The Case of Comrade Serge
Biography has many tasks, the most salient of which is obviously the re-creation of a human personality for subsequent generations. Sometimes, this duty takes the form of a rescue operation, by which the record of an important life is prevented from toppling into oblivion. And sometimes, too, it is necessary to redeem a reputation from calumny. At the point where this is done properly, biography may shade into history and alter the way in which we view an epoch. Susan Weissman’s study of Victor Serge meets all the above conditions.
The life of her subject was a near microcosm of the fate of the revolutionary left in the 20th century. Born to a family of Russian revolutionary exiles, Serge was brought up in Belgium--the Belgium of King Leopold’s Congo and the Belgium that furnished the pretext for World War I. His early life was that of an outsider; almost a bandit, in the louche anarchistic milieu that flourished after the fin de siecle. But the events of October 1917 caused him to mutate from rebel to revolutionary. He made his way back to the country of his forebears and hoped to see it transformed into the first socialist workers’ republic.
You might think that the rest of the story--disillusionment followed by deportation, imprisonment, persecution, exile and death--more or less wrote itself. But you would be mistaken. Not only did Serge put up a fight against Stalin every step of the way, he also committed almost all of his thoughts and experiences to paper (often at vast risk to himself), and much of this imperishable trove has survived. The archive includes some essential personal reminiscences and glimpses of real people and real events. It also includes a novel--”The Case of Comrade Tulayev”--which many think comparable to the work of George Orwell and Arthur Koestler as a fictional depiction of the moral nightmare of Stalinism and which has the additional distinction of having been written by a survivor of same. Serge also produced--and preserved in memory after the original pages had been destroyed by police--almost the only volume of gulag verse that has come down to us.
Weissman has set herself three objectives: to bring Serge to life; to honor the struggle of the left opposition, whose bravery in the face of Stalinism has received insufficient credit from historians; and to show that, when Serge differed from the left opposition, he was generally correct. This is an amazingly intricate project, and it involves her in writing against most of the preconceptions of the left as well as of the conservatives.
The general reader should not be discouraged; there is much to be learned from revisiting these seemingly arcane intellectual disputes. We learn from Serge that there were people close to Lenin and Trotsky who knew right from the start that Bolshevism might become a new word for despotism. There were “objective conditions” that might be used to give a partial explanation for this: It was not exactly the fault of Marxist theory that Russia was a savagely backward country or that it had been devastated by war and counter-revolution or that capitalist Europe was slipping into the lunacy of fascism. However, there were some farsighted comrades who understood that there was a menace also lurking in the “subjective conditions” and that a party with an attachment to uniformity, to police measures and to millennialist rhetoric might well be one of these.
By 1920, Serge was writing that he had begun “to feel ... this sense of danger from inside, a danger within ourselves, in the very temper and character of Bolshevism.” It was Daniel Bell who wrote that the first break between the Bolsheviks and the democratic left occurred at Kronstadt during February and March 1921, when the party used military means to suppress the very naval mutineers whose bravery had brought them to power in the first place. From then on, said Bell, everyone who defected had his own “Kronstadt” (he liked to say that Kronstadt was his Kronstadt). But Serge was a premature anti-Kronstadtist.
The Stalinization of the Bolshevik party took two related forms. One could be described as ideological. Stalin, who had no ideas of his own, simply took advantage of each new disaster to discredit and then destroy those true believers who had been caught taking the wrong “line.” He was a bureaucratic genius, adept at exploiting divisions among his opponents and promoting rumors of heresy or sabotage. Thus the second form of Stalinization: the crushing of anybody capable of independent thought. Those who don’t especially care to restage arguments about collectivization or the New Economic Policy or the Soviet attitude toward the Chinese Revolution can still profit enormously from studying those who tried to keep Russian culture and politics alive in a dark time.
Weissman has succeeded magnificently in tracing the slow and methodical way that Stalin squeezed the breath out of society, even as she reconstructs the courageous but doomed efforts of those who saw and felt what was coming. Since Serge was one of the most exemplary of these, and because he had friendships and contacts beyond the borders of the Soviet Union, he became an early cause celebre for those in the West who realized that something ghastly was going on in “the motherland of the working class.”
When he was imprisoned, his name was brought up at conferences of intellectuals, teachers and activists, including ones at which Communist sympathizers thought they had a majority. The name Victor Serge became an inconvenience to Stalin personally. His visitors, even some of his most deferential ones, kept bringing it up. In 1935, after an approach from Romain Rolland, the dictator called his police chief, Genrikh Yagoda. The first order of business was to ask what Serge had confessed to. After all, by then everybody in the gulag had been forced to confess to something, even if only impure thoughts. Yagoda told a surprised Stalin that the prisoner Serge had not confessed to anything at all. His highly unusual fortitude made it easier for him to be released without embarrassment and permitted to travel to the West.
