Victor Serge
Victor Serge was a Belgian-born Russian revolutionary, novelist, poet, historian, journalist, and translator. Serge was a key eyewitness to and participant in the revolutionary movements of the 20th century and the opposition to Stalinism, which influenced his writing along with contemporary Modernist experiments. His notable and best-known works as an author include such novels as The Case of Comrade Tulayev, his historical account Year One of the Russian Revolution, and his Memoirs of a Revolutionary, 1901–1941.
Originally an anarchist, Victor Serge joined the Bolsheviks in January 1919 after arriving in Petrograd at the height of the Russian Civil War. He worked for the Comintern as a journalist, editor, and translator and was an early critic of the emerging Stalinist regime. Serge joined the Left Opposition in 1923 and was expelled from the Communist Party in late 1927 or early 1928. He was imprisoned by the Soviet regime in 1928 and again from 1933 to 1936.
Following an international campaign by prominent intellectuals, Serge was released from deportation in Orenburg and allowed to leave the Soviet Union in April 1936. During his subsequent exiles in France and Mexico, he continued to write extensively, producing critical analyses of the Soviet Union, several acclaimed novels depicting the lives of revolutionaries and the psychological toll of political struggle, and historical works.
His writings offer a unique perspective on the Russian Revolution, its degeneration into totalitarianism, and the broader struggles against fascism and authoritarianism; critics have also embraced his fiction works as remarkable examples of Modernist literature influenced by Joyce, Freud and Russian modernism. After decades of relative obscurity, interest in Serge's work experienced a significant revival towards the end of the 20th century and into the 21st, with many of his books being republished. He is remembered for his unwavering commitment to socialist ideals, his defense of individual freedom and critical thought, and his powerful literary testimonies to the "unforgettable times" he lived through.
Early life and political beginnings
Viktor Lvovich Kibalchich was born on 30 December 1890, in Brussels, Belgium, to impoverished Russian émigré intellectuals. His parents were Narodnik sympathizers who had fled Russia after the assassination of Tsar Alexander II in 1881, a plot in which a relative, Nikolai Kibalchich, a chemist, played a key technical role and was subsequently executed. Victor Kibalchich did not adopt the name "Victor Serge" until 1917, when he began writing for Tierra y Libertad in Spain.In his youth, Serge joined the Belgian Young Socialists but soon became disgusted with their electoralism and opportunism. He turned to anarchism, moving to Paris in 1909. There, he associated with anarcho-individualist and illegalist circles, became a writer and editor for the journal L'Anarchie under the pen name Le Rétif, and was implicated with the Bonnot Gang. Although he did not participate in the gang's expropriations, he defended the principle of individual expropriation. Refusing to denounce his comrades, Serge was sentenced to five years of solitary confinement in 1913 for his association with the group. This experience formed the basis of his first novel, Men in Prison.
Released in January 1917, Serge was expelled from France and went to Barcelona, Spain. There, he joined the CNT, participated in the syndicalist uprising of July 1917, and wrote for Tierra y Libertad. Disillusioned with anarchism's inability to confront the question of power and drawn by the Russian Revolution, he decided to go to Russia. He attempted to reach Russia via France but was arrested in October 1917 for violating his expulsion order and interned as a "Bolshevik suspect" in a French concentration camp at Precigne for fifteen months. In the camp, he studied Marxism with other Russian revolutionaries.
Russian Revolution and Comintern
Arrival in Russia and joining the Bolsheviks
Serge was exchanged for French military officers held by the Russians and arrived in Petrograd in January 1919. He was immediately struck by the harsh realities of the Civil War, famine, and the Red Terror, as well as the Bolsheviks' authoritarian measures. An article by Grigory Zinoviev on "The Monopoly of Power" shocked him, raising concerns about the suppression of democratic liberties. Nevertheless, Serge believed Bolshevism was necessary for the survival of the revolution and joined the Russian Communist Party in May 1919.Work in the Comintern and Civil War
Serge was quickly put to work in the newly formed Communist International, leveraging his linguistic skills and European revolutionary experience. He worked with Zinoviev, then President of the Comintern, and Vladimir Mazin to establish the Comintern's administration. He ran the Romance-language section, edited publications, translated, and met foreign delegates. During the Civil War, Serge participated in the defense of Petrograd, served as a trooper in a Communist battalion, engaged in smuggling arms, and became a commissar in charge of the archives of the former Tsarist secret police, the Okhrana. His experiences with the Okhrana archives led to his book What Everyone Should Know about State Repression.Early critiques and Kronstadt
While committed to the Bolshevik cause, Serge was critical of their authoritarian practices from early on. He objected to the "stultifying structures" and the rise of bureaucracy. The suppression of the Kronstadt rebellion in March 1921 was a particularly distressing event for Serge. He believed the Bolsheviks could have reached a compromise with the sailors, whose demands often mirrored earlier Bolshevik ideals, but that the Party panicked. Serge was horrified by the Party's lies surrounding the event, considering it a "watershed for the Revolution and its ideals". Despite his anguish, he ultimately sided with the Party, believing the alternative was counter-revolution.The introduction of the New Economic Policy in 1921 dismayed Serge, who saw it as a retreat towards capitalism. He proposed an alternative, a "communism of associations", based on worker-controlled cooperatives and democratic planning from below, but this found little traction. Disillusioned by the growing bureaucratization and the compromises of NEP, Serge and some French Communist friends attempted to establish an agricultural commune, "Novaya-Ladoga", in late 1921, but it failed due to local hostility and hardship.
