Memoirs of a Revolutionary (1951)

"I have outlived three generations of brave men, mistaken as they may have been, to whom I was deeply attached, and whose memory remains dear to me. And here again, I have discovered that it is nearly impossible to live a life devoted wholly to a cause which one believes to be just; a life, that is, where one refuses to separate thought from daily action. The young French and Belgian rebels of my twenties have all perished; my syndicalist comrades of Barcelona in 1917 were nearly all massacred; my comrades and friends of the Russian Revolution are probably all dead �E€E any exceptions are only by a miracle. All were brave, all sought a principle of life nobler and juster than that of surrender" the bourgeois order; except perhaps ( )

What a book this is - Serge was the child of exiled Russian Revolutionaries, raised in Belgium; he became an anarchist and went to stir up the revolution in pre-WW1 France (spending most of the war in prison for his troubles). He then went to fight with anarchists in Spain before heading for Russia in 1919 to join the Bolsheviks. He was in the thick of things with the Bolshevik leadership and knew the major players well, before his disagreements with Stalin led to his isolation and eventual arrest, imprisonment in the Lubyanka for four years, and then internal exile to Kazakhstan. Friends abroad helped him be allowed to leave the USSR just in advance of the show trials that did for Zinoviev, Kamenev, Bukharin et al in the 1930s, and he spent time in Belgium and France writing and trying to further the cause of an anti-Stalinist communism before the Nazi invasion chased him down to Marseilles, where he was able to use other foreign contacts to secure passage to Mexico, where he died in exile.

Serge isn't a hero, he remained a committed Marxist to the end and failed to disown the 'good Terror' at the start of the revolution which he manages to divorce from the 'bad terror' that followed it. He also regularly notices that people in capitalist countries live far better than in the USSR, and that even a little bit of free market in Russia is enough to cheer people up and avoid pesky things like famines, without reconsidering whether this communism business is really all that. Nonetheless, he was fully opposed to Stalin and championed individual freedom of thought and conscience when it put his own neck on the line and almost everyone around him crumbled, so there is a lot to be said for him too. This is a ludicrously interesting book, well written (he was also a novelist), and a view of history from a man on the inside of some of the biggest moments of the 20th century. Great stuff. ( )

Victor Serge was born in exile in Belgium in 1890 and died in exile in Mexico in 1947. In between, he was jailed at least three times (once in France, twice in the Soviet Union) and internally deported to Orenburg in the the Ural Mountains, fled Paris just ahead of the Nazis, and barely made it out of occupied France. Also in between, he participated in the innermost circles of the Russian Revolution, fighting in one of the fiercest battles of the civil war, going on foreign missions for the Communist Party, and having access to both Lenin and Trotsky, before becoming disillusioned by the totalitarian turn the Communists took and, ultimately, by that same authoritarian trait in Trotsky. Throughout all this time, he was writing, with his work mostly published in western Europe.

Born of Russian parents who fled to the west because of their own revolutionary activities, Serge became interested in socialist and anarchist politics as a teenager and began his life-long connections with most of the European activists and revolutionaries of the first part of the 20th century. After being jailed in France, he traveled to Spain and met Catalan rebels, returned to Paris, and wound up in St. Petersburg (then Petrograd, later Leningrad), at the Finland Station, in 1919. In the course of his years in the Soviet Union, he not only clearly saw the perils and evils of the path the Bolsheviks were taking, but spoke up about them, as a member of the so-called Left Oppositionists that initially clustered around Trotsky. The inevitable happened: he was jailed, then released, jailed again, and then sent to Orenburg, where he was allowed his books and his family, but where starvation was never far away. Because of his western citizenship, and because his writing was published in France and elsewhere, the Soviets were under pressure to release him, and he was ultimately expelled to the west. Once there, his life was made difficult not only by the anti-communists but also by the left, because he was persona non grata for having criticized what was going on in the Soviet Union and both Stalin and Trotsky. Nonetheless, he maintained his connections to a vast network of socialists and others who, like him, believed in democracy, free speech, and the rights of the individual as well as social revolution.

What makes this book so fascinating, in addition to Serge's presence at some of the seminal events of the last century and in addition to his sparkling writing (also evident in his excellent novels), is his amazingly clear perception of what was really taking place, when the vision of so many others was clouded by wishful thinking; his total commitment to tolerance and individual freedom; his ability to continue to look to the future despite the horrors he personally endured; his remarkable prescience and psychological/political insight (e.g., of why Stalin had to kill off the entire first generation of Bolshevik revolutionaries, and of the direction the second world war would take); his sharp portraits of dozens and dozens of people, some I'd heard of and many more I hadn't; and the broad perspective it opened up for me of the extent of the revolutionary activity in Europe and the mixed reaction to that by the Soviets (e.g., they appeared to help the republicans in the Spanish Civil War by sending them arms, while at the same time killing all the leaders who didn't toe the Stalinist line).

Serge clearly saw that the world had changed after the First World War, and that it was once again heading to disaster with the Second. Nonetheless, he believed in progress, perhaps slow and halting, but inevitable. As he says in the final section of his memoirs:

"The men of my generation -- those born around 1890 -- above all the Europeans among them, cannot help the sensation of having lived on a frontier where one world ends and another begins. . . . I have seen the face of Europe change several times. . . .

"Here we are, with the nightmare of war behind us, but without peace having been made, without a feeling of man's deliverance, without even a vague reawakening of the great hopes that signaled the end of the First World War. We feel trapped between the aggressive crushing power of a totalitarianism born of born of a victorious socialist revolution and the routines of an old society committed, in spite of itself, to changes it refuses to recognize. On both sides, primitive man, barbaric and narrow-minded, greedy and mendacious, is working against better man. . . .

"The future seems to me, despite the clouds on the horizon, to be filled with possibilities vaster than any we have glimpsed in the past. The passion, the experience, and even the errors of my fighting generation may perhaps illumine the way forward, but on one condition, which has become a categorical imperative: never to give up the defense of man against systems whose plans crush the individual." pp. 446- 447, NYRB edition

The NYRB edition I read is the first complete translation of this book; the publisher of an earlier edition forced the translator to cut a significant portion of the text because he thought it was too long. For this edition, a new translator uncovered the deleted portions and retranslated them, but I couldn't tell where one translation merged into another. The edition is also enhanced by a lengthy glossary of people and revolutionary movements and by drawings by Serge's son Vlady, an artist, as well as by photographs.