Victor Serge, Conscience of the Revolution

Scholars rediscover a largely forgotten Soviet dissident writer

Wandering around Buenos Aires in June of last year, Susan Weissman, an associate professor of politics at California’s Saint Mary’s College, found herself on a street lined with bookstores -- where, in the window of one shop, she noticed a display of the latest issue of El Rodaballo, a literary and political journal. The magazine’s design was elegant, but what really caught her eye was its headline: “The Contemporary Relevance of Victor Serge.” It is a subject very close to Ms. Weissman’s heart.

Ten years earlier, she had written her dissertation on Serge -- a Russian author who supported the Bolsheviks, was imprisoned by Stalin, then spent years in exile, subject to constant harassment by Soviet agents. His novels and historical writings had been praised and denounced by intellectuals and activists around the world. But after his death in Mexico in 1947, Serge was all but forgotten.

That started to change after 1990, the centennial of Serge’s birth, when scholars in several countries began publishing studies of his work. New editions of his fiction, poetry, and essays have appeared in various languages -- not a flood of them, exactly, but enough to signal a revival. Yale University acquired the author’s papers in 1996. And his complex political legacy is the focus of Ms. Weissman’s book Victor Serge: The Course Is Set on Hope (Verso), due out in October.

So Ms. Weissman was gratified to find Serge’s name featured prominently on a magazine cover in Buenos Aires. (That sort of thing means years of scholarly labor on an obscure topic are beginning to pay off.) The timing was perfect, too. Ms. Weissman was there to attend an academic conference, but her visit had started out on a surprising note: When she arrived, her hosts had whisked her off, not to a seminar room, but to a huge rally against the International Monetary Fund. It was much like the demonstrations in Seattle a few months before, with one distinctly Argentine touch: a performance of “The Internationale,” the old revolutionary anthem, done tango-style. Serge would have liked that.

After buying a copy of El Rodaballo, Ms. Weissman was in for another surprise. The article on Serge was familiar. In fact, very familiar: It was a section from her dissertation that Ms. Weissman had published in Against the Current, an American socialist magazine.

“I found it slightly annoying at the time,” she says of the unauthorized translation. “But I also felt like I shouldn’t complain too much. Serge wrote constantly for small literary and political magazines that could barely pay the printer, much less their contributors. And that was when Serge himself was in real poverty. ... I don’t think he would have had much use for the idea of intellectual property. So I tried to keep that in mind.”

As for the topic announced by that magazine cover -- “the contemporary relevance of Victor Serge” -- it is something readers have only started to consider. Serge would have welcomed the fall of Communism, and the emergence of a worldwide movement challenging global capitalism would have appealed to him, too. But can the work of a revolutionary writer born in the 19th century be of any but purely academic interest at the dawn of the 21st?

Vincent Giroud, a curator at Yale’s Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, becomes excited -- and somewhat indignant -- when discussing Serge. “When people talk about Russia,” he says, “they always mention Orwell and Solzhenitsyn, but never Serge, who is essential. He was one of the first to describe Soviet reality during the 1920s and ‘30s. In Paris in 1935, there was the great Congress for the Defense of Culture [a gathering of writers opposed to fascism]. The most important thing to happen at the Congress was the campaign by a few intellectuals to free Victor Serge, the great revolutionary writer, from prison in the Soviet Union. Today he is forgotten. Absolutely scandalous and incomprehensible!”

Perhaps what Serge’s reputation really needs is a good screenplay: His life story would make for a compelling biopic. He seemed fated to revolution and exile from birth. His parents were leaders of the Narodniks, an underground movement of young intellectuals committed to uplifting the former serfs; they fled Russia after a Narodnik bomb killed the czar in 1881. Their son Victor Kibalchich was born in Belgium in 1890. (He took the pen name “Serge” only after the revolution.) As a young man in Paris, he worked as a typesetter, wrote poetry, and espoused the libertarian doctrine of individual revolt against society. While in his 20s, he participated, at least marginally, in “the Bonnot gang” -- a group of bohemians who expressed their contempt for the bourgeoisie by robbing its banks.

