Memoirs of a Revolutionary

by Victor Serge, Charles Lamb, Peter Sedgwick (Translator)

“. . . one of the most vivid and convincing revelations of a social rebel’s mind ever written.”—The Times

“This is fearsomely good writing. And the ultimate hero of Memoirs of a Revolutionary is not the one we would normally suspect: not Lenin, not Trotsky, not the multitudes of French, German, Italian, Spanish and Russian Anarchists, Communists and radicals that Serge knew. . . Rather, the hero in this story is Serge himself.”—RALPH

“I can't think of anyone else who has written about the revolutionary movement in this century with Serge's combination of moral insight and intellectual richness.”—Dwight Macdonald

“An extraordinary time capsule from the darkest hours of the twentieth century. Although often compared to Orwell, Serge is a more noble and irreconcilable figure. This book—written as the GPU was exterminating the last of the Bolshevik old guard-is a fiery testament to political conscience and revolutionary hope. Through Serge, we know something of those gigantic but largely forgotten figures: the anarchist and communist opponents of Stalin.”—Mike Davis

“The best account of [Serge's] life remain his “Memoirs,” and one hopes its re-publication wins Serge the wider readership he deserves. . . . An impassioned work of burning intensity, Serge's “Memoirs,” charts not only his own harrowing odyssey through the revolutionary maelstrom of interwar Europe but also the tragic fortunes of an entire generation of leftists and fellow revolutionaries . . . For the contemporary reader, “Memoirs,” still offers one of the finest—and most terrifying—accounts of the degradation of the Russian Revolution into murderous tyranny and bureaucratic strangulation . . . Serge's capacity to convey roiling human passion never dims; whether he is writing about allies or enemies, his subjects live and breathe.”—Los Angeles Times Book Review

The book begins in 1906, with Serge describing his impoverished, idealistic days as an activist in the left-wing movements of Europe; it ends with the years 1936 to 1941 after his release from exile to a remote city in a time of famine, expulsion from the Soviet Union, escape from Nazi agents in Paris, and flight to Mexico as a political refugee. More than a personal memoir, this insider's history of the revolution and its allied upheavals fills in the human details that add to our understanding of how mass movements take place, how governments stand and fall, how individuals survive in struggles between ideologies. It is a human memoir and, though set in an inhumane time, during a clash among powerful ideals, it is a humane memoir.

Genres: History, Nonfiction, Politics, Russia, Biography, Memoir, Autobiography

446 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1951

About the author

Victor Lvovich Kibalchich (В.Л. Кибальчич) was born in exile in 1890 and died in exile in 1947. He is better known as Victor Serge, a Russian revolutionary and Francophone writer. Originally an anarchist, he joined the Bolsheviks five months after arriving in Petrograd in January 1919, and later 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 ideals of socialism until his death.

After time spent in France, Belgium, Russia and Spain, Serge was forced to live out the rest of his life in Mexico, with no country he could call home. Serge's health had been badly damaged by his periods of imprisonment in France and Russia, but he continued to write until he died of heart attack, in Mexico city on 17 November 1947. Having no nationality, no Mexican cemetery could legally take his body, so he was buried as a 'Spanish Republican.'

Reviews

[Buck · Rating 4 out of 5]

Even the footnotes in this book are heartbreaking. Their helpful mini-bios of the obscure Mensheviks and trade unionists who crossed paths with Serge almost invariably end with a matter-of-fact notation along the lines of: ‘shot by Cheka, 1920’ or ‘arrested, 1937. Disappeared’ (1937 was a very bad year to be a Russian). Serge himself will introduce some passing acquaintance into the narrative and then, as often as not, mention parenthetically that he was later executed or vanished into the camps.

What’s really fascinating about this account of Stalinist Russia isn’t the full-blown portraits of Trotsky, Gorky and the rest, or the lucid political analysis; it’s Serge’s brief, incidental, almost grudging descriptions of just these little people, these ‘non-entities’ who have no other claim on posterity (and who were doomed, most of them, to an anonymous death in some GPU cellar). Variously heroic, mediocre or insane as the case may be, they are all intensely alive for the few sentences that Serge spares on them. You find yourself thinking: ‘But - but this is amazing! Who IS this guy? I want to know everything about him.’ But of course, there is simply nothing else to know. Consider Serge’s offhand summary of the career of a certain Guilbeaux, a French communist:

Guilbeaux’s whole life was a perfect example of the failure who, despite all his efforts, skirts the edge of success without ever managing to achieve it. He wrote cacophonous poetry, kept a card-index full of gossip about his comrades, and plagued the Cheka with confidential notes. He wore green shirts and pea-green ties with greenish suits; everything about him, including his crooked face and his eyes, seemed to have a touch of mould.

I mean, what else is there to say about the poor man? His whole moral essence just hangs there, like some ugly print in a shabby bedsitter.

Memoirs of a Revolutionary is a window on to the nightmarish cosmos that was the Soviet Union – a cosmos which, but for Serge and a few others, would remain utterly inconceivable to most of us. I’m sorry to sound dogmatic, but you just have to know about this stuff.

[John · Rating 5 out of 5]

Today - after my first reading - I can best convey my experience of this book by describing a similar experience, that of my first viewing of "Russian Ark," the most stunningly powerful movie I've ever seen and one that, to my mind, fully justifies the invention of talking pictures. What is so remarkable and original about this movie is that 120 of its 123 minutes constitute a single tracking shot - not the first director's cut - none. The camera moves forward, looking backward as it progresses through the rooms of the Hermitage in the order in which they were built and occupied from Peter the Great through Nicholas II and the hoards of 1917. The camera records people - all in appropriate period costume - and events that actually occurred in those rooms. The camera does not stop moving, its velocity doesn't change, at all - ever - if I recall correctly. No voice-overs announce the event, or names the participants or indicates with a single word the significance of the person/event committed to film. It simply records - but of course, one realizes - after the fact - that the camera operated in accordance with the directions documented in a script and in strict compliance with a schedule. After all the director was making the lengthiest tracking shot in the history of cinema, and all those extras had to change costume, rush about that vast palace(s) to their next positions and act as if they had always been there.

I responded to Serge's memoir in a state of slack-jawed awe, just as I did when the last devastating scene of "Russian Ark," which I won't disclose, faded to black. He records his memories of his life from about the age of eight, beginning in 1908 or so, I would say, pre-WWI Belgium, certainly, until his departure from France for Mexico in 1941 as the Nazis were occupying that country. And from beginning to end we read Serge's experiences of his life as an anarchist and militant revolutionary, then communist, then Bolshevick, a rather highly placed official in the Comintern, his participation in the Left Opposition (of Trotsky), his expulsion from the communist party, subsequent imprisonment, exile to central Asia, final deportation, etc., etc.

