Ever since my late-in-the-day discovery of Victor Serge (whose birthday it is today), a man I should have discovered much MUCH earlier, considering my interest in totalitarian regimes / dissident voices / revolution / Russia – I have read as much as I could.
You read the bare bones of Victor Serge’s life and a couple of things come to mind.
1. Let me get this straight: all of this happened to one man?
2. Okay so it all happened to him, fine. How did he find the time to write books?
Therein lies the mystery but it isn’t really a mystery. Serge spent the majority of his life on the run, from various murderous regimes. He was in a POW camp, he was exiled to Siberia, he was in prison many times, he fled, to France, and then to Mexico, clutching his notebooks in grubby bags, fearful of them being confiscated, which of course much of it was. His work told all the secrets of the Bolshevik power-grab, and it was even more powerful because he was one of them. He was viewed as an “apostate”, a “heretic”, a clue to the Messianic ideology.
And he may very well may be the first person (on record, at least) to recognize that the glorious Revolution was not only not going as planned, it was being crushed by the very people he fought alongside to bring about change. What was supposed to be a collective experience was – in actuality – the perfect set-up for the Strong Man. George Orwell saw this in the ’30s. Serge saw it in the early ’20s – extraordinary – and he saw it from within the Winter Palace. Extraordinary.
More about Victor Serge after the jump:
Those were long ago days, they may seem very very far away, but all of his work has great relevance to us now, to anyone politically aware (or who wants to be MORE politically aware). His work contains lessons you can’t find anywhere else, particularly since he – unlike someone like, say, Arthur Koestler – remained a “believer”. He felt the Revolution was stolen/hijacked (similar to what happened in Iran, when the Ayotollah Khomeini co-opted what had been a DEMOCRATIC revolution). I wasn’t there. I am not a True Believer in anything. Well, I believe in my friends and family and the importance of art. But politics? You will never – and I mean never – find me in a crowd of people cheering on a candidate. I also don’t like theories, which are wonderful “in theory” but often monstrous when put into practice. Serge had the wherewithal to look around him in the early ’20s and think, “….Huh. This is going off the rails.”
NOBODY had the clarity to pick up on it then, particularly not the Western “useful idiots” willing to turn a blind eye to, oh, summary execution, shipping entire populations to the other side of Russia. Safe liberals in glass-windowed editorial offices in New York City either thought that was A-okay (grotesque) or thought things like “The media is lying. That’s not going on.” OR, the joke is that people were saying: “If only Stalin knew about these things! Someone should tell him.”
Serge found himself isolated in Russia and isolated in the ex-pat community, in France, in Mexico, everywhere, and he was shunned by New York publishing houses, merely because his work was a savage critiques of Russia and the Russian Revolution. The man was literally begging at the gates, running from country to country, sometimes with Nazis chasing him, sometimes NKVD operatives, and he really needed the money from his writing to escape. The doors remained shut. He had done the unforgivable: he was skeptical about the Russian Revolution, about Stalin, about the official story of the famine in Ukraine, the murder of Kirov. He smelled a rat.
His great book The Case of Comrade Tulayev is based on the 1934 murder of Kirov, a murder which gave Stalin the excuse to basically kill everybody in Russia. Millions and millions of people were arrested, shot, put in gulags, as retribution for the murder which Stalin himself signed off on (not literally – he was smart enough not to leave his fingerprints anywhere). Robert Conquest, in his book The Great Terror, wrote:
This killing [the murder of Kirov] has every right to be called the crime of the century. Over the next four years, hundreds of Soviet citizens, including the most prominent political leaders of the Revolution, were shot for direct responsibility for the assassination, and literally millions of others went to their deaths for complicity in one or another part of the vast conspiracy which allegedly lay behind it. Kirov’s death, in fact, was the keystone of the entire edifice of terror and suffering by which Stalin secured his grip on the Soviet peoples.
In his essay ‘Victor Serge: Pictures from an Inquisition’, Christopher Hitchens lays it all out:
Nonetheless, and fortunately for us if not for him, he resolved to stay on within the Party and to do what he could. Dispatched to Berlin to help with the Communist International, he discovered that Bolshevism was becoming as bureaucratic and intolerant beyond the borders of the USSR as it was within them. But he also learned about the mounting threat of the madness of fascism, and this produced in him a sort of dual consciousness: First, this new enemy needed to be defeated; second, it needed to be understood. The apparatchiks of communism, however, both underestimated the danger and helped to provoke it. Indeed, it could be said of fascism, as Serge was to write with an acuity that makes one almost dizzy, that “[this] new variety of counterrevolution had taken the Russian Revolution as its schoolmaster in matters of repression and mass-manipulation through propaganda … [and] had succeeded in recruiting a host of disillusioned, power-hungry ex-revolutionaries; consequently, its rule would last for years.”
