From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Victor Serge
Born	1890 Brussels, Belgium
Died	1947 Mexico City, Mexico

Victor Lvovich Kibalchich (В.Л. Кибальчич) (December 30, 1890-November 17, 1947) better known as Victor Serge was a Russian revolutionary. Originally an anarchist, he joined the Russian Communist Party on arriving in Petrograd in February 1919 and worked for the newly founded Comintern as a journalist, editor and translator. He was openly critical of the Soviet regime, but remained loyal to the Bolsheviks.

Contents 1 Early life 2 Career in the Soviet Union 3 Later life 4 External links 5 Offline Source 6 See also

Serge was born in Brussels Belgium, into a family who had gone into exile because of Narodnik activities. His father, an officer in the Imperial Guard, was a member of the Land and Liberty group, and was related to Nikolai Kibalchich of the People's Will; after the arrest and execution of Kibalchich as a result of the assassination of Alexander II in 1881, Serge's father fled the country. He eventually found work as a teacher at the Institute of Anatomy in Brussels. Victor Serge’s mother was Polish, a member of the Pederovskaya family.

The family became involved in the radical Russian émigré community of Western Europe. They remained poor and were often malnourished. During his childhood and adolescence, Serge read a great deal, and became interested in socialism and anarchism along with his friends, including Raymond Callemin. Serge joined the Belgian Socialist Party in 1905 at the age of 15, but soon came to feel that it was not radical enough. He became increasingly involved in anarchism, and was expelled from Belgium in 1909. He moved to Paris France and learned the printing trade.

His first article was penned in September of 1908. Under the pen name "Le Rétif" ("The Restless" or "the stubborn), Serge wrote many articles for Le Révolté and, starting in 1909, L'Anarchie (the journal founded by Albert Libertad whom Serge and his friends considered to be a hero). He was an outspoken supporter of individualist anarchism and illegalism, frequently clashing with L'Anarchie's editor, André Roulot (aka "Lorulot"), who favored less inflammatory rhetoric. In 1910, following a schism in L'Anarchie, Lorulot departed and Serge was named as the new editor of the paper.

He was later judged to be involved in acts of terrorism and received a five-year prison sentence in solitary confinement for his involvement in the Bonnot Gang. Several of his comrades were executed.

Serge was in prison on the outbreak of the First World War. He immediately forecast that the war would lead to a Russian Revolution: "Revolutionaries knew quite well that the autocratic Empire, with its hangmen, its pogroms, its finery, its famines, its Siberian jails and ancient iniquity, could never survive the war."

In September, 1914, Serge was in a prison on an island in the Seine, twenty-five miles or so from the Battle of the Marne. The local population, suspecting a French defeat, began to flee, and for a while Serge and the other inmates expected to become German prisoners.

On his release in 1917 he went to live in Spain, which was neutral in World War I but was the scene of an attempted syndicalist revolution. Meanwhile, Nicholas II was overthrown in February, 1917, and in July 1917 Serge decided to travel to Russia, for the first time in his life, to participate in the revolutionary activities there. In order to get there he returned to France. He studied art history for 2 months but was then arrested because he had promised to stay out of France. He was imprisoned without trial for more than a year, and engaged in political discussions with fellow prisoners. It was around this time that he began using the name Victor Serge. In October, 1918 the Danish Red Cross intervened and arranged for Serge and other revolutionaries to be exchanged for Bruce Lockhart and other anti-Bolsheviks who had been imprisoned in Russia.

When Serge arrived in Russia in January 1919 he became associated with the Bolsheviks. He eventually joined the Bolsheviks, having grown disillusioned with anarchism, believing that anarchism was a good way of life but bolshevism was the best theory of political change. He continued to support the involvement of anarchists and non-Bolshevik socialists in the revolution, and joined social groups largely containing non-communists, such as the circle around novelist Andrei Bely. Serge was concerned about the Bolsheviks’ desire for world revolution, particularly believing that France was far from revolutionary conditions. Serge lived in Petrograd which was known as one of the centers of revolution, but was going through a difficult period. At one time, Serge lived in a mansion that once belonged to a noble family. With no other way to keep warm, Serge and his companions began burning books, and he was particularly happy to burn a book of laws of the Russian empire. Serge met Maxim Gorky, and was offered a position at the Universal Literature publishing house run by Gorky. Though Serge deeply admired Gorky, he declined the position. At first Serge made his living as an inspector of schools and as a lecturer in the Petrograd Soviet. In March 1919 he began working for Grigory Zinoviev who had been appointed as President of the Executive of the Third International. Serge's knowledge of languages enabled him to organize international editions of the organization's publications. Serge criticized the bureaucratic personality of Zinoviev.

Serge was a very capable worker in the Comintern, and was particularly known for meeting people who arrived to the Soviet Union from various nations. He also worked to help those whom he believed were unjustly persecuted by the Secret Police.