It is possible that until then, he had not quite taken the full measure of Stalin’s ferocity. His place of internment, Orenburg camp, had been a relatively lenient one by gulag standards. And his brilliant novel, “The Case of Comrade Tulayev,” had made a working assumption that the 1934 assassination of Sergei Kirov, the party chief in Leningrad, was indeed the work of a lone and disaffected madman. The murder of Kirov was the pretext for the most sanguinary and hysterical of Stalin’s purges, so that Serge, in stressing the “loner” theory, may have sought to combat the fantastic accusations of conspiracy that were confected by the Soviet secret police. However, as Weissman points out with a strong body of supporting evidence, he may have been naive in declining to consider the even more chilling alternative--that Stalin himself had organized the assassination of one of the party’s favorite sons. In any event, it seems that Serge didn’t get himself out of the Soviet Union a moment too soon. In the years to come, not even the kind words of distinguished Western fellow travelers were enough to rescue any victims.
But neither was a dissident intellectual to consider himself safe once he had reached the West. It is extraordinary to read of the zeal and wickedness with which Stalin pursued the handful of Trotskyites and other oppositionists who challenged his rule in small magazines and tiny organizations. Perhaps he could not bear to be reproached in the language of Marxism; at all events he devoted a horrific energy to extinguishing this tiny flame of defiance. Even the recently released Venona papers, about the activity of Soviet intelligence in the Americas, reveal an astonishing amount of time and money expended, not on espionage against the imperialist foe but on the uprooting and destruction of negligible socialist minorities. (Weissman might quarrel with my use of the term “negligible” here: I should say that I refer only to their specific weight within society. Their moral claim to a place in history is exactly what she vindicates, but that’s another thing.) The culmination of Stalin’s campaign of assassination was the murder of Trotsky in Mexico in 1940, but by that time almost all members of his family, whether living in Russia or abroad, and a starkly impressive number of his personal and political friends had been “taken care of” in the same way. This book is in part their overdue monument.
Two names recur at this point: Mark Zborowski and Dwight Macdonald. Zborowski was an agent of Stalin posing as a Trotskyite in the West who successfully arranged many provocations and murders. It now seems highly probable that he also engineered factional and personal divisions among Stalin’s handful of exiled enemies, who tended to be strong personalities with a taste for polemic and infighting. He ended his days in the United States, not without having to suffer the revenge of Weissman repeatedly banging on his front door. It is chilling to learn of the ease with which men like Zborowski were operating in open societies. Macdonald emerges with great honor as one of the men (the other was Orwell) who believed in Victor Serge as an author and as a person of integrity. Macdonald’s tirelessness in helping Serge to survive physically was matched by his commitment to repudiating the hacks and liars who then infested so much of the American “left” milieu.
Serge died--some say was murdered--in exile in Mexico City in 1947. He was by then so convinced that Stalin was the main enemy that he took positions (albeit in extreme-left publications) that might be described as those of a cold-warrior. But he never abandoned his belief in the humanist character of the socialist idea, and his books are now taken up by a new generation of Russian left-democrats, who have opened a library in Moscow that bears his name. Weissman shares in their idealism, as her title indicates.
It’s not necessary to share it yourself in order to appreciate and value the work she has done. All you require is the capacity to be impressed by the difference that may be made by an intransigent individual.
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From ‘Victor Serge: The Course is Set on Hope’
“Who was Victor Serge? A worker, a militant, an intellectual, an internationalist by experience and conviction, an inveterate optimist, and always poor, Victor Serge lived from 1890 to 1947. He took part in three revolutions, spent a decade in captivity, published more than thirty books and left behind thousands of pages of unpublished manuscripts, correspondence and articles. He was born into one political exile, died in another, and was politically active in seven countries. His life was spent in permanent political opposition. Serge opposed capitalism--first as an anarchist, then as a Bolshevik. He opposed Bolshevism’s undemocratic practices and then opposed Stalin as a Left Oppositionist. He argued with Trotsky from within the anti-Stalinist left; and he opposed fascism and capitalism’s Cold War as an unrepentant revolutionary Marxist.... His refusal to surrender to either the Soviet state or the capitalist West assured his marginality and consigned him to a life of persecution and poverty. Despite living in the shadows, Serge’s work and his life amount to a corrective to Stalinism, and an alternative to the market.”
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Christopher Hitchens is a columnist for Vanity Fair and the Nation, and a contributing writer to Book Review. His latest book is “Letters to a Young Contrarian” (Basic Books).