Attempting to synthesize these apparent opposites but latent collaborators, Serge came up with the word “totalitarian.” He believed that he had originated it himself; there are some rival claimants from the period of what was then called “war communism,” but it is of interest that the term has its origins within the Marxist left, just as the “Cold War” was first used by George Orwell in analyzing a then looming collision of super-powers in 1945. Incidentally, when Serge was later seeking to have his Memoirs of a Revolutionary (1951) published in English, it was to Orwell that he wrote asking for help.
Indeed (not that it did him much good), Serge had a knack for nosing out the right acquaintances. He met Antonio Gramsci and Georg Lukacs during his years outside Russia, and received a warning from Lukacs not to go back. He later not only escorted Nikos Kazantzakis and Panait Istrati around the USSR but also was present when Istrati let fall the remark that made him famous: To the old saw “One can’t make an omelet without breaking eggs,” Istrati mordantly replied, “All right, I can see the broken eggs. Where’s this omelet of yours?” When the honest old Bolshevik diploma at Adolf Joffe committed suicide in 1927, to call attention to the “Thermidor” that was engulfing the revolution, Serge assisted in organizing a mass turnout for Joffe’s funeral; he later realized that he had helped to lead the last legal anti-government protest to be held in Moscow. Within a short time he himself was in one of Stalin’s prisons.
Released after some grueling experiences, he remained – despite his misgivings about the personality of Leon Trotsky – a partisan of the left opposition. Had he not been re-arrested in 1933 and deported to internal exile in Orenburg, he might well have been swept up and discarded forever in the period of even more hysterical persecution that followed the assassination of Sergei Kirov, on December 1, 1934. Kirov had been a popular leader of the Party in Leningrad; most historians now agree that his murder was the signal for the true frenzy of the purges to begin. It was the Soviet equivalent of the Reichstag fire.
Most historians also now agree on another important point: that the murder was organized by Stalin himself, either to remove a well-liked man who could have become a rival, or simply to help justify the political pogrom that he had long had in mind. (See in particular Robert Conquest’s Stalin and the Kirov Murder [1989] and Amy Knight’s Who Killed Kirov? [1999].) Some time before the assassination Serge had been overheard to say that what he most feared was the killing of some high Party satrap and the consequent licensing of a more comprehensive terror. Thus what is most interesting about his novel on the subject is that it begins by apparently exculpating Stalin from the main charge.
The Case of Comrade Tulayev shows the inner workings of this murderous conspiracy and how the 1930s Terror began to spread. Serge watched the Revolution from afar at first with excitement. In the early 1920s, he went back to Soviet Russia to work for the new regime, and almost immediately saw very disturbing tendencies and trends. By 1936, 1937, many people (except the brainwashed arm of the Western Left) understood Stalin’s Russia was bad news. To perceive it in 1926, however, was really something, particularly if you were so close to the power source you were inside the charmed circle. Serge kept his bearings. What’s amazing about Serge’s novel is when he wrote it, the real event was cloaked in secrecy, there was no reliable information about it. The event is still cloaked in mystery. We probably will never get the whole truth since the archives were so tampered with, or “disappeared”. Serge didn’t have anything to use as a reference point. It was just his SENSE of how it was working, how the State clicked into motion
As with most of Serge’s writing, Last Times, his novel of the Fall of France, was written as he was being pursued by multiple enemies, Stalin’s minions, the Nazis, and Serge ended up in Mexico, around the time Trotsky – also in Mexico – was assassinated. Serge needed cash. Badly. But nobody would publish him in America. Brainwashed. Scared. So think about it: an actual Russian person – a Russian revolutionary, no less – was ignored by the establishment once he criticized Stalin – because of course American liberals knew more about what was going on in Russia than the actual Russian refugee! With this book, he consciously tried to write a crowd-pleasing best-seller. And he did! It would make a great mini-series: it’s about the fates of the citizens of one city block in Paris during the 1940 Nazi invasion of France. It’s an ensemble book, almost cinematic. It’s different from his other books, and of course it’s based on his experience in real life. He had been in France and fled the Nazis. Victor Serge ran ran ran ran all his life.
