DOI: 10.1111/1467-8675.12330
ORIGINAL ARTICLE
A world we have lost: Remembering the Russian Revolution through Victor Serge Ross Poole Philosophy and Politics, New School for Social Research, New York, NY, USA Correspondence Ross Poole, Philosophy and Politics, New School for Social Research, New York, NY 10003, USA. Email:
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We are leaving the void, and entering the kingdom of will. (Victor Serge, 1919)1
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SPARKS OF HOPE
It is not easy to get excited about the centenary of the October Revolution. There are very few left who want to celebrate the Bolshevik model of revolution, fewer who are prepared to defend the Soviet form of socialism that was its outcome, and even fewer who bother to listen to them. Well before the collapse of the Soviet Union in the early 1990s it had lost all credibility as an alternative to capitalism and liberal democracy. And while it is a long way from the end of history celebrations that followed, no one is seriously proposing to resurrect the Soviet model. If history is the judge, and those who made the Revolution could hardly object to the choice, the Revolution belongs to the past, not the present. It would seem that the centenary can be the occasion only for academic dissections of what is definitively over. Why then, apart from conventions about centenaries, should we remember the Bolshevik seizure of power? And, if we should, how should we remember it? I take these as questions about memory, not about history. That is to say, they are questions about what these events of a hundred years ago may mean for us now. This does not mean that we can ignore the meanings that the Revolution had for its participants and witnesses. On the contrary, we need to address them if we are to discover what the Revolution should mean to us. But we know, as its contemporaries did not, what happened afterwards. We cannot put aside this knowledge as we investigate the past. But we should not allow that knowledge to predetermine our understanding of those struggles. We should seek what Walter Benjamin (2003, p. 391) called the spark of hope in the past, even if the spark was to disappear in the blackness that followed. In other words, I am looking for what deserves to be remembered in the Revolution, perhaps for something that even now might be celebrated. I will not, except for an occasional comment, revisit the various histories and memoirs of this period. Instead, I will use novels, that is, fictional depictions of the Revolution. In a fuller account, these might themselves provide material to celebrate; the first 10 years of the Revolution saw an enormous flourishing of literary and other forms of artistic creativity, and this certainly deserves to be remembered, especially as so many of that talented generation were to perish under Stalin. But my concern here is much narrower. I will discuss only one author, Victor Serge, and only one of his novels at any length. My interest in Serge's work is not in its place in early Soviet literature (indeed, he wrote in French), but for its insights into the revolutionary struggle. I will treat his novels as a form of historical knowledge. This was how Serge understood his work. In 1929, with the defeat of the left opposition Constellations. 2017;1–12.
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and his own arrest and exile, he turned to fiction, not as an escape but as a way of portraying truths about the Revolution. In his novels, as in his political writings, Serge provided a brutally honest account of the horrors, not only of the Stalinist ascendancy but also those of the early years of the Revolution. However, he did not give up on the Revolution. In 1939, the bleak year of the Stalin–Hitler pact and with full knowledge of the purges, he wrote: It is often said that “the germ of all Stalinism was in Bolshevism at its beginning.” Well, I have no objection. Only, Bolshevism also contained many other germs, a mass of other germs, and those who lived through the enthusiasm of the first years of the first victorious socialist revolution ought not to forget it. To judge the living man by the death germs which the autopsy reveals in the corpse—and which he may have carried in him since his birth—is that very sensible? (Serge, 1939) The most obvious way to understand the germ metaphor is as a causal propensity towards a certain end. In favorable circumstances, the good germs will flourish and produce freedom and equality and at the same time provide the antibodies necessary to resist contamination. In the case of the Russian Revolution, the development of the favored germ was prevented by the bad germs that generated Stalinism. This may have been Serge's understanding of the metaphor (see Weissman, 2001/2013, p. 20). But all too soon, this understanding generates the futile scholasticism of what Eric Hobsbawm (1997) called “counterfactual history. If only Lenin had lived long enough to get rid of Stalin; if only Trotsky had not been ill at certain key moments in the struggle against Stalin; if only Kerensky had been smarter; if only the Provisional Government had hung on long enough for the Constituent Assembly to do its job; and so on. The history of the Revolution, like every history, is full of unrealized possibilities. But what might have been has little epistemic or political force when measured against the hard actuality of what was. When Benjamin spoke of the spark of hope it was not to recommend an alternative history, one with a happy ending. It was to recover aspects of the past that deserve, even demand to be remembered. For Benjamin, these make a claim on us now. While he says little about what these aspects of the past were, he provides a hint when he speaks of the “refined and spiritual things” that are present in class struggle, not as “spoils that fall to the victor” but in the “confidence, courage, humor, cunning, and fortitude” with which the struggle is carried on (Benjamin, 2003, p. 390). The task of remembering the Revolution is that of seeking the sparks of hope present in the struggles of those destined to be defeated. It is these that make a claim on us now. Minimally, it is a claim for remembrance; the recognition of those who sacrificed their lives and of what is of continuing value in those struggles.2 It will also, I will suggest, involve coming to understand the failure of that revolution as a tragedy, one that remains with us today.
