have been difficult for a country that was itself subject to rationing, despite the economic support it was getting from the Entente. It would have been necessary to set up a White government, and that would have meant a monarchist government which, one way or the other, would have refused to recognize the total independence of Finland; and finally it would have been necessary to mount a prolonged defense of the Red capital against the revolutionary armies. So common sense boosted our feeling of confidence. And indeed we needed quite a strong dose of it to resist the unhealthy atmosphere prevailing in certain circles.
A few days before the onset of the tragedy I happened to meet some people of my acquaintance who were “Whites.” For it is one of the peculiarities of civil war that “Reds” and “Whites” rub shoulders with each other and are acquainted; there are even families divided between the two camps where personal affection does not disappear completely. In a street in Petrograd which used to be “bourgeois,” three neighbors from the district had stopped to talk in low voices: they were a shopkeeper, a doctor and a chemist. They greeted me in a friendly fashion. And it was basically with the intention of doing me a good turn that the doctor told me in a confidential tone that major events were about to happen: “This time, the British will certainly be there. And perhaps the Finns. They’re giving details such as…I advise you to look after yourself.”
The shopkeeper tried to outdo him: “Apparently last night the gunfire from Kronstadt could be heard quite clearly. And you realize that Kronstadt can’t hold out for long against the British.”
I didn’t believe them—and I was skeptical of news coming from such a source. I had rapidly learnt the nature of this little world of intellectuals calling themselves liberals, socialists and even revolutionaries (before the revolution became a social one). I knew how pitifully incapable of action they were. I went on my way. They remained on the pavement—a shopkeeper, a doctor, a chemist—three likeable but anachronistic figures with their threadbare overcoats, their dubious detachable collars and their bowler hats. Ever since, that trio seen on a May evening in 1919 has stuck in my memory, like a symbol. The whole bourgeois population, which was being crushed by the formidable millstones of the dictatorship of the proletariat, was still anxiously looking forward to the collapse of the still
shaky Communist regime, which was betrayed on all sides and undermined by innumerable hatreds. For these people embodied hatred and sabotage. The shopkeeper was a speculator; I found out not long afterwards that he had sold a house in Petrograd (this kind of speculation on real estate in the large Russian cities was actually thriving in Finland). The chemist ran a dispensary and every evening brought back from his work anecdotes which were both hilarious and sinister. For essential medical supplies were unavailable and they were replaced by whatever means were possible: a few wretches gave free play to their imagination with tricks which were sometimes criminal. Negligence, disorder, sabotage, theft and speculation were arranged in a variety of combinations. Alcohol intended for medical purposes was sold at 15,000 roubles for a small bottle. Narcotics such as cola-nuts and cocaine vanished in the same way. And the manager of the Communist dispensary said with a little smile: “What do you expect? It’s what you get with nationalization!” As for the doctor, he did nothing at all since he “couldn’t be expected to work with Bolsheviks.” “Besides,” he added, “it won’t last long. It only remains to bury the corpse of Bolshevism.” The most peculiar thing, and also the saddest, was that these three men prided themselves on not being reactionaries. One of them used to tell, with a certain pride, how during the February revolution he had participated in the capture of the police station in his district, and in the organization of the citizens’ militia. During those same days the doctor had risked his life several times hunting down the remaining policemen of the old regime who had taken refuge in attics with machine-guns.