So why does this book remind me of "Russian Ark"? Serge's book. his masterwork it appears, consists of a stream, flood really, of memories in precis, collected in roughly chronological order in which he conveys his experience of persons and events related to left-wing, revolutionary politics in Europe and to Russian/Soviet history from about 1908 through 1941. And there are literally scores of events, a few of which he names, and hundreds of the actors in them, whom he does name and describe. So we have, in this page turner, an unrelenting flow of persons and events, his recollections of which and his estimates of whom he records in sparse, altogether clear and unambiguous prose. I felt borne along in this flood of people, places and events as if guided by a Virgil-like being, who had already seen and known it all.

I will most certainly read this book again. My second reading will likely occur when I read another biography of Lenin or Stalin or another history of the Russian Revolution or a history of the first two or three decades of Soviet history. No matter how great their authors' narrative skill or artistry, no matter the scope of their authors' erudition and deep knowledge of their subject -nothing replaces an account of lived experience. These biographies and histories will illuminate the events in ways that Serge does not - in that these narratives will provide information and understanding of the issues and actions to which Serge refers and responds - in context. But not even the best of them - Lincoln, Tucker and Cohn come to mind at this moment - even approach the immediacy of Serge's accounts. How could they? That's not their purpose.

But my enduring response is of the author, whom I have come greatly to admire (with certain reservations) - which is obviously the point of his memoir. It's hard for me to accept, however, that such paragons of incorruptible revolutionary virtue, integrity, resolution and human endurance exist or have ever existed, and I mean here persons who present themselves as survivors of every privation imaginable - apart from endless, slow torture and starvation unto death - one decade after another without so much as a change of a single point in either systolic or dystolic pressure - ever. I can't imagine the possibility of such equaminity, another trait that Serge shares with the camera of "Russian Ark". And if I choose to believe what he writes, his life in those years consisted entirely of violent or potentially violent or imminently violent episodes: arrest, imprisonment, forced labor, assassination, etc., etc., etc., forty years of it, without a moment's interruption, not a single moment's interruption. But perhaps it is so. I will note that he seems to have been entirely unmoved by his first wife's, his lovely "bluebird's," collapse into insanity, her family's complete annihilation under Stalin - and all variety of disasters that lead to the deaths of most everyone he ever knew. How is this possible?

But I refuse to quibble about the distortions of memoir. And I don't care if Serge really was the zombie he seems to have been, but whom I choose not to notice very much - today. I will suspend disbelief - as I write - because Serge has created in prose a world that I can sense, that I can believe and that I can enter into, walk about for a while - and then exit - gratefully.

AND ANOTHER THING...
I really do wish that Serge had not written his last chapter, Looking Forward, which he appears to have written well after completing the first nine chapters. Up to that point I thought I understood Serge's view regarding the claims of the individual vis-a-vis state and society, and it seemed clear that he regarded as absolute the individual's right of independent thought and expression, where expression includes the right to organize like-minded individuals for struggle that eventuates in the realization of the content of those shared thoughts/goals, etc. I maintained this impression despite certain statements about the primacy of the "common fate," and the flow of "history," which I have never succeeded in thinking of as disembodied abstract "forces" that appear un-caused, unbidden and achieve their effects in the absence of human intervention. But Serge's story was altogether too gripping to bother with these niceties.

Then I read "Looking Forward," and I wish I hadn't. It appears that Serge wrote this after-thought in response to a comment that "I show hardly any interest in talking about myself." [Not true, by the way.] Then he writes: "It is hard for me to disentangle my own person from the social processes, the ideas and activities in which it has shared, which matter more than it [his person, that is] does and which give it [his person] value. ... I view human personality as a supreme value, only integrated in society and in history. The experience and thought of one man have no significance that deserves to last, except in this sense. ... nothing is truly our own unless it be our sincere desire to share in the common life of mankind." Serge gives no reasons for this position, even if it were clear what this position means. What men, what common life, where, when? Etc. Can the individual oppose this "common life," whatever that is, legitimately? Can the individual pursue an existence outside and apart from the "common life" - legitimately, and is society obliged to acknowledge, support, cultivate, ignore that life apart? And so on.

Then comes the last sentence of his memoir: "The passion, the experience and even the errors of my fighting generation may perhaps help illumine the way forward, but on one condition, which has become a categorical imperative: never to give up the defense of man against systems whose plans crush the individual." (p.447) How is it that the preservation of the individual has become a "categorical imperative," an absolute - if he intends to import Kant into this discussion? And what constitutes "crushing"? Mass murder and forced labor certainly, but anything short of those extremes? Can the "system" impose no legitimate constraints on the individual if the "common life" demands those constraints? Are there any limits on the powers that flows from the "common life" to the state or society? If so what are they? And on and on.

This assembly of Serge's apparently contradictory statements represents a rather small sample. But what am I to make of it all?

It seems to me that Serge was more than a little conflicted. He seems to have harbored ideas that would authorize the suppression/submersion of the individual in the "common life," i.e. in the revolution, perhaps not to the degree that seems acceptable to Stalin, but in that direction. He seems also to have advocated exactly the opposite position, one that asserted the primacy of the individual, his independence of thought, criticism, expression and perhaps the freedom to act accordingly.

I find this all a bit heartening actually. Perhaps there are fissures in the facade - after all.

It is also true that even if Serge were conflicted in his thinking, he appears never to have acted in ways that would undermine the well-being of anyone - ever. Indeed, he intervened where and when and how he could in order to save lives, and he even succeeded from time to time.

[Jonfaith · Rating 5 out of 5]

We remained convinced that the achievements of a system of Socialist democracy would have been better, infinitely better and greater, with less cost, no famine, no terror, and no suppression of thought.

This is a magnificent if tragic history of the Russian Revolution. Serge also details the political climate across Europe in the transition from Lenin to Stalin. War Communism, the NEP and the events leading to the Terror of 1937 are explored and ruminated upon in a memoir where the observer is himself largely absent. The scion of exiled revolutionaries, Serge has a Dickensian childhood followed by time in Belgian prisons. He journeys to join the Anarchist movement in Barcelona before heading east to St Petersburg and the pages of History. Allied with Trotsky but always in favor of democracy and an abolition of the death penalty, Serge was endangered from the beginning. This memoir abounds with marvelous images and poignant conversation.

My highest recommendation.

[Mike · Rating 5 out of 5]

'On March 1 1881', Victor Serge writes,

...nine years before my birth, on a day of shining snow, a fair-haired young woman, her face calm and determined, who was waiting near a St. Petersburg canal for the passing of a sledge escorted by Cossacks, suddenly waved a handkerchief. There was an echo of muffled, soft explosions, the sledge came to a sudden halt, and there on the snow, huddled against the canal wall, lay a man with graying side-whiskers, whose legs and belly had been blown to shreds: the Tsar Alexander II. The party called People's Will published his death sentence on the following day.