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THE REVOLUTIONARY NOVEL Everything in this book is fictional and everything is true. (Serge, 1977, p. iv) In 1928 Serge had spent 10 years in full-time political activity. He had arrived in Russia in early 1919 and despite
his anarchist background almost immediately threw in his lot with the Bolsheviks. He worked with, for, and eventually against the party for the next 10 years. For three of those years he was engaged in revolutionary activity in Germany, hoping that a revolution there might rescue the Soviet Union from the authoritarianism and brutality that had become dominant. When he returned in 1925 he became a member of the left opposition. By 1928 the opposition had been defeated. Trotsky was in exile. Serge was arrested, then released, and suffered a near fatal illness. He decided that if he recovered he would return to writing, not merely political tracts and arguments, but also novels and poetry. He wrote an extraordinary amount, first in internal exile in the Soviet Union, and then in France and Mexico. He admired Trotsky but eventually fell out with him. Although he had significant supporters, he became increasingly isolated and died in near poverty in 1947. I will not be concerned here with Serge's political views as they were presented in overtly political writings. My interest is in the fact that he turned to writing novels (also poetry, but I will not discuss this here) not as a
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retreat from political activity, but as a form of politics. His novels were a way of depicting what had happened and often what was to happen in the various revolutionary movements he participated in. They provided ways in which he might depict the grandeur, the glory, the terror, and the tragedy of the revolution, and at the same time its pettiness, cowardice, corruption, and sometimes even its desperate comedy and farce. However, Serge argued that this was possible only given a conception of the novel that moved away from the focus on the adventures or misadventures of a small number of individuals or of a family (a focus that he thought, unfairly, was characteristic of the French novel). He wrote: “Individual existences were of no interest to me . . . except by virtue of the great ensemble of life whose particles, more or less endowed with consciousness, are all that we ever are” (2014, p. 305). His strategy was to depict a movement through the thought and actions of a large number of participants and observers. None of them fully understand the world in which they live and act, but nevertheless that world works through them. He aimed to provide “a testimony to the vast flow of life through us, whose essential aspects we must try to fix for the benefit of those who will come after us” (2014, p. 304). Serge did not claim to have invented this conception of the novel. He mentions John Dos Passos as an influence, presumably his Manhattan Transfer (the USA trilogy was not published until later). A closer influence was his friend and fellow writer, Boris Pilnyak. An account Serge wrote in 1923 of Pilnyak's work could well serve as an introduction to his own: The revolution which has broken all the old social disciplines has also broken the all-too-conventional ones of literature. No linear story-line in this Russian writer. There is no “plot” (a poor thing, a poor word). There are no distinctive, central personalities. Crowds in motion—in which each is a world, an end in itself—events which overturn, cross over, mix up, overlap with each other, multiple lives that appear and disappear, all rare, unique, central, since they are human, and all of them insignificant in “Russia, the Snow Storm, the Revolution,” for the only thing that remains and matters is the country, the masses, the storm. (Serge, 2004a; see also Greeman, 2011, p. xxvii–xxviii) Pilnyak was not a Bolshevik, or even a revolutionary. Serge describes him as a fellow traveller (2004a, p. 215). He suggests that because Pilnyak did not identify with the revolution, he was inclined to see it as a natural phenomenon, storm, rather than as a political movement with a purpose; a proletarian rising under the leadership of the Bolsheviks.3 Nevertheless, the conception of the novel Serge attributes to Pilnyak is appropriate, though certainly not uniquely so, to a communist and revolutionary political movement. It also captures what is a key moral issue for these movements. What is the relationship between the individual, each one “a world, an end in itself,” “rare, unique, central, because human,” and the mass movement, “Russia, the Snow Storm, the Revolution” in which individuals are insignificant? In this passage, Serge is tempted towards the view that “the only thing that remains and matters is the country, the masses, the storm,” which suggests that individual lives are significant only in their contribution to that movement. As we will see, this is the view of some of Serge's protagonists. But it does not do justice to his novels. Certainly, they seek to provide an understanding of historical movements through the thoughts and actions of some of the individuals caught up in them, where the individuals themselves do not have that understanding. But individuals matter; each is presented as a “world in itself.” Serge comments that if the characters in a novel are “truly alive, they function by themselves, to a point at which they eventually take the author by surprise” (2014, p. 307). The freedom that he allows to his characters means Serge was able to present sympathetic depictions of enemies and betrayers of the Revolution, and of spies and agents for the White Army in Conquered City and other novels.4 It is this freedom that allows us to recognize that each of his characters is a world in himself or herself, and that each failure and each loss is that of a unique world. Especially in his later novels, no one character is allowed to take center stage, but each is provided with enough life for us to understand something of their own self-awareness. Even in his account of the early years of the Revolution, the years that Serge was prepared to defend and to celebrate, he displays the moral costs behind the achievements. He himself was tough-minded enough to accept the necessity of these costs. It is only when the losses and sacrifices of his protagonists cease to have any intelligible connection with what he took to be the promise of the Revolution that he repudiated them.
