Birth of Our Power (38 page)

Professor Jean-Albert Bédé of Columbia University, who encouraged and guided my research, both for my doctoral dissertation on Serge and on this book;

My wife Julie, who worked with me at every stage of translating.

Serge (pseudonym for Victor Lvovich Kibalchich, 1890–1947) was born ‘by chance' in Brussels, Belgium, the son of an unmarried couple of anti-Czarist Russian refugees wandering Europe “in search of good libraries and cheap lodgings.” Home-schooled by these penniless, idealistic exiled scholars, young Victor imbibed the heady revolutionary traditions of the Russian intelligentsia while growing up poor on the streets of Brussels. His father had been close to the terrorist People's Will Party and proudly bore the name of one of the assassins of Czar Alexander II, N.I. Kibalchich, who was hanged in 1881 and whose portrait adorned his parents' ‘makeshift lodgings.'
¹

They were so poor that at age eleven he watched horrified as his younger brother died of malnutrition, while he survived on pilfered sugar soaked in coffee that little Raoul refused to eat. “Throughout the rest of my life,” he recalled, “it has been my fate always to find, in the undernourished urchins of the squares of Paris, Berlin and Moscow, the same condemned faces of my tribe.”

At age fourteen Victor is a militant Socialist Young Guard, and at fifteen a member of a rebel gang of Brussels apprentices writing and printing their own radical anarchist sheet
The Rebel
(pseudonym Le Rétif: ‘The Maverick').
²
At eighteen he is starving in Paris, devouring the contents of the Sainte-Geneviève library, editing
l'anarchie,
lecturing on individualism and translating Russian novels to survive. At twenty-one Kibalchich is sentenced to five years in a French penitentiary for refusing to rat on his Brussels buddies who, impatient of waiting for Utopia, terrorized Paris as the “tragic gang” of anarchist bank-robbers.
The experience of five years in the harsh French prison system (a regime of total silence, collective work, solitary confinement) tempered his soul. Ten years later, when he became a writer, his first novel,
Men in Prison,
was an attempt to rid himself of that suffering and to testify for all those prisoners whose voices are stifled in that “machine for grinding up men.”
³

Released from prison in 1917, Victor is expelled from France and comes back to life in Barcelona, where he works as a printer, participates in a revolutionary uprising, and publishes his first article, signed “Victor Serge.” The title: “The Fall of a Czar.”

Soon Serge attempts to reach revolutionary Russia via Paris, where he is arrested a ‘Bolshevik suspect' and held for over a year as in a typhus-infested concentration camp. It is his first contact with Bolshevism. After four bloody years the First World War finally comes to an end in November 1918. Exchanged for a French officer held by the Soviets, he arrives in St. Petersburg (then called Petrograd, later Leningrad) in January 1919. He would fictionalize these experiences of class struggle in Spain, detention in wartime France, and arrival in Red Russia in his second novel,
Birth of Our Power
(1931). This odyssey from Barcelona to Petrograd completes his evolution from ‘Maverick,' the anarcho-individualist rebel, to ‘Victor Serge' the revolutionary.

Victor joins in the defense of the frozen, starving Red capital, besieged by Western-backed White armies, and chronicles the siege in the French left-wing press.
⁴
Petrograd under siege would be the subject of Serge's third novel,
Conquered City
(1931).
⁵
Twenty-odd years later, he would draw on his memories of the 1919 siege to describe the Germans' World War II siege of Leningrad in
Unforgiving Years.
⁶

Despite misgivings about Communist authoritarianism, he joins the Party in May 1919, at the very moment when the Revolution seems about to go under. Serge is drawn to the Bolsheviks' heroic energy and participates in the creation of Press Service the Communist International (or Comintern) from its inception. By the spring of 1921, however, Serge's loyalties are severely torn when anarchist and dissident Communist sailors rebel and seize the island fortress of Cronstadt. Serge joins in
the thwarted attempt by Emma Goldman to mediate the conflict and then looks on in horror as the rebels and volunteer Communists massacre each other in a fratricidal combat across the melting ice floes.
⁷