It might seem strange to begin a memoir nine years before one's birth, but Serge has his reasons. Born to Russian émigré parents in Brussels, in 1890, about twenty years after Lenin, Serge (whose real surname was Kibalchich) eventually moves to Paris and becomes involved in the French anarchist and socialist movements; he's arrested in 1913 and spends five years in a prison located on an island in the Seine. A few things happen in the world while he's in prison. After a prisoner swap in January 1919, at the age of 28 , Serge finds himself en route to Russia, the country where socialism has truly taken hold, or so he believes.

We crossed the Soviet frontier at dead of night, in the middle of a forest...The sharp cold bored through our thin Western clothing and our teeth chattered. The children, swaddled in bedclothes, were crying. Men with lanterns, standing on a little white bridge in the misty moonlight, counted us as we passed. Choked with joy, we shouted 'Greetings, comrade!' to a Red sentry; he nodded, and then asked if we had any food. We had. Here, take it. The Revolution is hungry.

Russia also happens to be a country where he speaks the language fluently, although he's never been there. Now to me that would be worth writing about. To arrive in a country that is simultaneously alien but where you can understand every word- how would that feel? But Serge doesn't really talk about it. Likewise, while he generously describes details of his fellow prisoners' lives in Paris, his personal feeling about those years is that they were 'quite hellish.' Well...so one would expect. One reason these early chapters seem more schematic might be the fact that they describe what was by then the distant past (Serge wrote Memoirs... years later, in Mexico), but his refusal to dwell on his own subjective impressions is a recurrent theme in the book, as well as, I believe, tied into a question that I kept asking myself as I read. What is a revolutionary, after all? For Serge, it's someone who thinks about 'we' more often than 'I', someone for whom a sense of shared purpose and responsibility, and ultimately fate, is more important than the individual. A revolutionary is someone who doesn't stand separately outside of history but is intertwined with it, which might explain why Serge chooses to begin his memoir with the assassination of Alexander II. This sentiment might in certain contexts seem noble, it also carries the possibility of totalitarianism, but I feel confident in saying that, had Serge's vision somehow come to pass, Russia (not to mention Ukraine, Georgia, and many other countries in the region) would have been far better off.

But a revolutionary, at least in Serge's experience, is also someone who sees their ideals perverted literally beyond imagination. Simon Sebag Montefiore has remarked on how often the victims of Stalin's terror compared their plight to a dream, but something of that surreal quality comes through even in Serge's depiction of the 20s. At first, he supports the revolutionary government. He thinks it's only necessary that a revolution must defend itself militarily in its immediate aftermath, even through terror; besides, it's the only revolution they have. And yet the evidence piles up over the years that the ideals of 1917, or at least what Serge considers to be the ideals of 1917, are lost- the falsifications around the Kronstadt rebellion, the maintenance of the death penalty even after the Civil War has been won, the unchecked power of the Cheka and then the GPU, the increasing censorship and standardization of newspapers and literature. People go mad, commit suicide. I got used to short sketches of people Serge knew- those who questioned and those who went along, politically committed or apathetic, true believers or opportunists, virtuous or venal, courageous or cowardly, unknown writers with the great novel of the world in their heads or dull as bricks- all of whose stories tended to come to similar ends: 'they vanished into the camps'; 'I was never to see them again'; 'she disappeared in 1936'; 'he was shot in 1937.' Another way to try to make sense of the madness was to become a conspiracy theorist. As one acquaintance confides in Serge,

Konstantinov lays his cards on the table, unveils his secret to me. The secret is that everything has been betrayed. From the years when Lenin was alive, treason has wormed its way into the Central Committee. He knows the names, he has the proofs. He cannot tell me anything, it's too dangerous: they know that he knows. The exposure of this plot demands infinite clairvoyance, a genius for inquisition, and absolute discretion...He whispers the names of foreigners, of the most powerful capitalists, and of yet others that have an occult significance for him. He specifies a city across the Atlantic. I follow his chain of reasoning with the secret uneasiness that one feels in the presence of some lunatic logician. And I observe that he has the inspired face of a madman. But in all that he says, he is driven by one basic idea that is not the idea of a madman: 'We did not create the revolution to come to this.'

By the late 20s, Serge has been declared an 'Oppositionist', which means that his writing can't be published, he's under constant surveillance, his family is harassed, his relatives are fired from jobs and starved. People are afraid to shake his hand on the street. You might think that this would be the time to put aside that indulgent interest in literature and concentrate on simply trying to survive the world-historical forces that threaten to crush you; the thought occurred to me, at least. And yet it's during this terrifying period, during which he knows he may be arrested or even killed at any time, that Serge develops a conception of literature's true value, a conception that I find both simple and beautiful, that seems to balance the notion of 'I' with 'we.'

Historical work did not satisfy me entirely. Apart from the fact that it demands both resources and undisturbed leisure of an order that I shall probably never enjoy, it does not allow enough scope for showing men as they really live, dismantling their inner workings and penetrating deep into their souls...I had, and still have, an immense respect for literary activity- and an equally great contempt for 'literature.' Many authors write for pleasure...and may do it well; many others practice a conscious profession for the sake of earning a living and winning a name. Those who have a message within them express it in the process, and their contribution has human value. The others are simply suppliers to the book trade. My conception of writing was and still is that it needs a mightier justification: as a means of expressing to men what most of them live inwardly without being able to express, as a means of communion, a testimony to the vast flow of life through us, whose essential aspects we must try to fix for the benefit of those who will come after us. In this respect, I belonged to the tradition of Russian writing.

I knew that I would never have time to publish my works properly. They would be worthwhile without that. Others, less engaged in combat, would perfect a style, but what I had to tell, they could not tell. To each his own task.

It seems clear that this conception of writing (which he set to paper years later, in Mexico) as a communicative act could only have been encouraged by his subsequent imprisonment on an upper floor of the Lubyanka in Moscow, the kind of hushed, antiseptic Twilight Zone prison section that Koestler makes so vivid in Darkness at Noon. There's only one detail I found strangely, incongruously permissive- thirteen cigarettes and thirteen matches a day. Exactly thirteen. Other than that...how the fuck did he survive?