In the great Red city, conquered by the workers, there were at that time about six or seven thousand Communist Party members and less than a hundred thousand workers; for already the youngest and most energetic among the workers had gone to the front. The remainder of the population (that is, about seven eighths) were either politically indifferent—passive—or hostile. This was the mass of “townspeople”—to make a not very satisfactory translation of the Russian word obyvatel, which indicates the mass of fearful, discontented and backward people. It was on this mass, cowardly and wretched but angry, that the reactionaries placed their hopes. What did they spend their time on? Almost exclusively on speculation, that is, unauthorized trade. In short, the shopkeepers, traders, businessmen and intellectuals were quite determined to carry on with business as usual, taking no account of the soviet regime. And even the slightest measures decreed by the soviet came up against the underhand resistance of a generalized ill will, but without any sign of open opposition. Everywhere, each evening, there were the same conversations in low voices about Allied intervention, about the collapse of the Communists and the massacre that would follow. Naturally nobody actually wanted this massacre to take place, but everybody expected it. The doctor sighed: “Our people are so uncultivated, what do you expect!” And his friends and followers “took note of the progress of anti-Semitism and of the loathing felt for the Bolsheviks.” In the marketplace and in the queues outside the bakeries the gossips passed on “guaranteed information” about the “pogrom due next Sunday.” I remember the charming six-yearold daughter of one of my Jewish friends who came home from school one day crying because the other children had told her that “at last the Yids were going to get their guts cut out.”
That was the enemy, the counter-revolution, all these things which cannot be portrayed or described briefly, for they sprang from ignorance, stupidity, cowardice, moral bankruptcy, the embittered egoism of the entire population of a city which had been profoundly corrupted by the capitalist system. We could feel it all around us, on the watch, looking for our weaknesses, our mistakes, our follies, skillfully making us stumble, ready at the slightest lapse to pounce on us and tear us to pieces. But although in the town we were, in purely numerical terms, only a small minority, we still felt that in face of the enemy we represented vigor, the only living vigor. For on our side, and on our side alone, we had thought, idealism, will, daring, dedication. And despite everything, from a certain point of view we had an impressive numerical superiority. For the six thousand Communists constituted merely the most active element on the “Red” side. Behind them, sympathizing instinctively with the party and carrying out all the menial tasks required by the revolution, there were sixty to eighty thousand working men and women, ready for any sacrifice in the event of real danger. The “Whites,” despite being so numerous in the city, had neither such a minority capable of taking initiatives, nor any such reserves to draw on.
It is impossible to understand anything of the history of the civil war without picturing these two opposing forces, mingled together, sharing the same life, rubbing shoulders in the thoroughfares of the cities with the constant, clear recognition that one side would have to kill the other. They were well aware of it, the three intellectuals talking in lowered voices on the corner of Voznesensky Prospect; while the sailor who walked by, casting a distrustful look in their direction, and the working woman, her head covered with an old colored handkerchief, who stared nonchalantly at them—these two, being “Reds,” were aware of it too.
May 29-30, 1919
These Whites and Reds can live alongside each other for some time without any open display of hatred, rubbing shoulders almost fraternally. Yesterday they were all busy in the same way, in pursuit of nourishment and entertainment. In these times of shortage everyone’s primary concern was to obtain bread or potatoes for the next day. Once that was done, some went to the theater or the cinema, some to clubs, some to party meetings, some to lectures or poetry readings. Our fifteen theaters, our thirty cinemas (managed by the state), our five or six daily concerts—not to speak of numerous evening classes—were not sufficient for the needs of a crowd greedy for relaxation and sensation, and which did not seek the noisy idleness of cafés—and a good thing too. Even yesterday you could have believed that this was all that life involved, normal life, as people of a calm disposition might call it.
But this morning the city was beset with great anxiety. The Whites and the Reds were eyeing each other, their faces inscrutable, their look obstinate and deliberately expressionless. This morning I learnt of the heroic death of Tolmachev, of the murder at the front of a handful of Communists, and of the way that the Whites suddenly and treacherously attacked the Reds. Not many miles from our intelligent Petrograd, devoted to music and ideas, this was a mediaeval slaughter, like those described by Philippe de Commines in his chronicles, when the men of Burgundy and Picardy, the English and the French, the followers of the King and of Charles the Bold set ambushes for each other at the turning of the road, or invited each other to drink so that they might be better able to cut each other’s throats at the end of the orgy, amid overturned torches and wild cries of “Kill! Kill!”