Midnight in the Century is a haunting book based on his experiences being sent into exile to Siberia. The title alone brings a shiver of dread. Serge’s novel covers being arrested in 1933, and sent away with just a bag of things. Reminder: Serge was an insider who moved BACK to Russia after the Revolution so he could be a part of it. Serge remained a staunch Socialist, although maybe leaning towards anarchism too (beware all the ‘isms”) but he was one of the first who called out what was really going on.
Conquered City was also written while Serge was on-the-run, and this one is about the Bolshevik takeover of St. Petersburg in 1919-1920. Chaos and hope: nothing working, trains not running, electricity shutting off, but an atmosphere of exhilarating working-class pride and solidarity, as everyone stormed the government buildings from the Tsarist times (ended just a year before). This book is superior to John Reed’s “reportage”, 10 Days That Shook the World. The context behind Serge’s book is more interesting.
I am grateful to NYRB for bringing out all of Serge’s stuff, translated into English sometimes for the first time. Like his personal journal: Notebooks: 1936-1947. Serge died in 1947. The journal just ends. In many ways, he remained true to the original ideals of Socialism, but his critique forced him into prison, into exile. He finally ended in Mexico surrounded by Russian ex-pats, many with similar stories. Serge was thrust into the middle of a Communist/Socialist/Stalinist/Trotskyite war – a real war. Trotsky was murdered. Serge had a target on his back. He was un-publishable. I have no idea how he survived. He had his son with him too. There were editors who tried to help. Even amidst the despair of a ragged life lived on the run, he wrote in his notebook every day, describing what he saw, who he met, and also reading the tea leaves about what was going on back in Russia. He was, 9 times out of 10, right on all counts.
Probably his greatest work is Memoirs of a Revolutionary. None of his books were written with any time for contemplation. He couldn’t refer to notes. He never had peace and quiet. He wrote in prison, he wrote while he was being deported, he wrote as he was fleeing. Much of his work was published posthumously. This is one of the most important books of the 20th century, alongside Robert Conquest’s The Great Terror: A Reassessment
One of the weirdest quirks of today’s world is to watch the right take on the old Left’s attitude about Russia. It’s why Robert Conquest – who started out as a Communist – is referred to as a “reactionary”. He wasn’t “reactionary”. He just was willing to criticize Russia. And now the sides have switched. I can only see this because I’m not a True Believer and I don’t “buy in” to theories. I don’t know how you justify cozying up to Putin when you used to be the regime’s biggest staunchest critics for literally 50 unberakable years. It’s been wild to watch it happen in real time.
Here are some excerpts from Serge’s Memoirs.
p. 5
I learned to read through cheap editions of Shakespeare and Chekhov, and, dozing off the sleep, I dreamt for hours of blind King Lear supported, in his journey over the cruel wasteland, by the tenderness of Cordelia. I also acquired bitter experience of that unwritten commandment: “Thou shalt be hungry.” I think that if anyone had asked me at the age of twelve, “What is life?” (and I often asked it of myself), I would have replied, “I do not know, but I can see that it means ‘Thou shalt think, thou shalt struggle, thou shalt be hungry.‘”
p. 13
In short, life appeared to us in various versions of a rather degrading captivity. Sundays were a happy release, but that was only once a week, and there was no money. Now and then we would wander along the lively streets of the town center, joyful and sardonic, our heads full of ideas, spurning all temptations with contempt. We were too prone to contempt. We were lean young wolves, full of pride and thought: dangerous types. We had a certain fear of becoming careerists, as we thought about many of our elders who had made some show of being revolutionary, and afterwards …
“What will become of us in twenty years’ time?” we asked ourselves one evening. Thirty years have passed now. Raymond was guillotined: “Anarchist Gangster” (the press). It was he, who, walking towards the worthy Dr. Guillotin’s disgusting machine, flung a last sarcasm at the reporters: “Nice to see a man die, isn’t it?” I came across Jean again in Brussels, a worker and trade union organizer, still a fighter for liberty after ten years in jail. Luce has died of tuberculosis, naturally. For my part, I have undergone a little over ten years of various forms of captivity, agitated in seven countries, and written twenty books. I own nothing. On several occasions the mass circulation press has hurled filth at me because I spoke the truth. Behind us lies a victorious revolution gone astray, several abortive attempts at revolution, and massacres in so great a number as to make you dizzy. And to think that it is not over yet. Let me be done with this digression; those were the only roads possible for us. I have more confidence in mankind and in the future than ever before.
