Victor Serge
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| Victor Serge | |
| Born | 1890 Brussels, Belgium |
|---|---|
| Died | 1947 Mexico City, Mexico |
Victor Lvovich Kibalchich (В.Л. Кибальчич) (December 30, 1890-November 17, 1947) better known as Victor Serge was a Russian revolutionary and Francophone writer. Originally an anarchist, he joined the Russian Communist Party five months after arriving in Petrograd in January 1919 and worked for the newly founded Comintern as a journalist, editor and translator. He was openly critical of the Soviet regime, but remained loyal to the ideals of socialism and the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917 until his death.
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[edit] Biography
[edit] Early life
Serge was born in Brussels Belgium, to a couple of impoverished Russian students, anti-Czarist exiles. His father, a former infantry trooper from Kiev, was distantly related to Nikolai Kibalchich of the People's Will, who was executed as a result of the assassination of Alexander II in 1881. The 'Kibaltchich myth' of revolutionary idealism and sacrifice dominated Victor's impoverished childhood. Serge's father, Leonid Kibalchich, a Peoples' Will sympathiser, had fled Russia around 1887 and went to Switzerland, where he met Serge's mother. Vera Frolova, née Podorovskaya, was the daughter of an impoverished petty-noble of Polish extraction from the Nizhni-Novgorod province. Vera married a Saint-Petersburg official and after giving birth to two daughters got permission to go to Switzerland to study, heal her consumptive lungs and escape the reactionary environment of Petersburg. She fell in love with the handsome, feckless Kibalchich, and the couple wandered Europe "in search of cheap lodgings and good libraries." Victor was born "by chance" in Brussels where the couple was so poor that Victor's younger brother died of malnutrition before Leonid eventually found work as a teacher at the Institute of Anatomy in Brussels. The couple broke up when Victor was 15, whereupon he lived on his own.
During his childhood and adolescence, Serge read a great deal, and became interested in socialism and anarchism along with his friends, including Raymond Callemin. Serge joined the Belgian Socialist Party in 1905 at the age of 15, but soon came to feel that it was not radical enough. He became increasingly involved in anarchism, and was expelled from Belgium in 1909. He moved to Paris France and learned the printing trade.
His first article was penned in September of 1908. Under the pen name "Le Rétif" ("The Restless" or "the stubborn), Serge wrote many articles for Le Révolté and, starting in 1909, L'Anarchie (the journal founded by Albert Libertad whom Serge and his friends considered to be a hero). He was an outspoken supporter of individualist anarchism and illegalism, frequently clashing with L'Anarchie's editor, André Roulot (aka "Lorulot"), who favored less inflammatory rhetoric. In 1910, following a schism in L'Anarchie, Lorulot departed and Serge was named as the new editor of the paper.
During his time in French anarchism, he was in a relationship with Rarrette Maetrejean, another anarchist activist.
In 1912 he was later judged to be involved in acts of terrorism and received a five-year prison sentence in solitary confinement for his involvement in the Bonnot Gang. Several of his comrades were executed.
Serge was in prison on the outbreak of the First World War. He immediately forecast that the war would lead to a Russian Revolution: "Revolutionaries knew quite well that the autocratic Empire, with its hangmen, its pogroms, its finery, its famines, its Siberian jails and ancient iniquity, could never survive the war."
In September, 1914, Serge was in a prison on an island in the Seine, twenty-five miles or so from the Battle of the Marne. The local population, suspecting a French defeat, began to flee, and for a while Serge and the other inmates expected to become German prisoners.
On his release in 1917 he went to live in Spain, which was neutral in World War I but was the scene of an attempted syndicalist revolution. Meanwhile, Nicholas II was overthrown in February, 1917, and in July 1917 Serge decided to travel to Russia, for the first time in his life, to participate in the revolutionary activities there. In order to get there he returned to France. He studied art history for 2 months but was then arrested because he had promised to stay out of France. He was imprisoned without trial for more than a year, and engaged in political discussions with fellow prisoners. It was around this time that he began using the name Victor Serge. In October, 1918 the Danish Red Cross intervened and arranged for Serge and other revolutionaries to be exchanged for Bruce Lockhart and other anti-Bolsheviks who had been imprisoned in Russia.