Serge arrived in Russia during the middle of the civil war and the era of war communism. At first he believed that the Soviets could not afford to be merciful to their enemies.

He soon became disillusioned with the Soviet government. He joined with Emma Goldman and Alexander Berkman to complain about the way the Red Army treated the sailors involved in the Kronstadt Uprising. A libertarian socialist, Serge protested against the Red Terror that was organized by Felix Dzerzhinsky and the Cheka.

In 1923 Serge became associated with the Left Opposition group that included Leon Trotsky, Karl Radek, and Adolf Joffe. Later Gregory Zinoviev and Lev Kamenev joined in the struggle against Joseph Stalin. Serge was an outspoken critic of the authoritarian way that Joseph Stalin governed the country and is believed to be the first writer to describe the Soviet government as "totalitarian".

In 1928 Serge was expelled from the Communist Party. He was now unable to work for the government and over the next few years he spent his time writing Year One of the Russian Revolution (1930) and two novels Men in Prison (1930) and Birth of Our Power (1931) and translating in French Vera Figner's Memoires. These books were banned in the Soviet Union but were published in France and Spain.

“Year One of the Russian Revolution” is largely Serge’s interpretation of events that happened during his second imprisonment in France. Serge acknowledged in this work that the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk was necessary and that Lenin and Trotsky were right to negotiate it despite the humiliation it caused. Based on his travel through Finland on his way to Russia, Serge acknowledged the role of the failed Finish revolution and the White Terror that followed in foreshadowing the Russian Civil War and the Bolshevik government’s feeling that it was necessary for them to conduct their own terrors. Serge was one of the few historians of this period to give prominent attention to the role of Finland in early Soviet history.

Serge was arrested and imprisoned in 1933. Most of the Left Opposition that were arrested were executed but as a result of protests made by leading politicians in France, Belgium and Spain, Serge was kept alive. The Communist Secret Police (GPU) obtained a confession from his sister-in-law, Anita Russakova, that she and Serge had been involved in a conspiracy led by Leon Trotsky. Serge knew from his contacts in the Communist Party that if he signed the confession he would be executed.

Protests against Serge's imprisonment took place at several International Conferences. The case caused the Soviet government considerable embarrassment and in 1936 Joseph Stalin announced that he was considering releasing Serge from prison. Pierre Laval, the French prime minister, refused to grant Serge an entry permit. Emile Vandervelde, the veteran socialist, and a member of the Belgian government, managed to obtain Serge a visa to live in Belgium. Serge's relatives were not so fortunate: his sister, mother-in-law, sister-in-law (Anita Russakova) and two of his brothers-in-law, died in prison.

On his arrival in France in 1936, Serge resumed work on two books on Soviet communism, From Lenin to Stalin (1937) and Destiny of a Revolution (1937). He also published several novels and a volume of poetry, Resistance (1938) about his experiences in Russia.

When France was invaded by Germany in 1940, Serge together with his son Vlady Kibalchich, managed to escape to Mexico where he continued to publish novels such as The Long Dusk and The Case of Comrade Tulayev. By this time, the Communist establishment publicly denounced him as a Trotskyist, as a result of his 1933 trial and subsequent imprisonment. He was subjected to strong criticism by the Mexican press and by veteran Communist propagandists Otto Katz (writing under the nom-de-plume André Simone) and Paul Merker.

His autobiography, Memoirs of a Revolutionary, was first published in the United States in 1945.

Serge's health had been badly damaged by his periods of imprisonment in France and Russia. However, he continued to write until he died of a heart-attack in Mexico City on 17th November, 1947.

• Year One of the Russian Revolution from the Victor Serge Internet Archive on Marxists Internet Archive 2005. Translation, editor's Introduction, and notes © 1972 by Peter Sedgwick. Retrieved April 5, 2005.

• "Victor Serge and the IVth International". Statement criticising Serge by the editors of the Bulletin of the Russian Opposition, writing in Quatrième Internationale April 1939. Source: Victor Serge & Leon Trotsky, La Lutte Contre le Stalinisme. Maspero, Paris, 1977 Translated for Marxist Internet Archive by Mitch Abidor in 2005. Retrieved April 28, 2005.

• The Unhappy Elitist: Victor Serge’s Early Bolshevism by Peter Sedgwick. History Workshop Journal 17, Spring 1984. Reprinted online by What Next? Marxist journal. Retrieved May 11, 2005.

• CRITIQUE 28/29: The Ideas of Victor Serge: a Life as a Work of Art Edited by Susan Weissman (Introduction on-line. Retrieved March 14, 2007.)

• Peter Sedgwick: "Introduction to Victor Serge, Memoirs of a Revolutionary"

Weissman, Suzi. Victor Serge: The Course is Set on Hope. Verso, 2001.

• Anarchism in France
• Anti-Stalinist left