p. 15
We needed a principle. To strive for an to achieve: a way of life. I now understand, in the light of reflection, how easy it is for charlatans to offer vain solutions to the young: “March in rows of four and believe in Me.” For lack of anything better … It is the failures of the others that makes for the strength of the führers. When there’s no worthwhile banner, you start to march behind worthless ones. When you don’t have the genuine article, you live with the counterfeit.
p. 19
It was a time of potbellied peace: the atmosphere was strangely electric, the calm before the storm of 1914.
p. 29
From my window I could see the square, the Panthéon gate, and Rodin’s Thinker. I would have liked to know the exact spot on which Dr. Tony Moilin had been shot in 1871 for tending the Commune’s wounded. The bronze Thinker seemed to me to be meditating on that crime, and waiting to be shot himself. After all, how insolent he was, doing nothing but thinking, and how dangerous if he ever came to a conclusion.
p. 36
From this day dates the revulsion and contempt that is aroused in me by the death penalty, which replies to the crime of the primitive, the retarded, the half-mad, or the hopeless by nothing short of a collective crime, carried out coldly by men invested with authority, who believe that they are therefore innocent of the pathetic blood they shed. As for the endless torture of life imprisonment or of very lengthy sentences, I know of nothing more stupidly inhuman.
p. 38
For a while I caught up again with Raymond and Edouard. They were intoxicated with their “scientific” algebraic formulae and in thrall to their dietary discipline (absolute vegetarianism, no wine or coffee, tea or infusions, and we who ate otherwise were “insufficiently evolved”), ceaselessly denouncing the shortcomings of “feelings,” invoking only “scientific reason” and “conscious egoism”. I could see clearly that their childish intoxication with “scientism” contained much more ignorance than knowledge, and an intense desire to live differently at all costs.
p. 38
No other man that I have met in my whole life has ever so convinced me of the impotence and even the futility of the intellect when confronted with tough primitive creatures like this, rudely aroused to a form of intelligence that fits them purely technically for the life struggle. He would have made an excellent seafarer for a Polar expedition, a fine soldier for the colonies, or, in another time, a Nazi stormtroop leader or an NCO for Rommel. There was no doubt of it, all he could be was an outlaw. He was a restless, uncontrolled spirit, in quest of some impossible new dignity, how or what he did not know himself.
p. 47
I reflected that if these desperadoes had been able, before their struggle, to meet men like this, understanding, cultured, and liberal-minded, both by inclination and profession (perhaps more apparently than really so, but even that would have been enough), they would not have entered upon their paths of darkness. The most immediate cause of their revolt and ruin seemed to me to lie in their isolation from human contacts. They were living in no company but their own, divorced from the world, living in one where they were always subject to some confining and second-rate milieu. What had preserved me from their one-dimensional thinking, from their bitter anger, from their pitiless view of society, had been the fact that since childhood I had been exposed to a world full of enduring hope, rich in human value, that of the Russians.
p. 52
Of this hard childhood, this troubled adolescence, all those terrible years, I regret nothing as far as I myself am concerned. I am sorry for those who grow up in this world without ever experiencing the cruel side of it, without knowing utter frustration and the necessity of fighting, however blindly, for mankind. Any regret I have is only for the energies wasted in struggles that were bound to be fruitless. These struggles have taught me that, in any man, the best and the worst live side by side, and sometimes mingle – and that what is worst comes through the corruption of what is best.
p. 58
Paris was leading a double life. Walking along, spellbound, I stopped in front of the lowly windows of the Belleville shops. The colors of the darning wools were a wonder, the mother-of-pearl pen-knives enthralled me, and for several minutes I contemplated the picture postcards of soldiers and their fiancees sending each other kisses through a messenger-dove, holding an envelope in its beak. Men and women passing by – how astonishingly real! A cat, sitting comfortably on the hot window ledge of a bakery, with the smell of warm bread escaping outside! I smiled at it drunkenly. Belleville was the same, only sadder and poorer. “Funerals in twenty-four hours, moderate prices, payment by installments…” A marble cutter was displaying his enamel plaques; all of them represented young soldiers. Housewives in shawls were coming from the town hall, each bringing her sack of potatoes and her bucket of coal. The gray facades of the Rue Julien Lacroix oozed out their ancient misery in the cold.
