{"id":8411,"date":"2022-11-29T00:01:36","date_gmt":"2022-11-29T05:01:36","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.tempestmag.org\/v01_2020\/staging\/?p=8411"},"modified":"2022-12-04T23:12:49","modified_gmt":"2022-12-05T04:12:49","slug":"remembering-victor-serge","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/tempestmag.org\/test02\/2022\/11\/remembering-victor-serge\/","title":{"rendered":"Remembering Victor Serge"},"content":{"rendered":"

V<\/span>ictor Serge is my favorite socialist of all time. I\u2019m willing to admit that this choice is decidedly divergent from the norm.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s true that Serge may have lacked Marx\u2019s powers of economic and historical analysis, Lenin\u2019s strategic and tactical instincts, or Trotsky\u2019s organizational powers. Yet Serge tops my list for an altogether different quality: his unparalleled political honesty. Serge was able to look brutal facts in the face while at the same time sacrificing nothing in the way of revolutionary intransigence.<\/p>\n

In the preface to the 1930 edition of his Year One of the Russian Revolution<\/a><\/em>, Serge writes,<\/p>\n

The working class is the only class which has everything to gain, whatever the circumstances, by knowing the truth. It has nothing to keep hidden, at any rate not in history. Social lies have the same function as they ever had: that of deceiving the working class. This class refutes deception in order that it can conquer; its refutation of deceit is the measure of its conquest.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Serge began his life as Victor Lvovich Kibalchich, born in born in Brussels to Russian parents living in exile in Belgium.\u00a0 He began his political life working his way through the individualist anarchist current in France in the early 20th century before seeking political asylum in Spain where he worked among the anarcho-syndicalists.<\/p>\n

Like many syndicalists, Serge was captivated by the Russian Revolution of 1917 and started to move toward Bolshevism. He made his way to Russia in 1919 and served the revolution tirelessly, eventually working for the Comintern in Germany. He joined the Left Opposition with Trotsky, for which he was eventually expelled from the party. During this period Serge wrote novels published in Paris as well as his history, Year One of the Russian Revolution<\/em><\/a>.<\/p>\n

Arrested in 1933, he was finally released and deported in 1936 after an international campaign by his artistic and political sympathizers. Serge\u2019s deportation narrowly saved him from Stalin\u2019s show trials in which Serge almost certainly would have been imprisoned in a labor camp or killed. Serge lived in exile in various countries around Europe until finally settling in Mexico, where he died November 17, 1947, 75 years before this writing.<\/p>\n

\"A
Serge worked as a journalist, editor, and translator for the Comintern (the Third, or Communist International). Pictured here: attendees at the Second World Congress of the Third International, 1920. Lenin is down front. Directly behind him is Maxim Gorky, and Zinoviev is on the second step. Photo<\/a> by an unknown creator.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Through his unique political honesty, Serge becomes a guide without equal to the history he lived through. At the small scale, Serge\u2019s sketches of the principal characters of the period who he encountered betray an uncanny ability to see immediately and deeply into the essence of a personality. As Serge himself said, \u201cI have always believed that human qualities find their physical expression in a man\u2019s personal appearance.\u201d<\/p>\n

Of Dzerzhinsky, head of the Cheka\u2014the secret police formed to combat counter-revolution\u2014Serge writes that he was \u201ca singular idealist, ruthless but chivalrous with the emaciated profile of an Inquisitor: tall forehead, bony nose, untidy goatee, and an expression of weariness and austerity.\u201d On Zinoviev, whom Serge also describes as \u201cLenin\u2019s biggest mistake,\u201d Serge relates, \u201cThere was an impression of flabbiness, almost of a lurking irresolution, emanating from his whole personality.\u201d Serge also offers important descriptions of lesser known communists, often putting their work into important context. On the Italian Angelica Balabanova for example, he writes, \u201cSmall, dark, and beginning to age, Angelica still led her eager militant\u2019s life which, with its romantic fire, was about three-quarters of a century too late.\u201d<\/p>\n