Memoirs of a Revolutionary 1901-1941 by Victor Serge, translated and edited by Peter Sedgwick
London: Oxford University Press, 1967 (this translation first published 1963)
I have been meaning to read Victor Serge for many years - in my peregrinations through the literature of revolution and totalitarianism and the tortured history of the Twentieth Century his name crops up again and again (in fact it's generally accepted that he coined the word totalitarian). I've finally got around to his memoirs, and what a fascinating and depressing read they are.
Depressing in the sense that he catalogs in great detail the failure of Socialism in the first half of the 1900s, specifically the descent of the USSR into despotism and a police state, far from the hopes of those that fought the Revolution hoping for a worker's democracy.
Serge does not in this memoir really go into his personal life: he briefly describes his childhood in Belgium and France (his parents were exiled Russian socialists), and while we know from the book that he has a son, and that his first wife was eventually driven insane by the privations and persecutions Serge and his family suffered in Russia, they are the background to the wider story Serge wishes to tell.
While this is not a history of the Russian revolution, Civil War and times up until the Terror, it provides all the background information to such a history: wonderful pen-portraits of major and not so major figures in Russia during the 1920s, descriptions of the tightening grip of the Cheka on Russian society and government, and the increasingly difficult time to be weathered by those that did not absolutely conform to the Bolshevik line.
Serge never stopped fighting for the Socialism that he believed in - he went to Russia to help the worker's revolution, he joined with the Bolsheviks because he believed at the time that they were the only group that could deliver such a revolution. When the Bolsheviks went down the path of authoritarianism and repression Serge fought from within the system, as to his mind that was the only way he could make a difference.
He watched with dismay as the Bolshevik leaders consistently chose the path of repression over openness. Instead of worker's tribunals, the leadership chose unlawful detention. Instead of abolishing the death penalty, they chose to allow the Cheka to shoot people without trial or recourse to any mechanism for reprieve. Serge laments that the new regime had learnt from the Tsarist one, and continued many of the unjust activities of the past - as he writes "[t]he Russian Revolution, although led by men who were upright and intelligent, did not resolve this problem; the character of the masses had received, from the experience of despotism [i.e. under the Tsars], a fatal stamp whose effects were imprinted in the leaders themselves."
Eventually, Serge's opposition to such despotism made him a marked man, for "[o]ur great Marxists of Russia, nurtured on Science, would not admit any doubt concerning the dialectical conception of Nature - which is, however, no more than a hypothesis, and one difficult to sustain at that." Because Serge espoused this, he was hounded out of his positions, and sent into internal exile. He most probably would have been shot or died in a prison somewhere as happened to many of his friends, but because of his international fame, particularly in France where he was well-known as a novelist, he was eventually expelled from Russia.
That was not the end of his troubles - the Russians made it very hard for him anywhere he went in Europe. Pushed to the edges of the socialist movement, Serge just barely scraped by financially (although lack of money or the finer things of life never worried him), and when the Second World War came, he was forced to flee to Mexico, the only place that would take him. Although Trotsky (whom Serge often disagreed with) could not escape Stalin's vengeance in Mexico, Serge managed to spend his last years there in relative, if miserly, calm; writing this memoir before dying in 1947.
Serge's legacy is that of a true revolutionary socialist, and a clear thinker much in the mold of George Orwell. He was always working for the proletarians, and against the apparatchiks and place seekers. When he wrote this memoir he was hopeful that the War would finally bring about the socialism he was looking for - it didn't, but certainly, in the West at least, many people's lives have been improved by governments adopting some measures that alleviate the lot of the workers.
I finish this review with a quote that bears repeating again and again, for totalitarianism in all its forms continues to be a blight on the human race, and we need to keep fighting for freedom. Serge wrote that "Totalitarianism has no more dangerous enemy than the spirit of criticism, which it bends every effort to exterminate. Any reasonable objection is bundled away with shouts, and the objector himself, if he persists, is bundled off on a stretcher to the mortuary. I have met my assailants face to face in public meetings, offering to answer any question they raised. Instead they always strove to drown my voice in storms of insults, delivered at the tops of their voices."
This book is dense, but full of wisdom and pathos. If you are a student of the history of the Twentieth Century, I can recommend this book.
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