His association with the gang led to a prison sentence. Following his release, in 1917, he headed to Russia to join the revolution. Serge then shed his anarchist affiliations to ally himself with the Bolsheviks -- the only party he thought was committed to abolishing inequality and oppression. He spent several years working for the new government as a translator and journalist, and went abroad to organize for the Comintern. But upon returning to the Soviet Union, in 1926, he found a society bearing ever less resemblance to his ideals.

During the late 1920s, Serge began writing a series of novels in French based on his experiences in the radical movement. (Besides being the preferred language of Russian intellectuals of his generation, French assured him an international audience.) He also did research into the early days of the regime, using materials that would soon begin disappearing down the memory hole. The result was Year One of the Russian Revolution (1930) -- a chronicle that passionately defended the Bolsheviks while also raising troubling questions about abuses by the secret police.

That was not the sort of historical scholarship that Stalin wanted to encourage. In 1933, Serge was arrested and sent, with his family, to the remote village of Orenburg, an early outpost of the gulag system of prison camps. Without his knowledge, left-wing intellectuals and labor unionists in France took up his cause. By 1936, the Soviet government was sufficiently embarrassed to allow Serge to emigrate. But suitcases of his containing a number of manuscripts -- including a work called “Year Two of the Russian Revolution” -- mysteriously disappeared just before he left the country.

Once abroad, Serge resumed publishing novels and political essays, and renewed his contact with another dissident Bolshevik then in exile, Leon Trotsky. There was much they agreed on, but tensions and political differences between them grew. Some of Trotsky’s followers called Serge a “petit bourgeois intellectual” and a “confusionist” (among other things). Any chance at a reconciliation was cut short when a Stalinist assassin killed Trotsky in Mexico in August 1940.

While differences in ideology and temperament were partly to blame for the growing conflict between Serge and Trotsky, Ms. Weissman believes that there was another factor: Stalin’s secret agents assigned to infiltrate dissident circles. She points to Marc Zborowski, a figure involved in the murder of several of the Trotskyist movement’s leaders in Europe.

“He was also a master of the poison pen,” Ms. Weissman says. “He could insert a few sentences in a letter or article that would heighten tensions, disorganizing the movement for months.” She cites the furor caused by a prospectus for one of Trotsky’s books that Serge had translated from Russian into French: It made the author sound like a bloodthirsty egomaniac. Serge protested that he had had nothing to do with the unsigned text. Ms. Weissman believes it was almost certainly the work of the Soviet mole.

After leaving Soviet intelligence, Zborowski became a fairly prominent anthropologist working in a research hospital in San Francisco. “I spent years trying to get Zborowski to talk to me, just to answer a question or two,” Ms. Weissman says. “I would call, and he’d just hang up the phone when he heard my voice. But after his death, I got a huge box of material under the Freedom of Information Act, with 4,000 pages of his FBI documents. Plus there are a couple of files from the KGB archive. Zborowski’s reports went straight to Stalin’s desk.”

Ms. Weissman says the archives reveal how troubling the work of a dissident intellectual like Serge was to the Kremlin. “While the Nazis were preparing for war in the 1930s,” she says, “Soviet intelligence was more obsessed with harassing a few hundred Trotskyists in Europe and America. It’s really almost unbelievable.”

Ms. Weissman’s monograph focuses on Serge’s role as a revolutionary thinker and historian who used Marxist theory as a way to understand Soviet reality. Other scholars emphasize Serge’s importance as a literary and cultural figure.

One of the exile’s closest associates was Dwight Macdonald, a political and cultural journalist who has attracted increasing interest from historians. During the 1940s, Macdonald’s magazine Politics introduced American readers to writers such as Jean-Paul Sartre, Bruno Bettelheim, Simone Weil, and Georges Bataille. In A Rebel in Defense of Tradition: The Life and Politics of Dwight Macdonald (Basic Books, 1994), Michael Wreszin notes the tireless but unsuccessful efforts of Macdonald and his wife to get Serge into the United States.

“Dwight once said that Serge was at heart really an artist and a moralist,” says Mr. Wreszin, a professor emeritus of history at the Graduate School and University Center of the City University of New York. “He saw Serge was an anti-authoritarian, more than anything else. A critic and a skeptic, which is also what Dwight himself was -- someone who is not compatible with a regime or an organization.”