Yes, this was done on this May 29, just outside the walls of Petrograd.
The details of this somber drama reached us at the very same time as the news of the death of Tolmachev, who had died three days earlier. Surrounded by the Whites in the Luga Upland, not far from the hamlet of the Red Mountains, a few stubborn soldiers fought to the death around Tolmachev, who blew his brains out at the last moment. The nature of this war is such that the “Reds” do not surrender: in fact, in general neither side takes prisoners among non-commissioned officers. If Red commissars, militants or commandants are taken by surprise they are invariably shot. For our part we don’t spare former officers, or non-commissioned officers of any sort. War to the death with no humanitarian hypocrisy; there is no Red Cross and stretcher-bearers are not allowed. Primitive warfare, war of extermination, civil war.
Tolmachev, whose pistol shot is echoing around Petrograd today with the fateful sound of an alarm bell, died at the age of twenty-three. He was a student who joined the Bolsheviks at the age of eighteen. During the war he became a factory worker as the best means of agitation. He was a member of the executive committee of the Communist Party in Petrograd during the period of clandestine activity; he participated in the February and Octobe
r revolutions, and worked as a propagandist first in the Petrograd tram garages and then in the factories of the Urals. He was an implacable, and successful, opponent of the Social Revolutionaries, of the Mensheviks and of patriots of every hue in the Urals, which had not been fully won over to soviet rule. Finally he became commissar of the little army which stood up to the Cossack Dutov, in the Don country; then deputy commander of the army on the Siberian front during the Czechoslovak offensive; then commissar of a unit hastily dispatched to Yamburg to protect Petrograd, where he fell in the middle of the battle. His short life as a revolutionary leaves an epic memory. There can have been few men, even in a period so fertile in deeds as this one, who have, in such a short space of time, lived so feverishly and expended so much energy in sacrificing themselves ceaselessly, in fighting, in improvising the new law, the new force, in multiplying sacrifice and victory, from Petrograd to the mountains of Siberia, from the Urals to the Don!
At least he did not die as a result of treachery. The death of the others, of those murdered on May 29—Tavrin, Kupche, Rakov and his wife—was truly atrocious.
They were at rest, sleeping in a peasant’s isba (wooden hut). Two battalions were occupying a village near Yamburg; they were in the middle of a campaign. At dawn they were due to spread out in assault waves. Someone crept through the dark streets of the sleeping village. Someone knocked on the windows. The doors suddenly flew open and there were shouts. The Whites were there, with grenades in their hands. The sentries had betrayed, or having been themselves betrayed, were dead. And it was the Red deputy commander, a wretch called Zaitsev who, having fixed the epaulettes of the old regime onto his black leather tunic, was leading the Whites. The Red commanding officers—almost all of them formerly officers of the Tsarist guard—were triumphant. They embraced each other as though a nightmare were ending. But the nightmare was only just beginning. On the threshold of a hut, the Communist commander of the regiment, Tavrin, appeared. He was knocked down with a bullet and finished off with a saber. Then he was stripped—for clothing is scarce—his property was shared out, his body was chopped up with a sabre, one of his ears was cut off and his tongue was torn out. Then a hunt for Communists began. Commissar Kupche was found by a “Communist” officer who tore up his party card under his nose, shouting “Now you scum are done for!” Kupche was cold-bloodedly stripped of his clothes and shot before his wife’s eyes. Rakov, the brigade commissar, was left alone to defend himself desperately. He barricaded himself into a peasant house, and they only managed to kill him when his machine-gun broke. The battalion commissars were shot one after the other. Then the men lined up and marched past their new leaders to the sound of the march of the Semionovsky regiment. Doubtless these men had previously been worn down by a propaganda effort. The surprise and fear of the majority, combined with the treachery of a few, meant that a whole regiment went over to the enemy. A great victory was proclaimed in the capitals of the civilized world. But the very same evening forty men deserted and went back to the Reds.
