Birth of Our Power (40 page)

Serge settled first in Brussels, then in Paris, where he continued to battle for the ideals of Soviet democracy and against the rising tides of Stalinism and fascism. His next novel,
S'il est minuit dans le siècle,
1939, told the story of the heroic resistance of the Oppositionists and Old Bolsheviks in Stalin's concentration camps, and he analyzed the Stalinist counterrevolution in books like
From Lenin to Stalin,
1937, and
Destiny of a Revolution,
1937. Serge was one of the few to recognize the outrage of the Moscow frame-up trials (which deceived a whole generation of Leftist intellectuals and even the U.S. Ambassador in Moscow) and to raise a voice against them.

Revolution had again broken out in Spain, and long before his contemporary and admirer, George Orwell (cf.
Homage to Catalonia),
Serge saw through Stalin's machinations there. While the workers and farmers were dying valiantly for the Spanish Republic, the Communists were quietly “eliminating” their political rivals in the rear. In spite of Serge's efforts, by the end of 1937, the Stalinists had murdered Serge's comrade Andrès Nin, the leader of the Spanish POUM (independent Marxist party) and jailed and killed countless others. “We are building a common front against fascism. How can we block its path with so many concentration camps behind us?” he wrote to André Gide (with whom he was later associated) on the eve of the latter's voyage to Russia.

World War II soon put an end to the limited possibilities for action that had remained open to Serge and his friends. As if reluctant to admit the catastrophe he hid long predicted and fought against, Serge was one of the last to leave Paris before the advancing Nazis in 1940, although he was clearly marked for death by the Gestapo. Arriving penniless in Marseille, with the Gestapo at his heels, he fought for months to get a visa while the great “democracies” closed their doors to him. At the last moment, he found refuge for himself and his family in Mexico.

Isolated as he now was from the European socialist movement that had been his life, forced to be an impotent witness to the debacle of Europe under Hitler, menaced by NKVD assassins (who had recently murdered his friend Trotsky, also in Mexico), deprived of a journalistic
platform by his Stalinist opponents, Serge might well have been thoroughly demoralized by his years in Mexico. But he continued to write, though without hope of publication, and produced some of his finest works (The
Case of Comrade Tulayev
and
Memoirs of a Revolutionary)
“for the desk drawer.” At the end of the war, in spite of failing health and financial difficulties, he made plans to return to France. But his many projects for new books and new struggles were cut short by his death on November 17, 1947.

Even at the lowest ebb of his fortunes (in 1943), Serge had found the courage to write: “I have undergone a little over ten years of various forms of captivity, agitated in seven countries, and written twenty books. I own nothing. On several occasions a press with a vast circulation has hurled filth at me because I spoke the truth. Behind us lies a victorious revolution gone astray, several abortive attempts at revolution, and massacres in so great number as to inspire a certain dizziness. And to think that it is not over yet. Let me be done with this digression; those were the only roads possible for us. I have more confidence in mankind and in the future than ever before.”

Serge's dedication to absolute political honesty and clear-sightedness
(probité
and
lucidité)
as the only bases for building a genuine revolutionary movement had its corollary in his devotion to artistic truth.

The noun “witness” is a rough English equivalent of the Greek
martus,
from which our word “martyr” is also derived. The idea of being a witness to one's faith implies not only testifying to a creed, but also participation and active suffering, freely accepted, in the name of something larger than one's personal ego. It also implies a privileged situation. Poets and other creative artists have long claimed this kind of status for themselves. Whether they chose to suffer in the name of the forward march of Humanity (Hugo and the social romantics) or for the purity of Art and the Ideal (Baudelaire and the symbolists), they have regularly assumed that the greater the risk and the deeper the plunge into the mysteries of existence, the richer will be the prize with which the artist returns and which he offers up to an often uncomprehending humanity.