p. 65
When he asserted “We can take the city,” I would ask, “How would we govern it?”
p. 70
The critical question that was put to everyone, including myself, was, all the time: “For or against Bolshevism? For or against the Constituent Assembly?” To this I would reply as I was wont, rashly and frankly: the Russian Revolution cannot confine itself to changing the political order; it is, and must be, of a social character. In other words, the peasants are bound to seize the land, and will take it from the landlords, with or without uprisings, with or without the permission of a Constituent Assembly; the workers will insist on the nationalization or at the very least the control of large-scale industry and the banks. They did not kick out the Romanovs just to go back to their workshops as powerless as yesterday or to help the cannon-kings grow rich. This, for me, was a self-evident truth, but I saw very soon that although I confined myself to proclaiming it among the Russian military emigres, I ran a grave risk of getting into trouble with the French authorities. Trouble was indeed coming, in no uncertain manner. Without knowing it, I was “on the line” advocated by Lenin.
p. 78
A destroyer escorted our steamer, and now and then took long shots at floating mines. A dark gush would rise from the waves and the child hostages applauded. From mist and sea there emerged the massive outline of Elsinore’s gray stone castle, with its roofs of dull emerald. Weak Prince Hamlet, you faltered in that fog of crimes, but you put the question well. “To be or not to be,” for the men of our age, means free will or servitude, and they have only to choose. We are leaving the void, and entering the kingdom of the will. This, perhaps, is the imaginary frontier.
p. 80
We never thought of sleep once we were in the goods wagon. This was efficiently heated by an iron stove and pulled by an asthmatic locomotive that was taking us, through the pale, ideally pure dawn, to Petrograd. A wintry landscape, without trace of man. Brilliance of snow, borderland of emptiness. In a second forlorn little outpost, another soldier, indifferent to everything but hunger and food, found us a copy of Severnaya Kommuna, organ of the Petrograd Soviet. It was only a single, fairly large gray sheet, printed in pale ink. From it came our first shock. We had never thought that the idea of revolution could be separated from that of freedom. All we knew of the French Revolution, of the Paris Commune, of 1905 in Russia, showed us popular ferment, bubbling ideas, rivalry of clubs, parties, and publications – except during the Terror, under the “Reign of the Supreme Being”; but the Terror of 1793 was simultaneously a climax and the beginning of a decline, the approach to Thermidor. In Petrograd we expected to breathe the air of a liberty that would doubtless be harsh and even cruel to its enemies, but was still generous and bracing. And in this paper we found a colorless article, signed “G. Zinoviev”, on “The Monopoly of Power.” “Our Party rules alone … it will not allow anyone … We are the dictatorship of the proletariat … The false democratic liberties demanded by the counterrevolution.” I am quoting from memory, but such was certainly the sense of the piece. We tried to justify it by the state of siege and the mortal perils; however, such considerations could justify particular acts, acts of violence towards men and ideas, but not a theory based on the extinction of all freedom. I note the date of this article: January 1919. The desert of snow was still rolling on beneath our eyes. We were approaching Petrograd.
p. 80
Shklovsky, People’s Commissar for Foreign Affairs (in the Northern Commune), an intellectual with a black beard and a jaundiced complexion, met me in a room of what was lately military headquarters.
“What are they saying about us abroad?”
“They’re saying that Bolshevism equals banditry.”
“There’s something in that,” he replied calmly. “You’ll see for yourself, things are too much for us. In the Revolution the revolutionaries only amount to a very tiny percentage.” He outlined the situation to me, sparing nothing: a revolution dying, strangled by blockade, ready to collapse from inside into the chaos of counterrevolution. He was a man of bitterly clear vision. (He committed suicide around 1930.)
p. 94
But the Party had few men of this stamp and many Chekas: these gradually came to select their personnel by virtue of their psychological inclinations. The only temperaments that devoted themselves willingly and tenaciously to this task of ‘internal defense’ were those characterized by suspicion, embitterment, harshness, and sadism. Long-standing social inferiority complexes and memories of humiliations and suffering in the Tsar’s jails rendered them intractable, and since professional degeneration has rapid effects, the Chekas inevitably consisted of perverted men tending to see conspiracy everywhere and to live in the midst of perpetual conspiracy themselves.