It was a prison of noiseless, cell-divided secrecy, constructed inside a block that had once been occupied by an insurance company. Each floor formed a prison of its own, sealed off from the others, with its individual entrance and reception kiosk; colored electric light signals operated on all landings and corridors to mark the various comings and goings, so that prisoners could never meet one another. A mysterious hotel corridor, whose red carpet silenced the slight sound of footsteps, and then a cell, bare, with an inlaid floor, a passable bed, a table and a chair, all spick and span. A big, barred window with a screen masking it from the outside. On the freshly painted walls, not a single scribble or scratch. Here I was in the void, enveloped in a quite astonishing silence. Except that, far away, with a jangle of bells and ironmongery, the trams were passing by in Miasnitskaya Street, which at all hours of the day was full of people...

Here, in absolute secrecy, with no communication with any person whatsoever, with no paper, not even one sheet, with no occupation of any kind, with no open-air exercise in the yard, I spent about eighty days. It was a severe test for the nerves, in which I acquitted myself pretty well. I was weary with my years of nervous tension, and felt an immense physical need for rest. I slept as much as I could, at least twelve hours a day. The rest of the time, I set myself to work assiduously. I gave myself courses in history, political economy- and even in natural science! I mentally wrote a play, short stories, poems.

After some cat-and-mouse with an inscrutable interrogator whom you somehow know is doomed himself, a must in any piece of Russian literature, Serge is sentenced to three years internal exile in Orenburg, in southwestern Russia. I've read over the phrase 'internal exile' many times, but I'm not sure I'd ever read an actual account of it. Orenburg, it seems, while full of starving and desperate people, was nevertheless one of the more desirable spots for internal exile- it was a city after all, as opposed to just some outpost near the Arctic Circle, and the weather was not especially harsh by Russian standards (which is to say, five months of winter that would dip, according to Serge, to lows of minus 42 degrees C). When they arrive, the GPU men give them instructions: 'It is forbidden to leave the town, except to go out for fresh air in the woods; from now on you may find any work or lodging that you can; only no employment can be taken up without our authorization.'

A three-year term of internal exile apparently meant very little- additional sentencing at the arranged time of your release was quite common. If you instinctively want to ask why, or on what grounds, that's not the way the Soviet Union worked. What happens in Serge's case is that he gets very, very lucky, if you want to call it luck, by virtue of the fact that he's a well-known writer in France and Belgium, that he has influential friends in socialist and literary circles, that the USSR is allied with the Popular Front in France, and the international attention given to Serge's case becomes awkward. Serge is allowed to leave the USSR, finally, although his writing is confiscated and the government takes revenge on his family. I found these later chapters of the book more vivid than the earlier ones, and experienced almost a sense of physical relief as he described leaving the country. And yet, as in the year 2019, leaving Russia was no guarantee of safety for a dissident. GPU men continue to follow him and intercept his mail in Brussels, and the Soviet government uses its international influence to make it almost impossible for him to publish anything in left-wing journals or newspapers. They would continue to pursue Serge until 1947, when he died of a heart attack in Mexico City...'just after entering a taxi', is how Wikipedia puts it.

Memoirs of a Revolutionary is a lone human voice speaking to us from the maelstrom of history. I'm going to have to read more of this guy.

[Manray9 · Rating 5 out of 5]

With Memoirs of a Revolutionary, Victor Serge adapted the title of Russian anarchist Peter Kropotkin's 1899 memoirs. In doing so, he tied himself to the colorful history of European radical activism and carried that heritage well into the twentieth century. Victor Lvovich Kibalchich, writing under the nom de plume Victor Serge, was the Belgian-born son of expatriated Russian radicals. He labored most of his life as a militant in exile, a tireless worker for humanitarian socialism, a perspicacious historian and accomplished novelist.

Serge and his family endured imprisonment, internal exile, poverty, censorship, intimidation and persecution. He was jailed under miserable conditions by conservative Western governments and the USSR alike, but he never cowered, never recanted and remained a man of courage and passionate convictions. He was one of few activists with anarchist ties to achieve a conspicuous place among Russia’s Bolsheviks and bear witness to the Civil War, the suppression of the Worker's Opposition movement, and the elimination of intra-party dissent by Stalin. Only his ties to prominent French intellectuals and the international popularity of his writings saved him from a fateful trip to the cellars of the Lubyanka.

Memoirs of a Revolutionary is eloquent. It provides an insider's look at Bolshevik Russia, the infancy of the USSR, and the descent of the radicals' dream into tyranny and oppression. Richard Greeman's excellent glossary provides explanatory notes on the multitude of early twentieth century French, Spanish, Italian and Russian radicals who played roles in Serge's long revolutionary journey. How appropriate to finish the book on May Day. It is worthy of Four Stars.

Of note: Serge's son, Vlady, often appears in the memoirs. He accompanied Serge on his travels throughout the thirties and forties and joined him in exile in Mexico. Vlady went on to a long life as a successful artist in Mexico. He died in 2005. See: http://www.vlady.org/

[Kevin · Rating 5 out of 5]

Great memoirs of one of the most literate revolutionaries I have come across. In this book, Serge chronicles his life from his early idealistic Anarchist days when he was involved with the Bonnot Gang, to his exile in Mexico after he was hounded out of Russia for supporting the Trotskyist Oppostion. I think Serge makes his position quite clear in relation to what he supported about 1917; he supported the Bolsheviks up to a point, but did frown quite severely over its bureaucracy and events such as the anarchist Kronsdadt uprising really caused him alarm. Serge was a very deep intellectual, and this is made all to clear with the words he writes. The book is a fantastic historical record of the early to mid 20th C.

[LW · Rating 4 out of 5]

Sin dall'infanzia,mi sembra d'aver sempre avuto,molto netto,il doppio sentimento che doveva dominarmi durante tutta la prima parte della mia vita: quello cioè di vivere in un mondo senza evasione possibile dove non restava che battersi per una evasione impossibile
Victor Serge

[E. G. · Rating 5 out of 5]

Foreword: Our Night with Its Stars Askew, by Adam Hochschild
Translator's Introduction, by Peter Sedgwick
About the Translation, by Richard Greeman

--Memoirs of a Revolutionary

Epilogue: The Death of Serge, by Vladimir Serge
Glossary
English Translations of Serge's Work
About the Images
Index

[Derek · Rating 5 out of 5]

A great man, a great age, and a great memoir. Serge was a courageous figure who knew how to write as well as he knew how to live. His novels are excellent too, but this is his best work in my opinion.

[Katia N · Rating 4 out of 5]

Here is the person who combines the destiny of a professional revolutionary with the literary gift. I never understood how your profession could be a revolutionary like a carpenter or an artist. It is more clear after this book, I guess... (Not that I would want to have such professional inclinations). During his life of the religious devotion to the common course he goes through almost all possible depravities without loosing his faith (although tainting it a bit in the process).

It is interesting to compare his memories of pre-war Europe with the ones of Stephen Zweig - they walked practically the same streets, but saw different things.