After withdrawing briefly from politics, Serge accepts a Comintern assignment in Germany where the promise of a new revolution poses a last hope for saving the isolated Soviets from smothering under increasing bureaucratic dictatorship in Russia. In Berlin Serge serves the Comintern both as journalist and under various identities as a militant or ‘agent' (in those days there was little distinction). Serge's Berlin articles (signed ‘R. Albert') report on galloping inflation, mass unemployment, mutilated veterans begging, strikes, and abortive
putsches
were later collected as
Witness to the German Revolution.
⁸
This experience introduced him into the world of secret agents he explores in his last novel,
Unforgiving Years,
while his familiarity with the desperation of the German people living through the post-World War I crisis helped him recreate the atmosphere of Berlin at the end of World War II in the third movement of that novel.

In March 1923, the German Communists are outlawed after the fiasco of their aborted Hamburg
putsch,
and Serge flees with his family to Vienna, where he works for the Comintern and dialogues with Georg Lukacs and Antonio Gramsci. In 1925, despairing of a renewal of revolution in the West, Serge makes the insanely idealistic decision to return to Russia and join in the last-ditch antibureaucratic fight against Stalin as a member of the doomed Left Opposition led by Trotsky. Expelled from the Party in 1928, Serge turns to full-time writing after a near-death experience. In quick succession he publishes three novels and a well-documented history of
Year One of the Russian Revolution
in Paris before being arrested and deported to the Ural in 1933.

In a letter smuggled out of Russia and published after his arrest, Serge defends democratic freedom as essential to workers' socialism and describes Stalinist Communism as ‘totalitarian.' After months of interrogation in the notorious Lubianka prison, Serge is deported to the Ural, where he is joined by his teenaged son, the future artist Vlady.
⁹
Serge's wife Liuba Russakova, driven insane by the Stalinist terror, is confined
to an asylum. In 1936, protests by French trade-unionists and writers (including André Gide and Romain Rolland) lead to Serge's release from Russia, but the two novels he completed in captivity (“the only ones I had time to polish”) are seized by the GPU at the Polish border.
¹⁰

From precarious exile in Brussels and later in Paris, Serge struggles to support his wife and their two children while writing furiously to unmask the ‘big lie' of the Moscow show trials and Stalin's murderous intrigues in Republican Spain. His scrupulously documented eyewitness books and articles are greeted with silence by complacent intellectuals hypnotized by the ‘antifascism' of Communist-manipulated popular fronts. Serge is obliged to fall back on his old prison-trade of proofreader and find work in the print-shops of socialist papers that boycott his articles. Meanwhile, Serge and his comrades are living in a “labyrinth of pure madness” as Stalin's agents kidnap and murder Trotsky's supporters in the middle of opulent, indifferent Paris. “The Secret Agent,” the first section of Serge's posthumous novel,
Unforgiving Years,
is an eerie evocation of a doomed world capital paralyzed before the looming threat of war.

By 1939, Serge is on the verge of literary success with a novel about deported oppositionists in Stalin's Gulag:
Midnight in the Century.
¹¹
At the outbreak of the war, however, his books—considered subversive—are withdrawn from publication. When Paris falls to the Nazis, Serge, penniless, joins the exodus on foot—accompanied by his young companion Laurette Séjourné and his son Vlady. They survive a Luftwaffe strafing attack on the Loire and eventually find refuge in a Marseille villa rented by Varian Fry of the American Refugee Committee and shared with André Breton and his family. Aided by Dwight Macdonald in New York and by exiled comrades of the Spanish POUM settled in Mexico, Serge and Vlady board the last refugee ship out of Vichy France and end up in Mexico City in 1941, a year after Trotsky's assassination. Here Serge finds himself politically isolated—cut off from Europe by the war, unable to publish, boycotted, slandered, and physically attacked by Stalinist agents.