Macdonald could appreciate Serge’s conflicts with the Trotskyist movement. (Trotsky supposedly once quipped, “Everyone has the right to be stupid, but Comrade Macdonald abuses the privilege.”) The American journalist’s efforts helped make Serge known to the group of writers and critics often called “the New York intellectuals” -- an influential circle that included Saul Bellow, Irving Howe, Mary McCarthy, and Paul Goodman.

The Russian revolutionary’s literary work is the focus of Victor Serge: The Uses of Dissent (Berg Publishers, 1994), by Bill Marshall, a professor of modern French studies at the University of Glasgow. Serge’s novels of revolution and repression bear no resemblance to the Soviet “boy meets tractor” genre. His epic account of a Soviet show trial, The Case of Comrade Tulayev (1948), has often been compared to Arthur Koestler’s Darkness at Noon (1940). But as Mr. Marshall emphasizes, the similarities are less interesting than the differences.

Koestler’s book is narrated through the consciousness of a single character: an old revolutionary in his prison cell who is finally persuaded that his confession to absurd charges is consistent with the ideology he has served his whole life. Serge, by contrast, shows a purge affecting dozens of characters -- from the most privileged Soviet bureaucrat to a depressed worker who longs to buy a new pair of shoes.

“Koestler’s view of the revolution is a monolithic one,” Mr. Marshall says by e-mail, “proposing one reading of the complex process of revolution, Stalinism, and purge. Serge is more open and pluralist, attentive to different protagonists, setting up a dialogue between them and the reader. He keeps open the prospect of renewal and dissent.”

The pace of scholarship has quickened over the past decade, but nobody can rush Richard Greeman, the founding father of Serge studies. Mr. Greeman wrote the first dissertation on Serge in English, at Columbia University in 1968. He has translated four of Serge’s novels, and wrote the introduction to a volume of his poems. Mr. Greeman’s articles on Serge have appeared in Yale French Studies, the minnesota review, and Revolutionary History. And unpublished chapters of his long-awaited biography are often cited by other researchers.

“Everybody is yelling at me to finish,” says Mr. Greeman, who has retired as a professor of French at the University of Hartford. He is now trying to do just that. But telling the story of a Belgian-born Russian novelist who wrote in French for an international audience of revolutionaries, intellectuals, and labor organizers (as well as the occasional spy) has proved endlessly challenging. He indicates that the biography will require at least two volumes, and is not too precise about when the first might appear. “It feels like I am putting together a jigsaw puzzle,” Mr. Greeman says from his home in Montpelier, France. “I can see a little of the picture here and there, but never the whole scene.”

It does not help that crucial pieces are missing. Both Ms. Weissman and Mr. Greeman, among other scholars, have tried to locate the KGB file containing the book manuscripts that the secret police undoubtedly confiscated as Serge was leaving the country. So far, the effort has hit a dead end.

But while his definitive biography of Serge remains in limbo, Mr. Greeman is excited about Yale’s purchase of the author’s papers, including an enormous mass of unpublished material from his final years in exile in Mexico. Proceeds from the sale have been used to finance the Victor Serge Foundation, a nonprofit organization Mr. Greeman directs. It sponsors research, translation, and political activism in the spirit of Serge’s work.

Among the projects the foundation has helped support is the Victor Serge Library, in Moscow. Since its beginning, in 1996, the library has become the gathering place of a motley crew of anarchists, Trotskyists, and other radicals who feel no nostalgia for the Brezhnev era, but are decidedly unenthusiastic about free-market capitalism too. Later this month, the library will sponsor an international conference of scholars timed to coincide with the first Russian edition of Serge’s autobiography.

At that same moment, by coincidence, tens of thousands of protesters against globalization will be descending on Washington. Ms. Weissman believes Serge would have welcomed such demonstrations, while also offering a cautionary note. “His message was to preserve your generosity of spirit and to keep your criti cal faculties intact,” she says. “That was the core of his vision. The word Serge used for it was ‘intransigence.’”

Mr. Greeman does not exactly disagree, but warns that seeing Serge only as a militant overlooks the somber quality of his work, with its vivid sketches of a revolutionary generation wiped out by the regime it helped create.

He cites a poem Serge wrote toward the end of his life. In it, the author presents the history of the 20th century as a volcano. The melancholy final image seems to be a picture of his legacy:

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