[edit] Career in the Soviet Union
[edit] During the Civil War
When Serge arrived in Russia in January 1919 he became associated with the Bolsheviks. He eventually joined the Bolsheviks, having grown disillusioned with anarchism, believing that anarchism was a good way of life but bolshevism was the best theory of political change. He continued to support the involvement of anarchists and non-Bolshevik socialists in the revolution, and joined social groups largely containing non-communists, such as the circle around novelist Andrei Bely. While he believed that additional revolutions in other countries were desirable and even necessary for the survival of the Soviet Union, he was concerned about the Bolsheviks’ desire to force world revolution, particularly believing that France was far from revolutionary conditions. Serge lived in Petrograd which was known as one of the centers of revolution, but was going through a difficult period. At one time, Serge lived in a mansion that once belonged to a noble family. With no other way to keep warm, Serge and his companions began burning books, and he was particularly happy to burn a book of laws of the Russian empire. Serge met Maxim Gorky, and was offered a position at the Universal Literature publishing house run by Gorky. Though Serge deeply admired Gorky, he declined the position. At first Serge made his living as an inspector of schools and as a lecturer in the Petrograd Soviet. In March 1919 he began working for Grigory Zinoviev who had been appointed as President of the Executive of the Third International. Serge's knowledge of languages enabled him to organize international editions of the organization's publications. Serge criticized the bureaucratic personality of Zinoviev.
Serge was a very capable worker in the Comintern, and was particularly known for meeting people who arrived to the Soviet Union from various nations. He also worked to help those whom he believed were unjustly persecuted by the Secret Police.
Serge married Liuba Russakova, and they had their first child, Vlady in 1920. The Russakov’s were a Russian Jewish family who were expelled from France and were on the same boat as Serge going to Russia. Liuba’s father, Alexander Russakov, was also a revolutionary, who moved to France following the 1905 revolution, while always continuing to be a worker and returning to factory work after his return to Russia, and Liuba briefly served as Lenin’s stenographer in 1921. Her health problems would be a major concern for Serge.
Serge arrived in Russia during the middle of the civil war and the era of war communism. At first he believed that the Soviets could not afford to be merciful to their enemies, once criticizing officers who let White Army prisoners go without shooting them. This was a reaction to the persecution of communists and other revolutionaries in the rest of the world. However, his positions on such issues soon changed, as the autocratic government instituted by war communism became just as harsh against dissenters after the end of the war.
He soon became disillusioned with the Soviet government. He joined with Emma Goldman and Alexander Berkman to complain about the way the Red Army treated the sailors involved in the Kronstadt Uprising. He believed that with more competent Soviet officials in charge of the negotiations, there could have been a settlement between the government and the sailors. A libertarian socialist, Serge protested against the Red Terror that was organized by Felix Dzerzhinsky and the Cheka. Serge also criticized the New Economic Policy, believing that it was counter-revolutionary, though in 1923 he admitted that it had resulted in improved conditions compared to war communism.
In the spring of 1921 he briefly withdrew from the government and began a commune on an abandoned estate near Petrograd. However, after 3 months the commune was abandoned because of hostility from anti-Semitic peasants who thought that all the residents of the commune were Jews.
[edit] Foreign missions
Serge then went on a Comintern assignment to Germany where there was an active communist party. During this time Serge mainly lived in Berlin and witnessed the economic crisis that occurred throughout Germany. Though still worried about the state of the Soviet Union, his stay in Germany restored his pride in the accomplishments of the Russian Revolution. Though he returned to Moscow to attend meetings several times, he lived in Germany until November 1923, when he was forced to leave after the failed October Communist insurrection and the November fascist coup attempt.
