Russia Twenty Years After

by Victor Serge

This is one of the most important documentary accounts of the Stalinist system written by the revolutionary novelist and historian Victor Serge. This was his first major work, written just after his harrowing release and expulsion from the Stalinist gulag, where he spent three years as an intransigent oppositionist to the Stalinist regime. Stalin nearly stilled Serge's voice, and in exile he, along with Leon Trotsky, took up the defence of those who were falsely accused and silenced. Twenty years before Krushchev's secret speech about Stalin's crimes, Victor Serge tried to alert the world to what Stalin was doing in the name of socialism in the USSR, to analyse how the Russian Revolution, which had been a beacon of hope for humankind, was in the process of devouring itself. Included in this edition is Serge's never before published (in English) retrospective of the Russian Revolution on its thirtieth birthday, "Thirty Years After the Russian Revolution", Serge's most eloquent summary and analysis of the Stalinist counterrevolution. The introductory essay by Susan Weissman, "Victor Serge: The Forgotten Marsixt", introduces the reader to Serge, evaluating his contribution to current understanding of the former Soviet Union. Susan Weissman also updates Serge's accounts of the fate of various oppositionists with information from the newly opened Soviet archives.

496 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1996

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.'