Germany, Vienna, and Left Opposition
In late 1921 or early 1922, Serge accepted a Comintern assignment in Berlin. He was tasked with editing the French edition of the Comintern journal International Press Correspondence. He witnessed firsthand the economic and social decay of Weimar Germany, the rampant inflation, and the political polarization. He was critical of the Comintern's often misinformed and bureaucratic handling of the German revolutionary situation, particularly during the failed "German October" of 1923.During a trip to Moscow at the end of 1922 or in June 1923 for a Comintern Executive meeting, Serge was surprised by the relative prosperity brought by NEP but alarmed by the growing corruption and social disparities. He noted the degeneration within the Comintern itself.
From late 1923 to 1925, Serge was based in Vienna, continuing his Comintern work. Vienna had become a crossroads for international revolutionaries, and Serge associated with figures like Georg Lukács, Antonio Gramsci, and Adolf Joffe. It was during this period in Vienna, in 1923, that Serge formally joined the Left Opposition, which was coalescing around Leon Trotsky in the Soviet Union to resist the bureaucratization of the Party and advocate for a policy of industrialization and workers' democracy. After Vladimir Lenin's death in 1924, Serge wrote Lenin 1917, a study that, while seemingly an official tribute, implicitly criticized the emerging Stalinist leadership by emphasizing Lenin's internationalism and reliance on mass democracy.
Return to USSR and anti-Stalinist struggle
Serge returned to the Soviet Union in 1925, intending to actively participate in the Left Opposition. He found a society in moral crisis under NEP, with widespread disillusionment and the rise of a new privileged stratum. He became a leading figure in the Leningrad Opposition, working closely with Trotsky's supporters like Alexandra Bronstein. The Opposition advocated for a program of industrialization, revitalization of Soviet democracy, and a commitment to international revolution, opposing Joseph Stalin's theory of "Socialism in One Country".File:Л. Д. Троцкий, Л. Б. Каменев и Г. Е. Зиновьев. Середина 1920-х годов.jpg|thumb|Leon Trotsky, Lev Kamenev and Grigory Zinoviev, mid-1920s
The internal Party struggle intensified, with Stalin, Zinoviev, and Lev Kamenev launching a campaign against Trotsky and Trotskyism. After the Troika split in 1925, Zinoviev and Kamenev briefly formed the United Opposition with Trotsky in 1926. Serge was involved in unifying the Leningrad Trotskyist and Zinovievist groups. Despite their efforts, the Opposition was systematically silenced, their members harassed, and their platform suppressed. Serge was expelled from the Communist Party just after the Fifteenth Party Congress in December 1927, which also expelled the leading figures of the United Opposition. He was arrested in March 1928 and imprisoned for seven to eight weeks.
After his release from prison in 1928, Serge, now politically silenced within the USSR, turned to "serious writing" as a means of resistance and testimony. He had suffered a near-fatal intestinal occlusion, which, combined with his political "death", led him to dedicate the rest of his life to chronicling the "unforgettable times". In the following five years of precarious liberty, he produced a remarkable body of work, including the novels Men in Prison and Birth of Our Power, and the historical work Year One of the Russian Revolution. His works were published abroad but boycotted in the Soviet Union and often ignored or criticized by both the mainstream Western press and the official Communist left.
Serge was a firsthand witness to the brutal processes of forced collectivization and crash industrialization initiated by Stalin in 1928–29. He documented the ensuing grain crisis, the war against the peasantry, the mass deportations, and the devastating famine of 1932–33. His analysis, articulated in works like Soviets 1929 and later in Russia Twenty Years After, traced these policies to Stalin's bureaucratic response to the failures of NEP and the regime's determination to maintain power at any cost. He also chronicled the wave of show trials against "specialists" and former oppositionists, recognizing them as a means to find scapegoats for the regime's failures and consolidate Stalin's totalitarian control.