Serge harshly criticized the bureaucratic nature of the Comintern, and its attempts to determine when revolutions would occur based on inaccurate information. He criticized the increasing control of the Comintern by the Soviet government, and particularly the factions of Zinoviev and Stalin. He cited the situation in Germany in 1923 as a major example of this. Serge had worked in Germany to promote a workers’ revolution, which was eventually canceled and occurred only in Hamburg because the party there had not heard of the cancellation. Serge believed that the working class in Germany was not ready for revolution because its character was too moderate. Serge criticized the Social Democrats in Germany, felt that the communists had poor organization, and predicted the danger of fascism there.
In 1923 Serge became associated with the Left Opposition group that included Leon Trotsky, Karl Radek, and Adolf Joffe. Serge was an outspoken critic of the authoritarian way that Joseph Stalin and his allies were governing the country and is believed to be the first writer to describe the Soviet government as "totalitarian".
Meanwhile, Serge moved to Vienna, Austria in 1923. Austria was ruled by social democrats at the time and felt powerless in international affairs. The communist party was so small that there was no possibility of revolution there. However, many communists were working or in exile there, and Serge befriended many important intellectuals including Georg Lukacs, Adolf Joffe and Antonio Gramsci. Serge watched political events in Russia, Germany and elsewhere, but could participate little, and worked on other pursuits such as literary analysis.
[edit] The Left Opposition
Serge returned to the Soviet Union in 1925, during Stalin’s rise to power and the futile attempt to stop him. During his time in Vienna, the Left Opposition was waiting for an opportunity to gain support within the party. Shortly after Serge’s arrival, this opportunity appeared to come when Zinoviev and Lev Kamenev, members of then ruling troika with Stalin, reconciled with Trotsky, and the United Opposition was formed. Serge was generally supportive of forming the United Opposition despite the continued disagreements on economic and other matters between the Trotskyist and 'Zinovievist' members. Meanwhile, Serge moved to Leningrad where he was actively involved in Opposition groups. Despite the support of Kamenev and Zinoviev, Stalin’s allies were gaining more and more power and the opposition often had to meet in secret. Serge soon realized that the defeat of the opposition was inevitable, particularly by late 1927 when he felt that, at the 10th anniversary of the Russian Revolution, the reaction had been completed. He often compared the defeat of the Left Opposition to the Thermidorian reaction which followed the French Revolution.
Serge was not one of the political or theoretical leaders of the Left Opposition, but he worked tirelessly to promote it through both writing and activism. He was understanding of Trotsky’s unwillingness to ask for the support of the masses against the party, and that the masses could not help the opposition through a revolution against the party. He was one of the few members of the opposition who could speak at Communist Party meetings without being shouted down by hecklers, though he was only given 5 minutes to speak at each meeting.
In late 1927, most of the Opposition, including Trotsky and Zinoviev, was expelled from the party, and some opposition members, led by Zinoviev, capitulated in order to return to the party. Serge believed that the expulsion of the opposition meant that the party was completely broken, and refused to support the capitulation. He believed from this point that the ban on additional political parties was wrong.
[edit] After Stalin’s victory
In 1928 Serge was expelled from the Communist Party, largely because of his protests against the Soviet Union's policy on China, and officially because of his protests over the party congress's expulsion of the Opposition. He was now unable to work for the government and over the next few years he spent much of his time writing Year One of the Russian Revolution (1930), completing two novels (Men in Prison (1930) and Birth of Our Power (1931)) and translating Vera Figner's Memoires into French. These books were banned in the Soviet Union but were published in France and Spain. He also commented on and attempted to investigate the murders of political dissenters. Amidst the growing poverty and peasant resistance which was brutally crushed, he also wrote commentaries on these aspects of Soviet life.