I believe that the formation of the Chekas was one of the greatest and most impermissible errors that the Bolshevik leaders committed in 1918, when plots, blockades, and interventions made them bow their heads. All evidence indicates that revolutionary tribunals, functioning in the light of day (without excluding secret sessions in particular cases) and admitting the right of defense, would have attained the same efficiency with far less abuse and depravity. Was it so necessary to revert to the procedures of the Inquisition?
p. 109
Trotsky was all tension and energy; he was, besides, an orator of unique quality, whose metallic voice projected a great distance, ejaculating its short sentences that were often sardonic and always infused with a truly spontaneous passion. The decision to fight to the death was taken enthusiastically, and the whole amphitheater raised a song of immense power. I reflected that the psalms sung by Cromwell’s Roundheads before their decisive battle must have sounded no different a tone.
p. 112
I continued to investigate the Okhrana archives. The frightful mass of documents that I found there afforded a unique kind of psychological interest, but the practical bearing of my research was perhaps even greater. For the first time the entire mechanism of an authoritarian empire’s police repression had fallen into the hands of revolutionaries.
p. 115
We also found in the archives meticulous histories of the revolutionary parties, written by chiefs of police. These have since been published. Pored over in the malachite halls of the Winter Palace, whose windows overlooked the Peter-Paul Fortress, our very own Bastille, these extraordinary tools of a police state’s machinery of repression should give pause for thought. They reveal the ultimate powerlessness of repression which it seeks to impede the development of a historical necessity and to defend a regime that is against the needs of society. However powerfully equipped it might be, all it can achieve is to add to the suffering by gaining a little time.
p. 117 [Not only is this extraordinarily perceptive, but Serge perceived it in 1919. Lots of folks got the memo about Russia by World War II, or, at the very least, the Spanish Civil War. But to see this in 1919? Especially by a “believer”? An insider at the time? Extraordinary.]
It was becoming clear, to me and to others, that the suppression of the Cheka and the reintroduction of regular tribunals and rights of defense were from now on preconditions for the Revolution’s own safety. But we could do absolutely nothing. The Politburo, then composed (if I am not mistaken) of Lenin, Trotsky, Zinoviev, Kamenev, Rykov, and Bukharin, deliberated the question without daring to answer it, being itself, I have no doubt, the victim of a certain psychosis born of fear and ruthless authority. Against the Party the anarchists were right when they inscribed on their black banners, “There is no worse poison than power” – meaning absolute power. From now on the psychosis of absolute power was to captivate the great majority of the leadership, especially at the lower levels. I could give countless examples. It was a product of the inferiority complex of the exploited, the enslaved, the humiliated of the past; of the autocracy’s tradition, unwittingly reproduced at each stage; of the unconscious grudge of former convicts and gallows birds of the imperial prisons; of the destruction of human kindness by the war and the civil war; of fear and of the decision to fight to the death.
p. 131 [See my comment above in re: the below. No wonder he was rejected by the Left and embraced by those considered to be “reactionary”. He saw through the veil and spoke the truth about the “very temper and character of victorious Bolshevism”. He did not blame it on a bad apple spoiling the bunch. He began to perceive that it was the very thing itself that was the poison. Also, here he’s talking about 1920. Not 1940 when many others started finally taking the blinders off. He was 20 years before everyone else.]
The failure of the attack on Warsaw meant the defeat of the Russian Revolution in Central Europe, although no one saw it as such. At home, new dangers were waxing and we were on the road to catastrophes of which we had only a faint foreboding. (By “we”, I mean the shrewdest comrades; the majority of the Party was already blindly dependent on the schematism of official thinking.) From October onwards significant events, fated to pass unnoticed in the country at large, were to gather with the gentleness of a massing avalanche. I began to feel, acutely I am bound to say, this sense of a danger from inside, a danger within ourselves, in the very temper and character of victorious Bolshevism. I was continually racked by the contrast between the stated theory and the reality, by the growth of intolerance and servility among many officials and their drive towards privilege. I remember a conversation I had with the People’s Commissar for Food, Tsyurupa, a man with a splendid white beard and candid eyes. I had brought some French and Spanish comrades to him so that he could explain for our benefit the Soviet system of rationing and supply. He showed us beautifully drawn diagrams from which the ghastly famine and the immense black market had vanished without trace.