Victor Serge was such a martyr-witness. He felt that “artistic detachment” was not a means of being objective about reality, but only a fashionable means of avoiding a confrontation with it. And he plunged
headlong into a maelstrom of social destruction and revolutionary upheaval. His commitment to revolution was made long before Communist state power made it easy and at times profitable for writers to become
engagé,
and it continued long after many of them had returned to their ivory towers proclaiming that their new-found god had failed. At the time of his death, Serge was one of the only survivors of three revolutionary generations. He had occupied a unique position, a position from which he, perhaps better than any other writer, was able to render both the heroism and the tragedy of a whole age of revolution.

For Serge, “He who speaks, he who writes is above all one who speaks on behalf of all those who have no voice”; he wrote out of a bond of solidarity with the men whose often tragic destinies fill the pages of his works—the heroes and the victims, the brave and the cowardly, the anarchists, Bolsheviks, bandits, madmen, poets, beggars, and the common workers. He defined the need to write as a need “first of all to capture, to fix, to understand, to interpret, to recreate life; to liberate, through exteriorization, the confused forces one feels fermenting within oneself and by means of which the individual plunges into the collective unconscious. In the work itself, this comes across as Testimony and Message …” He goes on to say, “Writing becomes a search for poly-personality, a means of living several destinies, of penetration into others, of communicating with them. The writer becomes conscious of the world he brings to life, he is its consciousness and he thus escapes from the ordinary limits of the self, something which is at once intoxicating and enriched with lucidity”
(Carnets,
Paris, 1952).

This attitude made it possible for Serge fully to appreciate the experiences of his turbulent life and to distill them into the concrete characterizations in his fiction. His life as an activist was unique in that he managed to be in virtually every revolutionary storm center during the first part of this century. But his experiences were nonetheless typical for a man of his times; individually, they recapitulated the experiences of millions of men caught up in the struggles of European society.

In the solitude of his Mexican exile, after a chance meeting with Trotsky's widow, Natalia Sedova, Serge wrote sadly in his diary: “[We are] the sole survivors of the Russian Revolution here and perhaps anywhere in the world … There is nobody left who know what the Russian Revolution was really like, what the Bolsheviks were really like—and men judge without knowing, with bitterness and a basic rigidity.” That ineffable quality, “what things were really like”—the aspect, tone
of voice, emotional context of a human event, personal or historical—that is what the novelist's ear and eye can catch and what makes of his social or historical fiction a truer record of living reality than the historian's data or the theoretician's rational frames.

Richard Greeman

New York, 1966

FICTION

Men in Prison
(Les hommes dans la prison,
1930). Translated and introduced by Richard Greeman. Garden City, NY: Doubleday & Co., 1969; London: Victor Gollancz Ltd., 1970; Middlesex: Penguin Books Ltd., 1972; London and New York: Writers and Readers, 1977; Oakland: PM Press, 2014. A searing personal experience transformed into a literary creation of general import.

Birth of Our Power
(Naissance de notre force,
1931). Translated by Richard Greeman. Garden City, NY: Doubleday & Co., 1967; London: Victor Gollancz Ltd., 1968; Middlesex: Penguin Books Ltd., 1970; London and New York: Writers and Readers, 1977; Oakland: PM Press, 2015. From Barcelona to Petersburg, the conflagration of World War I ignites the spark of revolution, and poses a new problem for the revolutionaries' power.

Conquered City
(Ville conquise,
1932). Translated and introduced by Richard Greeman. New York: NYRB Classics, 2009. Idealistic revolutionaries cope with the poison of power as the Red Terror and the White struggle for control of Petrograd during the Civil War.

Midnight in the Century
(S'il est minuit dans le siècle,
1939). Translated and introduced by Richard Greeman. London and New York: Writers and Readers, 1981; New York, NYRB Classics, 2014. On the eve of the great Purges, convicted anti-Stalin oppositionists in deportation attempt to survive, resist the GPU, debate political solutions, ponder their fates, and fall in love.

The Long Dusk
(Les derniers temps,
1946). Translated by Ralph Manheim. New York: Dial Press, 1946. The fall of Paris (1940), the exodus of the refugees to the Free Zone, the beginnings of the French Resistance.

