Victor Serge

Victor Serge: the Course is Set on Hope

By Susan Weissman

Verso, 2001

364 pages, $77 (hb)

REVIEW BY PHIL SHANNON

http://www.greenleft.org.au/node/29367

Poverty and persecution dogged Victor Serge all his life. Ten of his 57 years were spent in jails, he was stalked by "security" police (including the Nazis' Gestapo, Joseph Stalin's secret police and Washington's FBI) and exile was his home. The Stalinist, fascist and capitalist regimes of the world knew a revolutionary Marxist when they saw one and they all wanted him silenced.

Susan Weissman's political biography of Serge should help to rescue this outstanding anti-Stalinist socialist from the margins of history. A Belgian-born Russian, Serge journeyed from "Belgian reformist socialism to French anarchist individualism, to Spanish anarcho-syndicalism to Bolshevik revolutionary Marxism". Jailed for supporting "anarchist bandits" in France and a failed anarchist insurrection in Spain, Serge arrived in Russia when "Bolshevik suspects" were exchanged for French army officers in 1919.

Serge joined the Bolshevik Party because he believed only the Bolsheviks "knew what to do next" — at crucial moments, anarchism had proved politically bankrupt, with anarchists dutifully abhorring "authority" and refusing to take power.

However, 1919 was a poor year to embrace the world's first socialist revolution. Serge arrived in Petrograd to "a world frozen to death ... a metropolis of cold, of hunger, of hatred, of endurance" in the midst of famine, disease and counter-revolutionary terror answered by a stern Bolshevik response.

Serge stood with the Bolsheviks despite heavy-hearted agonising over "revolutionary repression" that included the creation of a political police (the Cheka) and the suppression of a sailors' revolt in the strategic port of Kronstadt in 1921, which had it been successful "would have opened, in spite of themselves, the doors to a frightful counter-revolution".

Also so necessary, yet so terrible, was the partial return of the market under the New Economic Policy (NEP), which not only increased the supply of food from the peasants but freed up other "benefits" of the market, including wealthy merchants (NEP men), rich landowners and social ills like prostitution. Social alienation increased as the revolution's ideals retreated to the inner sanctums of the Bolshevik Party.

Help could only come from international revolution, especially in Europe. In Berlin, Serge began clandestine work for the Communist International (Comintern), the international organisation of the world's communist parties. But revolution failed in Germany, bungled through haste, indecision and amateurish preparations by a Comintern leadership rotten with bureaucratism and yes-men loyal to Stalin.

As party general-secretary, Stalin had begun a "molecular counter-revolution" in the Soviet Union by appointing his supporters to strategic posts in the party/state apparatus. Owing their jobs and privileges to Stalin, they formed a loyal and large bureaucracy with their own material interests. These "parvenu bureaucrats", as Serge called them with disgust, included former bourgeois, NEP men and all manner of opportunists.

To Serge, the contrast with the early years of the Revolution was stark. Despite all the hardship and errors, the Bolshevik Party of Vladimir Lenin and Leon Trotsky had been remarkably democratic and humanitarian, with organised party tendencies and debate in full flower. Serge saw these early years as "Bolshevism at its best".

For his pains, Serge is still accused by libertarians of being the Bolsheviks' "pet anarchist", a gross libel against not only Serge's political integrity, but also against the early Bolsheviks.

So began Serge's heroic role as a member of Trotsky's Left Opposition, under constant threat of arrest and murder from Stalin's political police (the GPU), whilst Stalin's "activists" shouted them down in party cells and broke up their meetings.

For Serge, however, the fatal weakness of the Left Opposition was "party patriotism", the confining of their struggle to the party. Such was their ideological and emotional investment in the Bolshevik Party that to be outside it was to be nothing. Earlier than Trotsky did, Serge recognised the paralysis of Stalin's party. Like Trotsky, Serge never recanted in order to rejoin the party.