As far as the Russian Revolution is concerned, it is the honest account of the witness and the participant. He sketches a lot of portraits of contemporary revolutionaries and shows the change of the regime's spirit in a very short time. It was interesting reading as I have not come across that many similar accounts which are not distorted by the propaganda.

[AC · Rating 5 out of 5]

A masterpiece... critical and ennobling. (Review will follow at some point)

[Anna · Rating 5 out of 5]

‘Memoirs of a Revolutionary’ is slightly mis-named, as it doesn’t read like a memoir. Instead, it reads like a piece of extended, on-the-ground reportage and analysis from the aftermath of the Russian Revolution, chronicling the civil war and subsequent slide into totalitarianism and terror. As such, it’s absolutely fascinating. Serge writes compellingly and the French has been well translated. I enjoyed phrases like, ‘pot-bellied peace’ and this anecdote about buying arms for the Reds using tsarist roubles: ‘Obviously the recipients of the Imperial bank notes were taking out a mortgage on our deaths, at the same time furnishing us with the means of our defense’.

Serge makes an excellent commentator on events, as he is both insider and outsider. Although for much of the book he lives in Russia, is part of the communist party, and works for the government, he is not Russian and retains strong links throughout Europe. He evidently had incredible skill at networking, as the memoirs are stuffed with names (however did he remember them all?) of the many figures he encountered over the years. Footnotes helpfully inform the reader when Stalin had each of them shot, as seems to have been the case with most. Serge was thus close enough to events, yet critical enough of the path they took, to offer fascinating insights. He remains something of a phantom within his own book, but gives the impression of urbane competence and analytical yet humane intelligence.

His diagnoses of how the revolution went wrong are very convincing. He is not greatly inclined to blame individuals - indeed, even Stalin does not come in for much personal rebuke. He is much more interested in institutional and circumstantial reasons behind events, such as wrong decisions that resulted in worse decisions. Indeed, his conception of history has very little of Marxist structuralism and quite early on he becomes concerned about the ‘theoretical intoxication bordering on delusion’ of leading Marxists. This absolute faith in doctrine appears to have been a precursor of cults of personality. In fact, Serge’s analysis reminded me of something I read about the French revolution (in Ending the Terror) - that those involved never agreed to disagree. As Serge phrases it: ‘The Party is the repository of truth, and any form of thinking which differs from it is a dangerous or reactionary error. Here lies the spiritual source of its intolerance.’

What I found especially striking and sad throughout the narrative was the parade of disillusioned revolutionaries, the author obviously being one such and knowing many more. At least Serge was willing and able to live elsewhere. As the situation become worse and worse, terror gripped Russia and the ideals of the revolution where betrayed, many former revolutionaries committed suicide. They were unable to reconcile themselves to the horrors of the communist regime, yet they could not bear to leave their home, their tattered political ideals, and live under capitalism once more. After devoting so much of themselves to the revolution, indeed subsuming any personal identity to it, their sense of self seems to have been shattered by the famines, purges, and repressions. Although Serge was evidently an idealist, he tempered this with an admirable pragmatism and espoused a socialism that was international in nature. He was determined to survive in order to publicise what was happening. As he repeatedly comments, outside Russia people either did not want to know what happening, did not believe things could possibly be as bad as he said, or both.

There is a great deal to admire in these memoirs. Serge does not lose his faith in socialism, despite the privations and persecution he and his comrades suffer. His viewpoint is perhaps best expressed here:

A French essayist has said, ‘What is terrible when you seek the truth, is that you find it.’ You find it, and then you are no longer free to follow the biases of your personal circle, or to accept fashionable cliches. I immediately discerned within the Russian Revolution the seeds of such serious evils as intolerance and the drive towards the persecution of dissent. These evils originated in an absolute sense of possession of the truth, grafted upon doctrinal rigidity. What followed was contempt for the man who was different, of his arguments and way of life. Undoubtedly, one of the greatest problems which each of us has to solve in the realm of practice, is that of accepting the necessity to maintain, in the midst of intransigence that comes from steadfast beliefs, a critical spirit towards these same beliefs and a respect for the belief that differs. In the struggle, it is the problem of combining the greatest practical efficiency with respect for the man in the enemy; in a word, of war without hate.

His comments on Marxism are also well worth quoting:

I do not, after all my reflection on the subject, cast any doubt upon the scientific spirit of Marxism, nor on its contribution, a blend of rationality and idealism, to the consciousness of our age. All the same, I cannot help considering as a positive disaster the fact that a Marxist orthodoxy should, in a great country in the throes of transformation, have taken over the apparatus of power. Whatever may be the scientific value of a doctrine, from the moment that it becomes governmental, interests of state will cease to allow it the possibility of impartial enquiry; and its scientific certitude will even lead it, first to intrude into education, and then, by the methods of guided thought, which is the same as suppressed thought, to exempt itself from criticism. The relationships between error and true understanding are in any case too abtruse for any one to presume to regulate them by authority; men have no choice but to make long detours through hypotheses, mistakes and imaginative guesses, if they are to succeed in extricating assessments which are more exact, if partly provisional: for there are few cases of complete exactness. This means that freedom of thought seems to me, of all values, one of the most essential.

[Justin Evans · Rating 5 out of 5]

Uneven, mostly because Serge is so good at inhabiting his own past, and so determined to record facts, many of which are related better by others. When those two things come together, it's quite difficult to get on board: here's a long explanation of Bolshevik politics, in which Serge plays a role, and with no obvious reflection. But soon enough he's on the outs with the Bolsheviks, he reflects more, and you start to wish that Lenin had been assassinated after all, and Serge had somehow managed to get himself to the top of the greasy pole. Far superior to all the right-wing 'end of an illusion' books, because Serge matures from an incorrect certainty to an astonishing clarity of mind, rather than 'maturing' from one incorrect certainty to another.

[Durakov · Rating 5 out of 5]

The middle portions on the purges and counterrevolutions was an absolute gut punch. A few times, I didn't know how much more I could read the seemingly endless lists of names of fallen friends and comrades. But Serge is a beautiful writer, and I trust his account more than almost any I've read. Someone who miraculously kept their heart in tact in the midst of the 20th century's horrors and always stayed true to what is worth fighting for in a revolution, sometimes at the expense of his safety and health.

[Steve]

Victor Serge here reflects on a diverse roster of revolutionaries throughout Europe, noticeably willing to comment freely on nearly everyone, most unknown to the window-gazing pedestrian reader like me. My eye did catch his commentary for Béla Kun, for whom Mr. Serge mustered much criticism, “a revolutionary of weak character and shaky intellect [who] had stupidly tried to pose as a ‘man of steel.’” Reading this work caused me to think there were few moments in history where employment opportunities for psychopaths were as universally robust as in those years following the First World War, though the associated retirement schemes were nearly always brutal. This appears Mr. Serge’s warning – allow totalitarianism, of any stripe and in any society, an open door and the necessary actors will emerge, as surely as the legion of talented aspirants to a Broadway casting call, even for the production with dubious prospects.