The Case of Comrade Tulayev
(L'Affaire Toulaèv,
1951). Translated by Willard Trask. Introduction by Susan Sontag. New York: NYRB Classics, 2007. A panorama of the USSR (and Republican Spain) during the Purges, with a cast of sharply etched characters from provincial policemen to Old Bolsheviks and the Chief himself.

Unforgiving Years
(Les années sans pardon,
posthumous, 1973). Translated and introduced by Richard Greeman. New York: NYRB Classics, 2010. Tormented Russian revolutionaries in Paris on the eve of World War I, Leningrad under siege, the last days of Berlin, and Mexico.

POETRY

Resistance: Poems by Victor Serge
(Résistance,
1938). Translated by James Brook. Introduction by Richard Greeman. San Francisco: City Lights, 1972. Most of these poems were composed in deportation in Orenburg (1933–36), confiscated by the GPU, and reconstructed from memory in France.

PM Press plans to publish James Brook's new translation of Serge's complete poetry in 2016.

NONFICTION

Revolution in Danger: Writings from Russia 1919–1921
.
Translated by Ian Birchall. London: Redwords, 1997; Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2011. Serge's early reports from Russia were designed to win over his French anarchist comrades to the cause of the Soviets.

Witness to the German Revolution
(1923). Translated by Ian Birchall. London: Redwords, 1997; Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2011. A collection of the articles Serge wrote in Berlin in 1923 under the pseudonym R. Albert.

What Every Militant Should Know about Repression
(Les Coulisses d'une Sûreté Générale: Ce que tout révolutionnaire doit savoir sur la répression,
1925). Popular pamphlet reprinted in a dozen languages. Serge unmasks the secrets he discovered working in the archives the Czarist Secret Police,
then explains how police provocateurs operate everywhere and gives practical advice on security to activists.

The Chinese Revolution
(1927–1928), Online at
http://www.marxists.org/archive/serge/1927/china/index.html
.

Year One of the Russian Revolution (L'an 1 de la révolution russe,
1930)
Translated by Peter Sedgwick. London: Pluto Press; Chicago, Haymarket Books. Written soon after Stalin's takeover in Russia, this history presents the Left Opposition's take on the October Revolution and early Bolshevism.

From Lenin to Stalin
(De Lénine à Staline,
1937). Translated by Ralph Manheim. New York: Monad and Pathfinder Press, 1973. A brilliant, short primer, on the Russian Revolution and its degeneration, with close-ups of Lenin and Trotsky.

Russia Twenty Years After
(Destin d'une Revolution,
1937). Translated by Max Shactman (Includes “Thirty Years After the Russian Revolution,” 1947). Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press, 1996. Descriptive panorama and analysis of bureaucratic tyranny and chaos in Russia under Stalin's Five-Year Plans, based on statistics and economic, sociological, and political analysis.

The Life and Death of Leon Trotsky
(Vie et Mort de Léon Trotski,
1951), by Victor Serge and Natalia Sedova Trotsky. Translated by Arnold Pomerans. London: Wildwood, 1975; Chicago: Haymarket Books, forthcoming. Still the most concise, authentic, and well-written one-volume Trotsky biography, based on the two authors' intimate knowledge of the man and his times and on Trotsky's personal archives (before they were sealed up in Harvard).

Memoirs of a Revolutionary
(Mémoires d'un révolutionnaire, 1901–1941)
Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1951. Translated by Peter Sedwick. New York: NYRB Classics, 2012. Originally titled “Souvenirs of Vanished Worlds,” Serge's
Memoirs
are an eyewitness chronicle of the revolutionary movements Belgium, France, Spain, Russia, and Germany studded with brilliant portraits of the people he knew. This is the first complete English translation and comes with a glossary.

The Serge-Trotsky Papers: Correspondence and Other Writings between Victor Serge and Leon Trotsky
.
D. Cotterill, ed. London, Pluto Press, 1994. Includes their personal letters and polemical articles as well as essays on Serge and Trotsky by various authors.