“What about the black market?” I asked him.
“It is of no importance at all,” the old man replied. No doubt he was sincere, but he was a prisoner of his scheme, a captive of his system, within offices whose occupants obviously all primed him with lies. I was astounded. So this was how Zinoviev could believe in the imminence of proletarian revolution in Western Europe. Was this perhaps how Lenin could believe in the prospects of insurrection among the Eastern peoples? The wonderful lucidity of these great Marxists was beginning to be fuddled with a theoretical intoxication bordering on delusion, and they began to be enclosed within all the tricks and tomfooleries of servility.
p. 133
I therefore realized that the notion of double duty was fundamental and I was never to forget it. Socialism isn’t only about defending against one’s enemies, against the old world it is opposing; it also has to fight within itself against its own reactionary ferments. A revolution seems monolithic only from a distance; close up it can be compared to a torrent that violently sweeps along both the best and the worst at the same time, and necessarily carries along some real counterrevolutionary currents. It is constrained to pick up the worn weapons of the old regime, and these arms are double-edged. In order to be properly served, it has to be put on guard against its own abuses, its own excesses, its own crimes, its own moments of reaction. It has a vital need of criticism, therefore, of an opposition and of the civic courage of those who are carrying it out. And in this connection, by 1920 we were already well short of the mark.
p. 149
I spoke of the matter to some comrades from the Party. They answered: “It will all be quite useless. We are bound by Party discipline, and so are you.”
I flared up: “One can leave a Party!”
They replied, cold and serious: “A Bolshevik does not leave his Party. And anyway, where would you go? You have to face it, there is no one but us.”
p. 152
At the beginning of March, the Red Army began its attack, over the ice, against Kronstadt and the fleet. The artillery from the ships and forts opened fire on the attackers. In several places the ice cracked open under the feet of the infantry as it advanced, wave after wave, clad in white sheets. Huge ice floes rolled over, bearing their human cargo down into the black torrent. It was the beginning of a ghastly fratricide.
p. 155
Marxism has changed several times, according to the times. It developed out of bourgeois science and philosophy and out of the revolutionary aspirations of the proletariat at the moment when capitalist society was reaching its peak. It presents itself as the natural heir of that society of which it is the product. Capital industrial society tends to encompass the whole of the world, fashioning all aspects of life to its design. Consequently, ever since the beginning of the twentieth century, Marxism has aimed to renew and transform everything: the property system, the organization of work, the map of the world (through the abolition of frontiers), and even the inner life of man (through the extinction of the religious mode of thought). Aspiring to a total transformation, it has consequently been, in the etymological sense of the word, totalitarian. It presents the two faces of the ascendant society, simultaneously democratic and authoritarian. The greatest Marxist party, from 1880 to 1920, the Social-Democratic Party of Germany, was bureaucratically organized on the lines of a State, and functioned as a means of achieving power within the State. Bolshevik thought draws its inspiration from the feeling of possession of the truth. In the eyes of Lenin, of Bukharin, of Preobrazhensky, dialectical materialism is both the law of human thought as well as that of the development of nature and of societies. Bolshevik thinking is grounded in the possession of the truth. The Party is the repository of truth, and any form of thinking that differs from it is a dangerous or reactionary error. Here lies the spiritual source of its intolerance. The absolute conviction of its lofty mission assures it of a moral energy quite astonishing in its intensity – and, at the same time, a clerical mentality which is quick to become Inquisitorial. Lenin’s “proletarian Jacobinism,” with its detachment and discipline both in thought and action, is eventually grafted upon the preexisting temperament of activists molded by the old regime, that is by the struggle against despotism. I am quite convinced that a sort of natural selection of authoritarian temperaments is the result. Finally, the victory of the revolution deals with the inferiority complex of the perpetually vanquished and bullied masses by arousing in them a spirit of social revenge, which in turn tends to generate new despotic institutions.
