#6226
#10
Dissent
Spril 2002
Books
'It Is Not Over Yet'
By Keith Gessen
Victor Serge: The Course is Set on Hope
by Susan Weissman
Verso, 2001 364 pp $35
In the months after the Nazi invasion of France, while hoping for an exit visa but expecting Stalin's henchmen, Victor Serge managed to write some parts of a novel. "Not, however," he assures us, "from any love of literature." There were other reasons. For his work in the Berlin outpost of the Comintern, the Gestapo might have liked to speak with Serge; for his fearless denunciations of Stalin, the NKVD would have liked to silence him. "A man ends by concentrating a certain unique clarity in himself, a certain irreplaceable experience," one character explains on the eve of his arrest in The Case of Comrade Tulayev, the novel Serge was then writing. How many people on earth understand Einstein-and if they were shot? "It would all be over for a century or two-or three, how do we know? A whole vision of the universe would vanish into nothingness."
Thus the need to write, even when life pressed powerful claims. "Others, less engaged in combat, would perfect a style," he explained in his Memoirs of a Revolutionary, "but what I had to tell, they could not tell." Serge could tell a great deal-it was that kind of life. Born in Belgium in 1890 to Russian exiles-their bare home in Brussels covered with pictures of revolutionaries who'd been hanged-he became an anarchist newspaper editor in Paris, spent five years in prison, worked for insurrection in Spain in 1917, and then rushed to the "vaster insurrection" taking place in Russia. On the way there, in the waiting room of the Russian Embassy in Paris, he met a fiery monarchist, also heading for Russia, and in the great tradition of that country they immediately began arguing, confessing, and pacing up and down. The man turned out to be Nikolai Gumilev, the husband of Anna Akhmatova and himself an important poet. "In 1921," Serge recalled, "I was to struggle vainly for several days, trying to stop the Cheka [All-Russian Extraordinary Commission for Combating Counter-Revolution and Sabotage] from shooting him." Gumilev was the first major writer killed by the Bolsheviks; Serge would meet many more.
He arrived in Petrograd in January 1919. The city was a shambles-the factories had ceased operation, the streets were lined with frozen excrement, and the people were burning precious housing stock for fuel. The bureaucracy had already become a menace: "I witnessed members of government driven to telephoning Lenin to obtain a railway ticket or a room in the [official] hotel." Serge canvassed opinion among anarchists and socialists. He found the Mensheviks "intelligent, honest and devoted to Socialism, but completely overtaken by events. . . .Every conversation I had with them convinced me that, face to face with the ruthlessness of history, they were wrong." When Maxim Gorky, the dean of Russian letters, offered him a post at his Menshevized publishing house, Serge recoiled. "My mind was made up. I was neither against the Bolsheviks nor neutral. I was with them." He joined the Party, was charged with organizing-under Grigory Zinoviev-the Third Communist International, and immediately began interceding for anarchists, Mensheviks, and whoever else found themselves in the Chekist maw. He also began writing what was in essence Bolshevik-not propaganda, exactly, but spirited-apologia, for a number of mostly French publications.
Serge's work in the International soon took him to Berlin, where he sowed revolution, then to Vienna, where he befriended the intellectual giants of European communism. He returned to Russia in 1926 in hopes of supporting Trotsky's Left Opposition and reviving the moribund Party from within. Expelled instead, and briefly arrested, Serge began to write novels, in French. In 1933, he was arrested again and exiled to the distant city of Orenburg.
Luckily-and, as he well knew, thousands were not so lucky-Serge was a significant figure on the French left, which mobilized a campaign on his behalf. Though a delegation of Soviet writers in Paris refused to acknowledge his existence ("these," cried Serge in his memoirs, "my good colleagues of the Soviet Writers' Union!"), Stalin eventually, and much to his later regret, ordered his release in 1936. Refused a visa to several European countries, Serge ended up in Belgium. He began to tell the world about the Stalinist terror and the frame-up of the Moscow Trials, and was vilified for it in the communist press. His old friend Jacques Sadoul called him a "common criminal" in l'Humanité ("an exceptional article," said Trotsky, "even for that prostituted publication"). Eventually expelled from Belgium because of Soviet pressure, Serge found himself in Paris and then, finally, Mexico, where he would die in 1947-poor, isolated, and very soon forgotten.
