Conquered City

The conquered city is Leningrad in 1919-1920, ruled by the Communists (Reds), but threatened on all sides by the White Russian army and its western supporters, the "Green" fighters gathering in the forests, hunger, lack of fuel for heating or cooking and, perhaps most of all, by exhaustion from years of fighting. Against the backdrop of Leningrad itself, founded as St. Petersburg by Peter the Great as Russia's window to the west, and its glorious imperial buildings and natural setting, Serge presents interlocking vignettes of the population of the hard-pressed city: the hungry, frustrated, railway plant workers threatening to strike; the enthusiastic and dedicated converts to the communist cause; the cold and hard-working "Special show more Commission;" the spies, plotters, and informers; the criminals and prostitutes; the soldiers near and far; the remains of the intelligentsia, and more. In terse prose mixed with the language of official proclamations, Serge, a committed socialist who had to flee Stalin's Soviet Union, vividly depicts the philosophical and actual conflicts of the time, the hypocrisies and betrayals, the pressure to conform, and the struggle for individuality and meaning. Of the the three novels by Serge I've read, this is certainly the most intense. show less

"All this beauty was perhaps the sign of our death. Not a single chimney was smoking. The city was thus dying. And, like shipwrecked men on a raft devouring each other, we were about to fight among ourselves, workers against workers, revolutionaries against revolutionaries."

Serge here writes on the besieged city of St. Petersburg, or Leningrad, or Petrograd. Although there is technically a main plot line, his approach to it is more episodic, a portrait of the city as much as it is of the characters themselves. We see the huddled factory workers, the soldiers, the spies, the smugglers, the naive, the rump parliament.

The novel is a story of when the rhetoric of revolution meets the hard brutality of war. Serge already sees the germs of show more what would destroy his revolution - the 'necessity' of violent purges, the rise of the secret police, the suspicion and destruction of outsiders. And all of this was written before Stalin.

I'll let the book speak for itself. Here's another quote.

"We have conquered everything and everything has slipped out of our grasp. We have conquered bread, and there is famine. We have declared peace to a war-weary world, and war has moved into every house. We have proclaimed the liberation of men, and we need prisons, an "iron" discipline �E€E yes, to pour our human weakness into brazen molds in order to accomplish what is perhaps beyond our strength E€E and we are the bringers of dictatorship. We have proclaimed fraternity, but it is "ernity and death" in reality. We have founded the Republic of Labor, and the factories are dying, grass is growing in their yards. We wanted to give according to his strength and each to receive according to his needs; and here we are, privileged in the middle of generalized misery, since we are less hungry than others!"ssex show less