4.5 stars. His "The Case Of Comrade Tulayev" is better, but this comes close.
Victor Serge (a pseudonym) was born in Belgium to Russian parents who were exiles from Tsarist Russia. He was immersed in revolutionary talk and ideas from childhood and became an activist himself, managing to survive both the revolutionary upheavals of the early 20th century and the advent of Stalin. He was initially an anarchist, later converting to Marxism and becoming an adherent of the Left Opposition in Russia and friend of Trotsky and Zinoviev.
This novel is a fictionalised memoir of his involvement in the general strike and abortive revolution in Barcelona in 1917, followed by escape across the French border and an attempt to reach Revolutionary Russia via the Russian Expeditionary Force on the Western Front. He is arrested as an undesirable alien and interned in a concentration camp before being exchanged after the Armistice with Western prisoners held by the new regime in Russia. The novel ends with the unnamed narrator starting to find his feet in St Petersburg and joyfully keeping warm by burning volumes of the Penal Code of the Tsarist Russian Empire. Exciting times !
The experiences of being an oppressed worker, an illegal agitator and a fugitive from the "justice" of reactionary regimes is vividly recounted, as are the comradeship and idealism which sustains him. The prison memoir is reminiscent of EE Cummings' "The Enormous Room" - except that he does not share Cummings' naive belief in the innocence of his fellow-inmates, or his confidence that everything will be OK in the end (Cummings was the son of Harvard intellectuals who were able to obtain US diplomatic pressure to achieve his release).
The novel sometimes seems a little disjointed and episodic, explained in the Introduction and Afterword as a consequence of its history - Serge was out of official favour by the time he wrote all his books, and had no expectation that they would ever be published in Russia. So he wrote short sections which were individually smuggled out and never edited as a whole. Stylistic deficiencies forgiven !
Some memorable passages I found moving:
{on the transitory hope of change engendered by The Great War} "And what if the circle of absurdity were not broken ? If after this war, these millions of dead, this disembowelled Europe, we were once again to know the peace of times past with the old multicoloured flags flying over the bone heaps ?";
{a famous matador's performance briefly distracts the workers from thoughts of revolution} "The thin sword held in the hand of this ex-cowherd from Andalusia seemed to be parrying the death blow aimed at the monarchy.";
{a right-wing newspaper article implies that Lenin is a German stooge} "What is the point of being incorruptible if you don't take money ?";
{soldiers' views of the Home Front in Paris echo Siegfried Sassoon} "the old man in the rear who knows everything of life for having used it up"......."By means of a marvellous alchemy, 100,000 businessmen transform pain, courage, faith, blood, shit and death into streams of gold.......";
"Fugitives cast two shadows; their own and the stool pigeon's";
{Allied victory has its downside for the workers} "Therefore, no revolution. Order, triumph, trophies, parades, the survivors' pride guaranteeing that the sufferings and the death would be forgotten, apotheosis of the generals."