Though his fame was in France, Serge's influence may have been greater here. He was a regular contributor to the golden-age Partisan Review and Dwight Macdonald's Politics. Edmund Wilson, then still at work on To the Finland Station, was deeply impressed by Russia: Twenty Years After (1937). "Serge taught us that one can hate Stalinist oppression," Lewis Coser wrote, "without becoming so imbued by hatred that one forgets the many evils of this world, seeing only one great evil." And this was dangerous-"Of one thing, anyway, I'm sure," Macdonald wrote him in 1945. "No American publisher will touch your [Memoirs] at present." No American publisher ever did, and in the years since his death one of the most important political writers of that era has just about disappeared. Serge is absent from the indexes of learned histories, slighted in discussions of the political novel. He memorialized so many of his contemporaries in his Memoirs; most of them were killed before they could return the favor. In Russia he is almost completely unknown.
Susan Weissman's The Course is Set on Hope, the first attempt at anything like a book-length biography of Serge, is meant to mitigate this neglect. It is, unfortunately, a disappointing work. Weissman is an inelegant writer, which sometimes leads her into a very un-Sergean slandering of the dead. The book displays a crude contempt for the Bolsheviks' opponents; "all" the White Russian groups in Paris are said to have been "delighted" by Stalin's terror, and in what is otherwise the book's strongest section, on Serge in France in the late 1930s, "Maria" Tsvetaeva is enlisted into the service of the NKVD. This is especially cruel: Marina Tsvetaeva, a wonderful poet who committed suicide in 1941 in utter agony, starvation, and despair, had a tough enough time of it without the next generation of Trotskyists believing she was Stalin's secret agent.
There are more serious errors, too. Politically, Weissman is a Trotskyist with a slight Sergist deviation. So although she is highly critical (with Trotsky) of Stalinist incompetence and opportunism and (with Serge) of political terror, she mostly blames the "counter-revolution"-a wonderful term that encompasses General Denikin, Stalin, the world bourgeoisie, and the social democrats. According to Weissman, the Bolsheviks did not monopolize power-they kept up a "lively and creative" dialogue with the other socialist parties for as long as was possible. And this idea-of an early Bolshevik innocence corrupted by outside forces-is at the core of a refusal (only partly shared by Serge) to peer into the dark heart of violent revolution; in practice it suggests that a great historical do-over might be in order. To believe this you must skip over uncomfortable facts, and Weissman does. She knows her Yevgeny Preobrazhensky instead of her Constituent Assembly-and what doth it profit a writer to have studied primitive socialist accumulation if she does not mention even in passing the dispersal of a democratically elected convention that incidentally consisted-since the liberals were already outlawed-exclusively of socialists? Weissman wishes to present Serge as a democratic Marxist, to argue that it is socialism, not capitalism, that is the natural partner of democracy, and this is a worthy project; but it is undermined by Weissman's own lack of commitment to the history of Russian democracy. When, on January 5, 1918, Bolshevik troops cut short an unarmed and peaceful demonstration in support of the Constituent Assembly by firing upon it, this may have been "lively," but it was not creative.
Mostly, though, The Course is Set on Hope reveals how little we learn of Serge by stacking up his position papers. When she is not paraphrasing his memoirs, Weissman dutifully introduces the Serge viewpoint into the great debates of early Soviet history-Serge on the Cheka, Serge on Kronstadt, the New Economic Policy, the Canton uprising of 1927. This is the wrong tack. Serge may have been the first to describe the Soviet Union as "totalitarian," but he knew just how small a consolation this was to the victims: "'Totalitarianism' did not yet exist as a word [in 1921]; as an actuality it began to press hard on us." And here is Weissman: "Serge finally defined the Soviet state as 'bureaucratic totalitarian with collectivist leanings.' His use of the term totalitarian was different from the later totalitarian school of analysis just as his usage of bureaucratic and collectivist differed from the 'bureaucratic collectivist' school." Perhaps. And this sort of analysis can be useful in a discussion of actually existing states. But the Soviet Union is dead. Weissman therefore finds herself in the impossible position of having to resurrect ancient, intricate arguments about events her readers can no longer be expected even to know about.
Though Serge has proved resistant to resurrection, he is still worth the trouble-but as a portraitist of terror and resistance, not as the source for a political program.
Serge had no illusions about the revolution. "Choking with joy," he writes of his arrival in Soviet Russia in 1919, "we shouted 'Greetings, Comrade!' to a Red sentry; he nodded, and then asked if we had any food." Serge is fully aware of the irony: between their "choking with joy" and the soldier's laconic nod lies a vast chasm of future disappointment. It's the sort of moment that recurs throughout Serge's work, and it is recognizably modernist. But Serge is different, he refuses to stop at the ironic disjunction. The revolution, after all, is just fifteen months old, an infant. So did they have any food? "We had. Here, take it. The Revolution is hungry."