I liked Mr. Serge’s perspective on literature.

I had, and still have, an immense respect for literary activity—and an equally great contempt for “Literature.” Many authors write for pleasure (especially the rich ones) and may do it well; many others practice a conscious profession for the sake of earning a living and winning a name. Those who have a message within them express it in the process, and their contribution has human value. The others are simply suppliers to the book trade. My conception of writing was and still is that it needs a mightier justification: as a means of expressing to men what most of them live inwardly without being able to express, as a means of communion, a testimony to the vast flow of life through us, whose essential aspects we must try to fix for the benefit of those who will come after us.

Then, at the end of this book, he writes, “The role of critical intelligence has seemed to me to be dangerous, and very nearly useless.” He seemed to understand the intrinsic value of the written word while also appreciating the frustrations attendant to polemics. I suppose there’s an important difference between acquiring understanding and propagating a call to action.

[Manfred · Rating 5 out of 5]

Although not born in Russia, Serge's story is quintessentially Russian. By page 7, someone is starving to death. By page 10, Serge is throwing down lines like, "His second wife, worn out from childbearing and poverty, underwent terrible crises of hysteria." Before long you are knee-deep in this catalog of suicides and guillotine-ing and vanishings and failed revolutions and the sordid taint of money and power. Yet Serge never loses his faith in the transformative power of the will of the people.

The fact I have a minimal grasp on Russian history and don't know all the Alexeys and Vladimirs being name-dropped here is inconsequential. The writing is very powerful, Serge has stacked his book with memorable turns of phrase and stories that have a universal appeal. And the next time some venal SuperPAC runs a political ad featuring a scared-looking actress who isn't sure she can "survive" another 4 years of the current ruling class, I will think of Serge's Russia, filled with hangmen and Siberian jails and the suppression of ideas and a particular Moslem cemetery converted into a village of abandoned children.

[Wendy Liu · Rating 5 out of 5]

honestly lifechanging

[Roberto · Rating 4 out of 5]

La memoria es sesgada, selectiva; adorna, tamiza los hechos con el barniz del tiempo volcando las emociones e ideas del presente en los sucesos pasados.
Como todo libro de memorias, éste de Víctor Serge es, con seguridad, un ejercicio de desmemoria. No siempre consciente, no por falta de honestidad; es el tiempo transcurrido, la perspectiva los que transforman los hechos recordados.
Aún así, Serge nos ofrece unas estampas vívidas, por vividas, de la revolución rusa, de sus protagonistas (Lenin, Bujarin, Trotsky, Zinoviev,...), de los críticos, de la disidencia, del gulag. También de los movimientos revolucionarios en España, del frente populismo en Francia. Las páginas destilan amargura, desilusión, ironía al contemplar la ingenuidad pasada pero "¿Cuántos nombres, cuántas siluetas de un mundo desaparecido, la piedad del recuerdo quisiera retener aquí!"(pág. 185)
Junto a esta piedad la creencia en el ser humano, la esperanza, aún virgen pese a los acontecimientos vividos, en un futuro mejor "Con esta condición única, convertida en imperativo categórico: no renunciar jamás a defender al hombre contra los sistemas que planean la aniquilación del individuo" (pág. 461)

[Loyson K Joy · Rating 4 out of 5]

" We revolutionaries, who aimed to create a new society, the broadest democracy of workers had unwittingly with our own hands constructed the most terrifying state machine conceivable , and when with revulsion we realized the truth, this machine driven by our friends and comrades turned on us and crushed us. Maturing in to merciless despotism, the Russian Revolution no longer summoned the German masses to give the utmost of their resources and strength. Nazism came to power, aping the Marxism it loathed. Europe multiplied concentration camps, burned or pulped books, laid reason under the steamroller and scattered broad over all its loudspeakers, intoxicating lies. "

Victor serge.

[John · Rating 4 out of 5]

After his novel about the Great Purge, The Case of Comrade Tulayev, and his overlapping (for fact and fiction always did so) account of his apprehension, Midnight of the Century, I continue in the NYRB series. Adam Hochschild's intro to this ed. expands understanding of a truly Continental figure, so representative of 20c Left. Born to Russians who fled after the 1881 assassination of the tsar, Victor grew up in Francophone Belgium. Jailed (often) in France, agitated (often) in Spain, and rushed back to a newly proclaimed USSR. Hoped against hope it'd fulfill its promise "as a distant beacon to men."

By 1920, however, Serge recognized futility. Bloodshed by armies and assassins, greed, spies, score-settling, famine, hatred, incompetence, and opposition accumulated to sustain ideals of Brotherhood. "War Communism" by perpetual, global Revolution ended utopian hopes. Nevertheless, he persisted.

Inevitably, his melange, messy but principled, heartfelt if inconsistent, of libertarian individualism, anarchism, Bolshevik acquiescence, and muddled Trotskyist convictions led to him being branded an "Oppositional." A repeat convict. Hounded to death by TB in Mexico City, fearing a long Red arm of Comintern henchmen, whether New World (post-Trotsky) or Old's Big Brother, 1947, at fifty-seven.

I started this while outside, "No Kings" protesters cheered open borders to defy the law; cosmopolitan Serge's "progressive" commitment to what we'd label "direct action" jostles with hard-won caution about utility of mass-manufactured demonstration, following Fearless Leaders of whichever banner, and concomitant danger of sacrificing one's livelihood to whims of parties, powers behind the curtain.

I contemplate how his radical parents fled their homeland because a paternal relative was implicated in the murder of Alexander II; how the smug self-styled terrorists of the People's Will boasted of their deed. Yet did the subsequent chaos in that nation, which we witness scarcely subsiding today under Putin, bring about the ideals of worker harmony and social solidarity under Soviet state "socialism"?

Check out his chapter on 1925/6. Masterfully summarizes suicides among his circle, those expelled for resisting CP "political correctness," while their cynical companions gorge, pimp, plunder, and preen. Reminiscent of Graham Greene's The Comedians in Papa Doc's Haiti, or the kleptocracy ruling Russia after '91. Serge, ideally situated among prime movers for the Cause, in his prescience, proves timely.

Other passages, albeit filtered through my distant perspective on the centennial of debates, dictates, digressions, and crimes, don't sustain the force they undoubtedly packed back then. But that's what you expect from current events expired, passionate rivalries sated, and hecatombs of gulag casualties.