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PETROGRAD UNDER SIEGE: TWO GODS AND ONE MASTER
I am going to focus here on Conquered City, the third of the novels written by Serge after his decision to return to literature. The first, Men in Prison, is an account of his arrest and imprisonment in France. The second, The Birth of Our Power, is based on his participation in the failed revolution in Barcelona, his return to and imprisonment in France, and his arrival in the new Soviet Union. In an obvious sense they are autobiographical. They follow events in Serge's own life. But he is almost invisible: an observer even of his own actions and conversations. He provides the point of view from which the stories are written, and occasionally a voice in a political discussion. His own personal life is not allowed to intrude, at least until in the last pages of Birth of our Power when he describes a solemn child, the daughter of a returning Russian exile, without mentioning that she was to become his second wife. But despite the marginal presence of the author, the first two novels do constitute a kind of political Bildungsroman. They are the story of Serge's development from an individualist anarchist in France to a revolutionary syndicalist in Barcelona, to a Bolshevist in the new Russia. On his own account, it was his dissatisfaction with the lack of a coherent political program that led him to look beyond the various forms of anarchism. His strongest political friendship in this period was with a Catalan anarcho-syndicalist, Dario,5 who was the leader of the revolution in Barcelona. Serge admired Dario's courage and commitment but was dissatisfied with his refusal to take seriously the organizational tasks necessary to take and hold power. What he recognized in the Bolsheviks was the existence of a revolutionary will. Even before he arrives in the Soviet Union the narrator of Serge's novel (here and elsewhere I will refer to the authorial persona as VS) thinks of the challenges ahead: We would have to be hard on ourselves, in order to be hard on others, since we are at last the power. It would be necessary to stop at nothing, or all would be lost. Would we be strong enough? Would we be worthy of you, Revolution? (2015, p. 192) He is soon to witness revolutionary hardness. Also on the boat to Petrograd, is Sam Potopenko, a Russian émigré, who had been a comrade in Paris and then in the French internment camp (he had made a courageous but unsuccessful attempt to escape). He had previously spent years in the USA and is now, like the author, returning to join the Revolution. Sam expresses some last-minute doubts. Why had he not remained in the relative comfort of Pittsburgh rather than the dangerous chaos of a revolution? “I'm wondering whether I'm not an idiot?” he asked. He does not have long to wonder. On his arrival in Petrograd, Sam is taken to the office of the Special Commission.6 There he is interviewed by three members of the Special Commission, each of whom we will meet again. It is revealed that while he was in the USA, he had been on the payroll of the Tsarist government to spy on other émigrés. He is asked why he returned: “He answers in a whisper, surprised by his own answer because it came from deep within him: “I couldn't live otherwise.” He is taken to an adjoining courtyard and shot: Sam, as if he knew this road which no one ever travels twice, moves toward a high rectangular pile of logs, covered with snow. The trampled snow has taken on a brown tinge here; it gives off a stale odor. Some birch chips glisten on the edge of the bark, sliced off with an ax. An ax . . . Here they use a Nagan revolver, made in Seraing. Sam closes his eyes, shuddering. Some one comes up behind him. It must be 11.30. (2015, pp. 202–203) It says something about Serge's enormous confidence and skill as a writer that he is prepared to take us into the last minutes of the life of a relatively minor character, right up to the instant of his death. But the passage has an important political resonance. Serge himself worked for some time on the archives of the Tsarist Secret Police, and no doubt he passed on to the Special Commission information of the kind that doomed VS's friend Sam. As an author, Serge does not retreat from the recognition that revolutionary justice must be hard, with no time for moral niceties. But he also allows Sam the last 10 minutes of his life. In Conquered City there is a shift in focus. The city of the title is Petrograd in 1919, the year when it was under siege by the White Army, a siege that was lifted by the victory of the Red Army under Trotsky. VS is absent most of the time, but appears occasionally to describe the city or engage in conversation with other participants. There is no central character or even group of characters. If there is a protagonist, it is the city itself, still with traces of its history as St Petersburg, the creation of Peter I (he had ceased to be Peter the Great after the Revolution) and the capital of Tsarist