He was arrested by the Soviet government for the first time in March 1928, and spent 2 months in jail without charge. While some of the French intellectuals who had been among his close comrades, such as Henri Barbusse harshly criticized his continued opposition to Stalin, others continued to help him and soon won his release. Shortly after his release, Serge suffered serious health problems, particularly an intestinal occlusion, of which he almost died, and this drove him to devote himself to writing. During the next five years of "precarious liberty" he worked at the Lenin Institute, translating the works of Lenin, though his translations were closely monitored by the censors and he was unable to receive credit. Serge lived in a communal apartment in Leningrad, with at least three people who openly monitored him as they worked for the GPU. Serge’s family was targeted for harassment, particularly his father-in-law Alexander Russakov who was denied work, arrested for a time, denied a bread card and died in 1932. Serge’s wife Liuba Russakova was driven insane. Serge could not meet with friends and relatives openly because they could get in trouble, so when visiting Moscow he often slept in empty houses. However, he occasionally met the remaining free opposition members secretly, and had some contacts with former friends who worked for Stalin. He also worked as hard as possible to smuggle anti-government material out of the Soviet Union. Trotsky received his last communication from the Soviet opposition from Serge in 1929.
Serge was arrested and imprisoned in 1933 and this time did not receive a quick release. Most of the Left Opposition that were arrested were executed but as a result of protests made by leading politicians in France, Belgium and Spain, Serge was kept alive. The Communist Secret Police (GPU) obtained a confession from his sister-in-law, Anita Russakova, that she and Serge had been involved in a conspiracy led by Leon Trotsky. Serge knew from his contacts in the Communist Party that if he signed the confession he would be executed.
Protests against Serge's imprisonment took place at several International Conferences. The case caused the Soviet government considerable embarrassment and in 1936 Joseph Stalin announced that he was considering releasing Serge from prison. Pierre Laval, the French prime minister, refused to grant Serge an entry permit. Emile Vandervelde, the veteran socialist, and a member of the Belgian government, managed to obtain Serge a visa to live in Belgium. Serge's relatives were not so fortunate: his sister, mother-in-law, sister-in-law (Anita Russakova) and two of his brothers-in-law, died in prison.
[edit] Later life
On his arrival in France in 1936, Serge resumed work on two books on Soviet communism, From Lenin to Stalin (1937) and Destiny of a Revolution (1937). He also published several novels and a volume of poetry, Resistance (1938) about his experiences in Russia.
When France was invaded by Germany in 1940, Serge together with his son Vlady Kibalchich, managed to escape to Mexico where he continued to publish novels such as The Long Dusk and The Case of Comrade Tulayev. By this time, the Communist establishment publicly denounced him as a Trotskyist, as a result of his 1933 trial and subsequent imprisonment. He was subjected to strong criticism by the Mexican press and by veteran Communist propagandists Otto Katz (writing under the nom-de-plume André Simone) and Paul Merker. On the other side, he found support from the International Revolutionary Marxist Centre, and wrote Los problemas del socialismo en nuestro tiempo with Marceau Pivert and Julián Gorkin.
His autobiography, Memoirs of a Revolutionary, was first published in the United States in 1945.
Serge's health had been badly damaged by his periods of imprisonment in France and Russia. However, he continued to write until he died of a heart-attack in Mexico City on 17th November, 1947.
[edit] Ideas
[edit] On The Russian Revolution and Civil War
“Year One of the Russian Revolution”, arguably Serge’s most famous book, which was written while Serge was living in the Soviet Union after Stalin’s rise to power, is largely Serge’s interpretation of events that happened during his second imprisonment in France. Serge showed in this work that he saw the Russian Revolution as a very important and unique event in world history. Serge acknowledged in “Year 1” that the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk was necessary and that Lenin and Trotsky were right to negotiate it despite the humiliation it caused.
Based on his travel through Finland on his way to Russia, Serge acknowledged the role of the failed Finnish revolution and the White Terror that followed in foreshadowing the Russian Civil War and the Bolshevik government’s feeling that it was necessary for them to conduct their own terrors. Serge was one of the few historians of this period to give prominent attention to the role of Finland in early Soviet history.