As a relevant aside, Bukharin's jest that an "iron curtain" was falling, and Serge got out of its way just in time, predates by about two decades Churchill's use of that phrase. Zinoviev and Trotsky driven out by 1927, "democratic centralism" reigns (not that those two militants were ever platform pushovers).

He explains, when about a dozen years after the Revolution he resumes writing, now as a vocation, how he must compose in fragments, to be sent if necessary abroad, for he lacks leisure, worries about his family's safety, and (this appeared 1943) hurries as he suffers premonitions of mortality. In his tiny Leningrad flat, he, his wife (battling madness), and their little son were watched by three agents.

He can't reveal news of the brave holdouts against the censors, informers, traitors, and hacks. Still, before he can either sneak off or be disappeared, by 1933 he falls into the clutches of the GPU as Koba's terror spasms, a Kazakhstan deportee. His foreign birth and his reputation in France combine to save him, and he's suddenly freed and abroad. As he ruefully reviews his next move, evading the Nazi march westward in 1940, it's his fourth uprooting and seventh lurch away from the enemy in two decades. True to his own prejudices, he remains loyal to a few lowlifes himself: gushing over one of the tsar's murderers who impelled his parents' flight, Vera Figner. Nevertheless, a closing chapter, "Looking Forward," inspires hope for humanism. He broke with the inflexible "Old Man," who was butchered before Serge arrived in Latin America, yet he anticipated a Marxism tempered by mercy...

Unsurprisingly, this narrative expects familiarity with hundreds of such figures (Richard Greeman's glossary appends Peter Sedgwick's clear 1963 rendition into English) from a hundred-plus years ago forgotten, policies and politicians of passing import, and a dizzying array of surnames, for Serge wanders two-and-a-half (counting vast Russia) continents as he restlessly inherits his family's impulse to foment change for elusive equality, damn all odds, as if instinctive. That, not minutiae, is the reason I soldiered on. He knows, as a journalist who had to survive by wits, how to convey within compressed space a summary of a policy or a sketch of comrades, in their burst of violent desperation.

Curious how such men and women manage to stay alive (or not) compared to marginal drudges and wage-slaves like myself, I choose Serge as a portal into their mindset. I'm skeptical of slogans and opt for "cultivating my own garden" (shades of Candide), yet being surrounded by friends and relations bent on "blue-state" victories, I find "Memoirs" an apt morality tale of what advantages and what drawbacks result from putting one's energies, donations, and trust into furthering "social justice."

[Apostolis H · Rating 5 out of 5]

Εξαιρετικά ενδιαφέρον.

[Steven Godin · Rating 5 out of 5]

'Together with Trotsky, we were against reckless industrialization, against forcible collectivization, against the inflated Plans, against the sacrifices and the infinitely dangerous strain inflicted on the country by bureaucratic totalitarianism. At the same time we recognized, through all the disasters, the successes achieved by this same industrialization. This we ascribed to the enormous moral capital of the Socialist revolution. The storehouse of intelligent, resolute popular energy which had built up was now revealed as inexhaustible. The Superiority of planning, clumsy and tyrannical as it was, in comparison with its absence, was also visibly manifest to us. But we could not, like so many foreign tourists and bourgeois journalists with a naive propensity to the worship of force, fail to note that the cost of industrialization was a hundred times multiplied by tyranny. We remained convinced that the achievements of a system of Socialist democracy would have been better, infinitely better and greater, with less cost, no famine, no terror, and no suppression of thought.'

[Alexander · Rating 4 out of 5]

First 150 pages- poverty misery and prison, next 50 pages révolutionary victory and it's consequences, next 100 pages more consequences and all your friends being purged. Last 50 pages, complaining about anti woke Stalin killing Nin.

A million brilliant anecdotes about famous revolutionary figures.

[Ian Jones · Rating 5 out of 5]

If you’ve read any of Victor Serge’s novels you will know what kind of bloke he was. Fearless, honest, clear-sighted. Yes, he was out there on the extreme Left, and if you’re a conservative, or even a moderate, you’ll probably find his political beliefs unpalatable. However, he had the integrity to recognise the errors and the failings and the impracticalities of many of the causes he championed, especially the Russian Revolution. And he spoke out against injustice, oppression and totalitarianism at great risk to himself. At heart he was a deeply humane man who genuinely wanted the whole world to be better off than it was in his day: more democratic, more free, more fair.
These memoirs read like his novels, with the difference that the central character is himself. His parents were anti-Tsarist Russian exiles who were living in Belgium when Victor was born in 1890. His father’s cousin was hanged for making the bomb that killed Alexander II in 1881, so he had revolution in his blood. He talks about his strange behaviour as a young child. For a couple of years, despite being a well-loved child, he did malicious little things like tearing up his father’s notes or putting salt in the milk. He can’t explain why he did this, but he does sketch an impoverished childhood in which his younger brother died of malnutrition. His parents disappear from the story when he was about 15 and suddenly, he is an anarchist, a print-shop worker and a journalist. He skates over a lot of things that affected him personally, such as meeting and loving women, marrying them (he was married three times), being imprisoned. Some of the details are covered in other writings; including, ironically, his novels. Birth of our Power, for example, as a work of fiction, tells us more about Victor’s activities in Barcelona in 1917 and in the French concentration camp thereafter, than we get in these memoirs. The author seems more comfortable talking about the external world than his own internal world, and he does explain why that is towards the end of the book. The explanation is more nuanced than the stereotypical “socialist” idea that individuals don’t matter. For Serge they matter a great deal, not just his family and comrades, but the whole of humanity.
One of the many things that makes this book an invaluable contribution to twentieth-century history is the fearless way the author denounces not just Stalinism but the drift towards tyranny that began under Lenin. Two examples of this are Serge’s opposition to the use of capital punishment and his horror at the way other political groups are persecuted by the Bolsheviks. Serge suffered for this. He was expelled from the Communist Party, imprisoned, exiled, had his manuscripts stolen and endured the anguish of seeing his in-laws arrested because of his political activities.
Other examples of his political wisdom and his stature as an historian are his account of the betrayal of the Spanish revolution in 1937, the rise of Fascism and the events that led to the Fall of France in June 1940. His escape from Europe with his son is tremendously exciting and he gives full and touching credit to the writers in the US and elsewhere who campaigned on his behalf.
The narrative takes us up to 1943, by which time Serge and his wife and son were living in Mexico City, so it ends four years before Serge’s death. Those four years were filled with more revolutionary activity, writing, tireless attempts to get his works published – he was shunned by publishers across the political spectrum because he was out of sync with the compromises and cowardice of his times. In an epilogue written, his son Vlady, who must have been mid-twenties at the time, tells how he went to see his father’s body, which had been taken to a police station after he had died suddenly of a heart attack. Vlady says that when he was shown into the room, he noticed that the soles of his father’s shoes had holes in them. He ended his life as he began it – penniless.
This edition has a translator’s introduction by Peter Sedgwick and a comprehensive glossary and notes by Richard Greeman. The glossary is especially useful as it gives useful information about dozens of people mentioned in the text, from leading politicians and activists to obscure figures that you’re unlikely ever to have heard of but who all played their part in the course of events. There is also a foreword by Adam Hochschild. He gives a very vivid explanation for Serge’s writing style in which he says that it comes “from the urgency of being a man on the run. The police are at the door; his friends are being arrested; he must get the news out; every word must tell.” In this book every word does indeed tell and I would recommend it to anyone who wants to know more about this great figure, or who wants to read an alternative but eminently valid account of European history in the first half of the twentieth-century.