Weissman writes that Serge participated in three revolutions. In fact, he missed all three-he was in Barcelona for the failed July 1917 insurrection, but not for the more seriously failed one in August; he was in Germany in preparation for the 1923 uprising, but was sent to Vienna before it was crushed. To Russia he came, so to speak, as soon as he heard, but the glorious period had already passed. Despite this, or because of it, the revolution's degeneration became his great theme. Like an astronomer seeking the origin of the universe in the radiation of far-flung galaxies, Serge kept trying to figure out where it went wrong. Further and further back he went, from Stalin to Kronstadt to the birth of the Cheka (December 1917). It was a horrible disaster, and Serge was one of the first to say so. If he never quite made it back to the night of October 25, it was because, so far as he could tell, there was no other way.
Serge's searches did not win him many friends. After a public debate about Kronstadt, Trotsky declared him a bourgeois moralist. "Serge plays with the concept of revolution," said the Old Man, "writes poems about it, but is incapable of understanding it as it is." Weissman finds this "vicious," but Trotsky was right-Serge did not think of the revolution as he did. And yet in his way Serge saw it more clearly: by its failure he knew it. The brief portraits of revolutionaries of which the Memoirs consists catalogue this failure with a remarkable cumulative force.
Of Georg Lukács: "In him I saw a first-class brain which could have endowed Communism with a true intellectual greatness. . . .I was to meet him and his wife later, in 1928-29, in a Moscow street…. Although he was fairly well-disposed towards me, he did not care to shake my hand in a public place, since I was expelled and a known Oppositionist. He enjoyed a physical survival, and wrote short, spiritless articles in Comintern journals."
On Trotsky: "The end of his life was played out in loneliness. He often paced up and down in his study in Coyoácan talking to himself. . . . He would engage in discussions with Kamenev, who had been shot long before; he was often heard addressing him by name."
And the anecdotes! Ivan Smirnov, an old hero of the Civil War, is removed from his cabinet post; pleased, in a way, he goes down to the Labor Exchange, hoping to find work as an engineer. "Some snooty little official," Serge reports, "saw this tall, graying, bright-eyed innocent bending in front of his window, and writing on the form he had to fill in, under the heading Last Employment: 'People's Commissar for Posts and Telegraphs.'" The official called the Central Committee, and the job hopeful was promptly deported. There are dozens of stories like these in Serge's memoirs, and their endings are all very much alike. Ivan Smirnov would later appear on the dock alongside Kamenev and Zinoviev in the first of the Moscow Trials.
As a writer, Serge had set out to defy all bourgeois conventions. He wanted to depict the consciousness of entire cities, of social classes. His first two novels lack central characters entirely; his third, Conquered City, has characters, but it's hard to tell what's going on. By Midnight in the Century (1936-1939), perhaps Serge's most characteristic book, he has narrowed his focus to a few brave exiled Oppositionists. Things got to the point where Irving Howe could accuse Tulayev (1940-1942) of being too "stately," too much like the nineteenth-century bourgeois novel.
This was a capitulation, of sorts, and it could not have come easily to Serge. But it so happened that as he began to think of the revolution less in terms of historical forces and more in terms of the individual lives lost, his books became a sort of listing of the dead. As he says of meeting Raymond Lefebvre, a French socialist who had written a tome about the First World War with the excellent title Revolution or Death!: "He spoke for the survivors of a generation now lying buried in communal graves. We quickly became friends." Serge, too, watched a generation of men-in his estimation, the best of them-murdered by the revolution he had spent his life preparing. His Tulayev is filled with a very physical foreboding. "I have migraines that medicine has not yet named," says one old Bolshevik: "a little pain the color of fire fixes itself in the back of my neck." For Serge, nearly the worst aspect of the murders was their squalor. Of Vassily Chadayev, an old Bolshevik and Oppositionist murdered in 1928: "All I ever saw of him again were some dreadful photographs: the dumdum bullets, fired from sawed-off rifles, had harrowed his face and chest monstrously." Since his death was kept secret, he writes of another Oppositionist, it "did not even serve as an example." Serge dedicated Midnight in the Century to "the memory of Kurt Landau, Andrés Nin, Erwin Wolf, who disappeared in Barcelona and whose very death was stolen from us."
It's not all death and horror with Serge. He is often maudlin, sometimes silly. He tells of an episode at Orenburg, when he was approached by a sympathizer who suggested that he form an Oppositionist group. "I looked deep into his eyes," writes Serge, "and thought to myself: 'You, my friend, are an agent provocateur!'" At moments like these it almost feels as if Serge, far from being a hardened revolutionary, were still playing at one. It was in Orenburg, too, that Serge managed briefly to make a living by sending manuscripts to France via registered mail-the manuscripts disappeared into the censor's bureau, but the post office dutifully recompensed Serge for his losses. "This," writes Serge, "afforded me the income of a well-paid technician." His novels are permeated with a palpable warmth. In Tulayev, the imprisoned Bolshevik economist, Kiril Rublev-his mind otherwise filled with statistics, projections, corrections-imagines himself talking to his wife, Dora, after deciding to resist the interrogation. "Dora would be glad," he thinks. "She would say, 'I'm certain I won't survive you long, Kiril. Show me the way.'"