[edit] On the rise of Stalin
Serge became a major historian of the struggles of the Left Opposition, giving profound insights on their enemies as well as his fellow opposition members. He stated that around 1926, some oppositionists felt that Trotsky could have organized a coup, as he was still supported by the Red Army. However, Trotsky feared, with Serge's agreement, that such a military revolution would provoke a dictatorship similar to that of Napoleon Bonaparte after the French Revolution.
Regarding the capitulators, Serge saw the party as developing a kind of religious feeling among many of those who were expelled, and that there expulsion seemed to them just like an ex-communication from a church. They would do anything to get back in.
[edit] On China
During the late 1920s, around the time of the decline of the Left Opposition and Serge's expulsion from the party, Serge spent a great deal of time and energy writing on issues surrounding China. China had an attempted revolution around that time but it was stopped by the Comintern, which ordered the Chinese Communists into a disastrous alliance with the Kuomintang. The Kuomintang soon betrayed the communists and massacred them. Though Serge was never able to visit China, he drew from communist and non-communist sources who had visited China for his analysis.
Serge noted that the Kuomintang had developed a similar bureaucratic authoritarian structure as the Soviet communist party and Comintern under Stalin. He also advocated that the proletariat needed to make an alliance with the peasants in a way that would depart from liberalism and nationalism. Perhaps most interestingly, he praised the works of Mao Tse Tung, who was not well-known at the time.
Serge’s works on China influenced the French intellectual debate on China, and also the later works of Trotsky on China.
[edit] On The Stalinist Economy
Beginning in the late 1920s, Serge helped to lead the anti-Stalinist Left's criticism of wasteful resource management in the Soviet economy, along with many other writers including Christian Rakovsky and Leon Trotsky. Serge's writing includes many examples of inefficient factories, homes and other buildings being built, as well as inefficient machines. He also brought attention to the fact that the Moscow subway stations were architecturally grand but had no benches for tired workers. He criticized the bureaucrats who approved these projects due to political loyalty, and stated that these bureaucrats, though they claimed to be communists, did not really care about the workers. Like many other Left Oppositionists, he pointed out that Stalin had no plan, shifting policies eratically while never succeeding in running the nation well.
Though he had more first-hand knowledge about these problems while still in the Soviet Union, he continued writing about these issues for the rest of his life.
[edit] On Literature
Despite Serge’s harsh attitude toward the enemies of revolution, he always maintained that writers and artists needed to have free expression no matter what their political views were. In this opinion he was mainly supported among the communists by Nikolai Bukharin, with whom he disagreed on economic and many other matters. Even after committing himself to communism, Serge maintained friendships with non-communist artists, including anarchists, Christians, and non-political artists, often considering these to be superior to communist artists. When unable to participate in politics, such as during his time in Vienna or during some of his imprisonments, Serge wrote valuable essays about Soviet art and culture, and analyzed the contributions of many early Soviet writers and artists. He was also influenced by Trotsky's ideas on proletarian culture.
Despite his advocacy of tolerating all artists, Serge also enjoyed harshly criticizing literature. While praising some aspects of the writing of Vladimir Mayakovsky, whom he personally knew, he also criticized Mayakovsky for being too close to the past and the old culture, and this very much annoyed Mayakovsky.
Regarding his own literary style, Serge devoted himself to literary writing only when he was not able to be involved in political struggles. But because he was shut out of politics for such long periods, he became a very prolific novelist, and is thought of by many as a more important writer than politician. However, his writing was always of a political character, and focused on the feelings of the masses rather than just one person.
[edit] Works available in English
[edit] Fiction
- The Long Dusk (1946) Translator: Ralph Manheim; New York : The Dial Press, 1946. - Translation of Les dernier temps, Montreal 1946.
- The Case of Comrade Tulayev (1951) Translator: Willard R. Trask; Hamilton, 1951. - Translation of 'L’Affaire Toulaev'. Paris 1949.
- Birth of our Power (1967) Translator: Richard Greeman; New York : Doubleday, 1967. - Translation of Naissance de notre force, Paris 1931.
- Men in Prison (1969) Translator: Richard Greeman; Garden City, N.Y. : Doubleday, 1969; Translation of Les hommes dans le prison, Paris 1930.