Serge was jailed, released into precarious liberty for five years, then deported to internal exile in remote Kazakhstan. During those years, Serge focused on literary activity, chronicling Stalin's counter-revolution under the reactionary fantasy of "socialism in one country". This ideology oversaw the horrors of forced collectivisation, famine, rapid industrialisation and terror. Millions died.

Stalin's economic program was made all the more futile by the staggering waste of resources by a bureaucracy which owed its position to political loyalty, not ability. The Stalinist press was noisy with a "Marxism of dead slogans born in offices".

To cover the Stalinist bureaucracy's bungling, scapegoats were needed. "Saboteurs and wreckers" were discovered everywhere, culminating in the Moscow show trials during the "Great Terror" of 1936-39, which wiped out an entire generation of revolutionaries, who had to be "destroyed beyond physical destruction, their corpses surrounded by a legend of treachery".

Serge delved into the psychology of leading Bolsheviks "confessing" to outrageous nonsense at mock trials about being fascists and counter-revolutionary agents. These Oppositionists had been "softened up" by decades of persecution, torture and demoralisation, "confessing" out of cynicism not cowardice. Serge held no rancour for those who dishonoured themselves in this way, for they were Stalin's victims, but he celebrated those who held out and died rather than give in.

Exile, jail, deportation and assassination scattered the Left Opposition. Serge's moving roll-call of Stalin's socialist opponents resurrects their struggle, reminding us that Stalin, far from embodying the Russian Revolution, savagely broke it on the bones of thousands of Marxists.

Following an international campaign for Serge's freedom, Stalin was forced to let him leave Russia, but not before the GPU stole three of his novels (which have never been recovered).

Serge fled Paris on the day of the Nazi invasion before finding shaky refuge in Mexico in 1941. Stalin loathed his enemies being out of reach, especially articulate witnesses to his betrayal; Serge was slandered as a Nazi, while NKVD (as the GPU was renamed) agents trailed him and plotted his murder, making two attempts on his life.

Comradely disputes between Serge and Trotsky from 1936 had developed into open rupture by 1939. Some of the most bitter exchanges were the result of the work of NKVD agents deeply infiltrated into exile Oppositionist circles, but these operations merely brought to a head real divergences.

Serge rejected the Fourth International (Trotsky's international party) in favour of "centrist" parties like the POUM (the Spanish Workers' Party of Marxist Unification) which wavered between reform and revolution.

Beneath the sectarianism and ferocity of Trotsky's often ad hominem polemics, however, Trotsky was justified in stressing how the "pitiless logic" of revolution abhors the middle ground, a graveyard for half-made revolutions. Was Serge on his way from being a revolutionary socialist to a social democrat? He did oppose, along with other "anti-Stalinist" ex-revolutionaries, Vietnam's struggle for independence (Serge regarded Ho Chi Minh as a "clone" of Stalin spreading "totalitarianism"), but Serge never abandoned his belief that the revolution in Russia was killed, not by some "fatal flaw" of Marxism, but by economic backwardness, civil war, counter-revolution and, above all, international isolation.

When Serge heard of Trotsky's assassination in 1940, the pain of recent disagreements evaporated. Serge felt devastated, and alone. One day in November 1947, whilst catching a taxi, Serge died from a heart attack (some speculate that Serge was poisoned by the NKVD). His clothes were threadbare and his shoes had holes. Serge ended his life as he had begun — poor and persecuted.

He left behind, however, a stunning political-literary achievement. Serge's novels, histories, essays and diaries, with their poetic expressiveness and eye for penetrating detail, give a powerful sense of the atmosphere of revolution and counter-revolution, and the individuals who lived it. Politics, for Serge, was foremost and always about people.

Despite some blemishes towards the end, Victor Serge was an exceptional revolutionary socialist, and despite all the political defeats and "massacres so great in number as to inspire a certain dizziness", he retained an unbowed optimism — "We have known how to win and we are always on the eve of tomorrow".

Capitalism cannot rest easy, and socialism without democracy is not socialism at all — thus Serge's legacy lives on.