[Tanroop · Rating 5 out of 5]

"The horizon begins to clear; the balance-sheet is being drawn up. For the last thirty years, with the existence of discoveries which add prodigiously to man's technical knowledge (without proportionately improving his level of consciousness), we have been entering a cycle of world transformation. In it we are the prisoners of social systems worn to the point of breakdown. Moulded themselves by a defunct world, the best and most clear-sighted of us have often been revealed, in the tempests of the age, as more than half blind. No doctrine has stood before the shock. There is nothing surprising about that; such are the limitations of man and of doctrine. Meanwhile, the broad outlines of history now in the course of realization are breaking clear from the chaos. It is no longer the revolutionaries who are making the world's tremendous revolution; it is the tyrannies that have set it going, it is the actual technique of the modern world that is breaking brutally with the past and throwing the peoples of entire continents into the necessity for starting life afresh on new foundations. That these foundations must be of social justice, of rational organization, of respect for the individual, of liberty, is for me a wonderfully evident fact which, little by little, is asserting itself beyond the inhumanity of the present time. The future seems to me to be full of possibilities greater than any we have glimpsed throughout the past. May the passion, the experience and even the faults of my fighting generation have some small power to illumine the way forward!"


Serge's radicalism, humanity, keen eye and pen make this a memoir that captures the full gravity and drama of both his own life and the experiences of his generation who, as he put it, "lived on a frontier where one world ends and another begins." A new personal favourite.

[Andreas Kakaris · Rating 5 out of 5]

Ο Serge και η οικογένειά του υπέστησαν φυλακίσεις, την εσωτερική εξορία, φτώχεια, λογοκρισία, εκφοβισμό και διώξεις. Έμεινε φυλακισμένος κάτω από άθλιες συνθήκες από τις συντηρητικές δυτικές κυβερνήσεις αλλά και την ΕΣΣΔ κατά την περίοδο του Στάλιν. Ένας άνθρωπος με θάρρος που παρόλες τις κακουχίες αλλά και την εξουσία που του δώθηκε περιστασιακά δεν άλλαξε αντιλήψεις. Ήταν ένας από τους λίγους μοναχικούς ακτιβιστές με αναρχικούς δεσμούς που κατάφερε να έχει μια θέση μεταξύ των μπολσεβίκων της Ρωσίας και να μεταφέρει με αντικειμενική ματιά τον εμφύλιο πόλεμο, την καταστολή του εργατικού αντιπολιτευτικού κινήματος και την εξάλειψη της εσωτερικής αντιπολίτευσης του Στάλιν. Λόγω των δεσμών του με διακεκριμένους Γάλλους διανοούμενους και της διεθνούς δημοτικότητας των γραπτών του σώθηκε από την εκτέλεση.
Εξιστορώντας τα απομνημονεύματά του με μια γλώσσα απλή μας δίνει μια ουσιαστική ματιά στο εσωτερικό της Μπολσεβίκης Ρωσίας, την Γερμανία του μεσοπολέμου, την κεντρική ευρώπη και την Βαλκανική χερσόνησο. Αναφέρεται κυρίως στο ξεκίνημα της ΕΣΣΔ, την πτώση του ονείρου των πρώτων εξεγερθέντων και την μεταμόρφωσή της σε τυραννία και καταπίεση. Δεν μένει όμως στην Ρωσία αλλά γυρίζει σε όλες τις περιοχές όπου ξεσπούν επαναστάσεις δίνοτας μια σφαιρική εικόνα για το τι συνέβαινε από το 1908 ως το 1945 στην Ευρώπη αλλά και μια μικρή εικόνα για το Μεξικό όπου κατέληξε. Το εξαιρετικό γλωσσάρι του Richard Greeman παρέχει επεξηγηματικές σημειώσεις για το πλήθος των ριζοσπαστών της Γαλλίας, της Ισπανίας, της Ιταλίας και της Ρωσίας που έδρασαν στις αρχές του 20ου αιώνα κι οι οποίοι διαδραμάτισαν διάφορους ρόλους στο μακρύ επαναστατικό ταξίδι του Serge.
Αν θα μπορούσα να κόψω ένα από τα 5 αστέρια θα ήταν μόνο γιατί σε κάποια σημεία μιλάει με έπαρση για τον εαυτό του ως προς την ακρίβεια των προβλέψεών του.

[Jamie]

This should be required reading for anyone with an interest in European history and culture, and the current state and future of Europe.

70 years after publication and the end of the second world war, on the eve of Britain arrogantly tearing itself from an increasingly German Europe, whilst Russia openly murders and silences dissidents, it's sombering how much, and how little, has changed, and how rapidly a continent can descend.

"Only a living society can be defended and this one had reached a stage of decomposition that was too advanced. Nobody believed in anything anymore, because nothing in fact was possible anymore."

[Edmond Dantes · Rating 5 out of 5]

Ottima lettura, alternativa alle versioni di regime degli eventi del 17 e successivi
Victor, memore della sua esperienza anarchica, capisce da subito la deriva burocratica/totalitaria del leninismo...
Ottimo anche lo stile puramente letterario- Lettura consigliata

[Stephen · Rating 4 out of 5]

Great for the occasionally interjected commentary, the description of the Left Opposition from the ground, and the portraits of people like Trotsky and Lenin. As probably expected, these were only sporadically placed in the narrative as the reader is left constantly (at least in the first half) flipping to the name index reading about people where that mostly appear only once or twice. But the second half is much more engaging, and I won't argue with the importance of this memoir in documenting the life of someone who impressively seemed to always be in the right (left?) place at the right (left) time during the revolutionary half century this book relates.

[Marginalia Σημειώσεις στο περιθώριο]

Η μεταφράστρια του βιβλίου, Ρεββέκα Πέσσαχ, μιλά γι' αυτό και για τον Βίκτορ Σερζ στη συνέντευξή της στο δεύτερό μας τεύχος: https://marginalia.gr/arthro/revekka-...