- Conquered City (1975) Translator: Richard Greeman; Garden City, N.Y. : Doubleday, 1975. - Translation of: Ville conquise, Paris 1932.
- Midnight in the Century (1982) Translator: Richard Greeman; London : Readers and Writers, 1982. - Translation of S'il est minuit dans le siècle, Paris 1939.
- The Unforgiving Years (2008) Translator: Richard Greeman; New York : New York Review of Books Classics, 2008. - Translation of Les Années sans pardon, Paris 1971.
[edit] Poetry
- Resistance (1989) Translator: James Brooks; San Francisco : City Lights, 1989. - Translation of Résistance, Paris 1938.
[edit] Non-fiction
- From Lenin to Stalin (1937) Translator: Ralph Manheim; New York : Pioneer Publishers 1937. - Translation of De Lénine à Staline, Paris 1937.
- Russia Twenty Years After (1937) Translator: Max Shachtman; New York : Pioneer Publishers, 1937. - Translation of Destin d'une révolution, Paris 1937. - Also published as Destiny of a Revolution.
- Memoirs of a Revolutionary (1963) Translator: Peter Sedgwick; London : Oxford University, 1973. - Translation of Mémoires d'un révolutionnaire, 1901-1941, Paris 1951.
- Year One of the Russian Revolution (1972) Translator: Peter Sedgwick; London : Allen Lane, 1972. - Translation of, L’An 1 de la révolution russe, Paris 1930.
- The Life and Death of Leon Trotsky (1973) (with Natalia Sedova Trotsky) Translator: Arnold S. Pomerans; Garden City, N.Y. : Doubleday, 1973. - Translation of: Vie et mort de Leon Trotsky, Paris 1951.
- What Everyone Should Know About State Repression (1979) Translator: Judith White; London : New Park Publications, 1979. - Translation of Les Coulisses d’une Sûreté générale. Ce que tout révolutionnaire devrait savour sur la répression, Paris 1926.
[edit] Collections
- The Century of the Unexpected – Essays on Revolution and Counter-Revolution (1994) Editor: Al Richardson; Special issue of Revolutionary History, Vol.5 No.3, Autumn 1994.
- The Serge-Trotsky Papers (1994) Editor: D.J. Cotterill; London : Pluto, 1994.
- Revolution in Danger – Writings from Russia 1919-20 (1997) Translator: Ian Birchall; London : Redwords, 1997.
- Witness to the German Revolution (2000) Translator: Ian Birchall; London : Redwords, 2000.
- Collected Writings on Literature and Revolution (2004) Translator & editor: Al Richardson; London : Francis Boutle, 2004.
[edit] Pamphlet
- Kronstadt '21 (1975) Translator: ?; London : Solidarity, 1975.
Sources: British Library Catalogue and Catalog of the Library of Congress.
[edit] External links
- Year One of the Russian Revolution from the Victor Serge Internet Archive on Marxists Internet Archive 2005. Translation, editor's Introduction, and notes © 1972 by Peter Sedgwick. Retrieved April 5, 2005.
- "Victor Serge and the IVth International". Statement criticising Serge by the editors of the Bulletin of the Russian Opposition, writing in Quatrième Internationale April 1939. Source: Victor Serge & Leon Trotsky, La Lutte Contre le Stalinisme. Maspero, Paris, 1977 Translated for Marxist Internet Archive by Mitch Abidor in 2005. Retrieved April 28, 2005.
- The Unhappy Elitist: Victor Serge’s Early Bolshevism by Peter Sedgwick. History Workshop Journal 17, Spring 1984. Reprinted online by What Next? Marxist journal. Retrieved May 11, 2005.
- CRITIQUE 28/29: The Ideas of Victor Serge: a Life as a Work of Art Edited by Susan Weissman (Introduction on-line. Retrieved March 14, 2007.)
[edit] Offline Source
Weissman, Suzi. Victor Serge: The Course is Set on Hope. Verso, 2001.