Kiril, as it happens, does not show the way-he capitulates. But the scene avoids sentimentality also because we know it is bubbling up from deep personal sorrow. Serge's own wife, Liuba, could not bear the strain of Stalin's Russia. "Every week the system devoured a new class of victim," writes Serge. "In this atmosphere my wife lost her reason." She was hospitalized, recovered a little, but "then the old story began again: bread-cards refused, denunciations, arrests, death-sentences demanded over all the loudspeakers at the street corners." This was 1931 or 1932. And yet it's a funny thing, the antibourgeois memoir. Serge writes of his wife with great tenderness, and he was buying sedatives one cold winter morning for "my poor invalid," as he called her, when he was himself arrested. But when he refers some time later to "my wife," the translator must insert a footnote to explain that this is Serge's next wife, Liuba having been placed, incurable, in a sanatorium in southern France. It is characteristic of Weissman's book that she does nothing to tell us more about a woman with whom Serge spent twenty years. This is a serious mistake for the biographer of a man who, during his lengthy list of Stalin's victims, apologizes when he forgets the name of Yakov Blumkin's secretary, who was shot in Odessa and whom Serge had never met. "[Leon] Sedov's recollection of this young man was full of warmth," writes Serge, "but my overburdened memory has let his name slip."
Serge's sympathy-perhaps it extended too far. He was interested in everyone, over-generous in his characterizations (even ex-friend Sadoul receives a fair portrait in the memoirs). Trotsky was so confused by Serge's diverse contacts upon his release from the USSR that he began to wonder whether he might not be a Soviet agent. As a novelist, too, Serge was able to inhabit the most disparate personages. Tulayev ends with the NKVD interrogator Fleischman reading the final testament of the recently executed Rublev: "'You thought well, Rublev,' said Fleischman, and it made him feel a sort of pride." He closes the notebook-"so he would have closed the eyes of a dead man"-and seals it with wax, to be discovered, perhaps, by future generations. This sympathy, this bizarre optimism, affects Serge's historical analysis as well, so that he sometimes seems to hold all positions simultaneously. As an apologist, he had mocked the people who thought one could simply waltz into the "free city of communism," with "no repression after the workers' victory, no revolutionary tribunals, no Cheka-above all, ye gods, no Cheka!" Later he would argue that the Cheka destroyed the revolution. And, unlike Trotsky and Bukharin, he felt keenly his own culpability (being so much slighter, it may have been easier to feel): "We wrote good books," says one of his characters, "we created ideological frameworks on mountains of statistics, observations, scientific findings-we did not suspect that we were passing through the magic gates of hell." Apostasy, a complete Koestler-like abjuring of his past beliefs, might have bought Serge a pass through the magic gates of cold war superstardom and lent his life a nice narrative arc. He refused it. In a brief, powerful summary of his career in the Memoirs, Serge writes:
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 a press with a vast circulation 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 inspire a certain dizziness. 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.
Wonderful stuff, but confidence in the future? When he wrote these lines, in 1943, Serge knew about the Nazi death camps; he believed that postwar Europe would be a quasi-totalitarian superstate; he was convinced that all communist insurgency movements were nothing more than pawns of the Kremlin. And he knew, especially on this last score, that he was partially to blame. Weissman makes Serge's optimism the centerpiece of her argument, and in a way she is right-it is unbelievable that someone who saw so clearly could avoid despair. Perhaps that really was the only road possible for "us"-an insistence, which bordered on the absurd, on the possibility of future regeneration.
And again, he had seen the revolution in swaddling clothes, and he could not forget it. "We have known how to win," he wrote in Partisan Review in 1942. "We have seen the generals, the ministers, the financiers and archbishops smile ingratiatingly and tremble before us. No predestination condemns us to be the victims of concentration camps-and as for the prison-torturers, we know quite well how people are put against a wall." This may have been violent wartime rhetoric, but Serge never knew any peace. He said impossibly contradictory things, and he said them incomparably well.
Nothing is ever lost, and events repeat themselves: we still have scribblers who lie, or avert their gaze, for the simple reason that it is easier to do so. We have apologists who call themselves realists, and an increasing number who do not feel it necessary to apologize at all. Serge is as unlikely now as ever; his tragic sense of the revolution as an action carried out by the best men in Europe is as disturbing. He did not excuse them or himself. No wonder Lukács refused to shake hands when they met on a Moscow street-Serge never washed his of anything.
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