Stop being so prescient and so brilliant, Victor.
p. 157
Totalitarianism is within us.
p. 160
But the majesty of the Russian Revolution disarmed its supporters of all critical sense; they seemed to believe that approval of it entailed the abdication of the right to think.
p. 165
[Trotsky] made his appearance dressed in some kind of white uniform, bare of any insignia, with a broad, flat military cap, also in white, for headgear; his bearing was superbly martial, with his powerful chest, jet-black beard and hair, and flashing eyeglasses. His attitude was less homely than Lenin’s, with something authoritarian about it. That, maybe, is how my friends and I saw him, we critical Communists; we had much admiration for him, but no real love. His sternness, his insistence on punctuality in work and battle, the inflexible correctness of his demeanor in a period of general slackness, all gave some rise to certain insidious attacks, demagogic and malicious, that were made against him. I was hardly influenced by those considerations, but the political solutions prescribed by him for current difficulties struck me as proceeding from a character that was basically dictatorial.
p. 171
On the whole, the foreign delegates were a rather disappointing crowd, charmed at enjoying appreciable privileges in a starving country, quick to adulate, and reluctant to think. Few workers could be seen among them, but plenty of politicians. “How pleased they are,” Jacques Mesnil remarked to me, “to be able to watch parades, at long last, from the official platform!”
p. 179
I am well aware that terror has been necessary up till now in all great revolutions, which do not happen according to the taste of well-intentioned men, but spontaneously, with the violence of tempests; that the individual has as much weight as straw in a hurricane; and that the duty of revolutionaries is to employ the only weapons that history affords us if we are not to be overwhelmed through our own folly. But the perpetuation of terror, after the end of the Civil War, and the transition to a period of economic freedom, was an immense and demoralizing blunder. I was and still am convinced that the new regime would have felt a hundred times more secure if it had henceforth proclaimed its reverence, as a Socialist government, for human life and the rights of all individuals without exception. I still ask myself, having closely observed the probity and intelligence of its leaders, why it didn’t. What psychoses of fear and of power prevented it?
p. 181
The winds of an immeasurable calamity swept upon us from the parched plains of the Volga. The Civil War had crossed these regions, and now drought had destroyed them. Millions, starved of all necessities, fled from the famine. I saw them coming up even as far as Petrograd, on foot or in carts. Not everyone had the strength or the means to flee; millions were to die on the spot. This scourge, which struck at both the Ukraine and the Crimea, devastated areas populated by twenty-three million inhabitants. The blow was so severe that authority tottered. Could the Bolshevik dictatorship overcome the ghastly specter of death? I met Maxim Gorky, bony, gray, and frowning as never before. He told me of the formation of a committee of leading intellectuals and non-Communist specialists, which was to appeal to all the latest energies of the country, and might well be the germs of tomorrow’s democratic government. (The Government at first recognized this committee, which was headed by the Marxist revisionist economist Prokopovich and the Liberal publicist Ekateriana Kusskova; then it had these two arrested and expelled from the country.)
I did not agree. The revolutionary regime seemed to be already so solidly established that the skeleton hand of famine could not snatch power away from it.
p. 187
Inside post-Versailles Germany, governed as it was by the Social-Democratic President Ebert, and by the most democratic of republican constitutions, one breathed in the atmosphere of a collapsing world. Everything was just in its place: people were unassuming, kindly, industrious, bankrupt, wretched, debauched, and resentful. Right in the middle of town, beyond the dark Spree and the Friedrichstrasse, a huge railway station was being built. Bemedaled cripples from the Great War sold matches outside nightclubs in which girls, who had a price just like everything else, danced naked among the flower-decked tables of the diners. Capitalism was running riot, apparently under the inspiration of Hugo Stinnes, and accumulating immense fortunes in the midst of insolvency. Everything was for saleL the daughters of the bourgeoisie in the bars, the daughters of the people in the streets, officials, import and export, licenses, state papers, businesses in whose prospects nobody believed. The fat dollar and the puny, puffed-up coin of the victors ruled the roost, buying up everything even human souls if they could. The Allied military missions, burdened with the impossible task of controlling disarmament, walked around in their smart uniforms, surrounded by a polite but no less obvious hatred.
p. 191
The march on Rome and the rise of Mussolini were understood by no one in the International except a few isolated militants, who included myself since I had followed the progress of Fascism from fairly close quarters. The opinion of the leadership was that this was a piece of reactionary buffoonery that would soon die away and open the path to revolution. I opposed this view, saying that this new variety of counterrevolution had taken the Russian Revolution as its schoolmaster in matters of repression and mass manipulation through propaganda; further, it had succeeded in recruiting a host of disillusioned, power-hungry ex-revolutionaries; consequently, its rule would last for years.
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