Nonetheless, it is in Mexico that Serge completes his most enduring work:
Memoirs of a Revolutionary, The Case of Comrade Tulayev,
and
Unforgiving Years,
which he finishes in 1946.
¹²
He also studies psychoanalysis, writes a manuscript on pre-Columbian archaeology and meditates on consciousness and death. He explores the meaning of the war not only in theoretical and political ‘theses' but also terms of dreams, earthquakes, volcanoes, and luxuriant vegetation. In 1947 his heart gives out, stressed by the altitude and exhausted by years of prison and privation. Penniless and stateless as usual, Serge is buried in a pauper's grave. In his posthumously published
Memoirs of a Revolutionary
he reflects: “Of this hard childhood, this troubled adolescence, all those terrible years, I regret nothing as far as I am myself concerned…. Any regret I have is for energies wasted in struggles which were bound to be fruitless. These struggles have taught me that, in any man, the best and the worst live side by side, and sometimes mingle—and that what is worst comes through the corruption of what is best.”

Serge's books have had almost as hard a life as their author. At the end of World War II, when Serge began
Unforgiving Years,
he was painfully aware of writing “exclusively for the desk drawer”—in which his classic
Memoirs
and
Comrade Tulayev
were already languishing, unpublished. Little hope in postwar Paris, what with paper shortages and the influence of the Communists in publishing. No luck either in New York and London, even with the help of Dwight Macdonald and George Orwell. With at least one Stalinist and two conservatives in every publishing house, “I'm at the point where I wonder if my very name will not be an obstacle to the novel's publication.”

Although
Tulayev
and the
Memoirs
eventually did achieve the status of ‘classics' (albeit neglected classics), for a variety of reasons Serge the novelist has remained marginalized. Yet he is arguably as important a novelist in the political genre as Malraux, Orwell, Silone, Koestler, and Solzhenitsyn. Nonetheless, Serge's radical socialist politics continue to disturb the consensus, while his prestige as a revolutionary participant-witness, oft-quoted by historians and political scientists, has tended to obscure his status as a literary artist. For example, political scientist Susan Weissman's recent book on Serge takes the position that “writing, for Serge, was something to do only when one was unable to fight.”
¹³
Another reason for Serge's neglect is his nationality, or lack thereof. As a stateless Russian who wrote in French, he apparently fell through the cracks between academic departments organized around national notions of French or Russian Literature. As a result, as yet no PhD theses on Serge have been written in any French university, nor will you find “Serge, Victor” listed in French biographical dictionaries and literary manuals.
¹⁴

To be sure, although he wrote in French, Serge is best situated in the Russian intelligentsia traditions of his expatriate parents. He inherited his father's scientific culture—physics, geology, sociology—while his literary culture came from his mother, who taught him to read from cheap editions of Shakespeare, Hugo, Dostoyevsky, and Korolenko and whose family was apparently connected with Maxim Gorky.
¹⁵
By his concept of the writer's mission, Serge saw himself “in the line of the Russian writers” who wrote about life in prison (Dostoyevsky's
House of the Dead)
and
The Lower Depths
(Gorky). And although he borrowed freely from cosmopolitan and modernist influences like Joyce, Dos Passos, and the French Unanimists, Serge developed as a writer within the Soviet literary ‘renaissance' of the relatively free NEP period.

Indeed, during the 1920s, Serge was the principal transmission belt between the literary worlds of Soviet Russia and France. Through his translations and regular articles on Soviet culture in the revue
Clarté
he introduced French readers to the postrevolutionary poetry of Alexander Blok, Andrei Biely, Sergei Yesenin, Ossip Mandelstam, Boris Pasternak, and Vladimir Mayakovsky as well as to fiction writers like Alexis Tolstoy, Babel, Zamiatine, Lebidinsky, Gladkov, Ivanov, Fedin, and Boris Pilnyak—his colleagues in the Soviet Writers Union.
¹⁶

By the mid-1930s, all of Serge's colleagues had been reduced to silence (suicide, censorship, the camps). “No PEN-club,” wrote Serge in
exile, “even those that held banquets for them, asked the least question about their cases. No literary review, to my knowledge, commented on their mysterious end.” Of that great generation of Soviet writers, only Serge—because he wrote in French and was rescued from the Gulag by his reputation in France—managed to survive. Only Serge had the freedom to further develop the revolutionary innovations of Soviet literature and to submit the world of Stalinism to the critical lens of fiction in novels like
Midnight in the Century, The Case of Comrade Tulayev,
and
Unforgiving Years.
As one Russian scholar put it: “Although written in French, Serge's novels are perhaps the nearest we have to what Soviet literature of the 30s might have been.”
¹⁷