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Russia, with its palaces and elegant buildings now occupied by administrators and activists of the new regime. Some of the characters are easily identifiable: Zinoviev, the “President,” is on stage, Dzerzhinsky makes a brief appearance, and Trotsky and Lenin are in the near background. Some others are recognizable versions of the friends, comrades, and antagonists whom Serge describes in Memoirs of a Revolutionary. Others are no doubt fictional. All are attempting to make their lives in conditions that none of them fully understands. Some are party members, more or less committed, sometimes corrupt, sometimes not, some hardworking and always tired, some ambitious for position in the party bureaucracy, some too ready to take the small perks that membership offers. Others are counterrevolutionaries, either spies or accomplices, working or waiting for the victory of the besieging forces. It is a world in which almost everyone is cold and no one has enough to eat. The struggle merely to keep alive involves corruption, theft, the barter of favors, and petty betrayals. Serge displays the pervasive cynicism of those ordinary men and women who no longer believe in the revolution's promises of bread and peace, but have no new belief to put in its place. The workers’ councils, which only 12 months before had been the heroic models of a new democracy are now more concerned with the immediate needs of local workers than with the political program of the city, let alone the country as a whole. Serge provides vivid depictions of those caught up in this world. Several of the most sympathetic depictions are of those working for the Special Commission doing what they must, retaining some sense of past commitments and idealism, in an atmosphere in which suspicion and class origin are sufficient grounds for arrest and death. These include the battered, always tired Ryzhic, the enforcer Arkadi (both of whom are on the committee that sentenced Sam to death), and a foot soldier, the young idealist Xenia. There are also spies for the surrounding White Army, and many who are ready to join the reactionary forces when the city falls. Those who venture into the surrounding countryside to beg or requisition food from the peasants are likely to be tortured and killed, either by the peasants (one commissar has his stomach cut open and filled with grain) or by the White Army. The Bolshevik response was to meet horror with horror, Red Terror against White. Serge's working title for the novel was, appropriately enough, Terror. According to Walter Benjamin (2003, p. 394), the “hatred and spirit of sacrifice” of the working class “are nourished by the image of enslaved ancestors rather than by the ideal of liberated grandchildren.” Whether or not this is true in general, there is very little of this in Conquered City. For many of Serge's revolutionaries it is precisely the future that gives meaning to their struggles. Parvenov, a young political commissar, is struggling to maintain revolutionary discipline in the Great Works, a vast enterprise with a heroic revolutionary past. He explains his problems to a history professor whose classes he has been attending: How happy men will be in a hundred years! Sometimes it makes me dizzy to think of it. In fifty years. In twenty years, maybe in ten years . . yes! Give us ten years, and you'll see. The cold, the night, everything. At this point, VS comments in parenthesis: “(Everything? What did he mean by that vague word, vaster than the cold and the night?)” (2011, p. 27). Parvenov, despairing of his political work at the factory, has asked for a transfer to the army. His application is successful, and we learn later of his heroic but pointless death in action.7 The young Cheka activist Xenia returning from conducting house to house searches for a White Army spy, walks through the city looking at the early morning sky: When we are dead, thought Xenia, when everything is finished, perhaps a similar cloud will pass through a similar sky at this very spot. What eyes will see it reflected in this water, eyes that will have known neither war, nor famine, nor fear, nor anguish, nor night patrols, that will not have seen man strike down man? I can't even imagine it. (2011, p. 123) Xenia thinks that if she lives she must study more—she has already been struggling with Marx's account of commodity fetishism, the young comrade who is courting her has recommended Engels on freedom and necessity—so that she might have a clearer picture of the realm of freedom to come. But of course, she does not live. In these sullen and desperate days, revolutionary élan is long gone and corruption, cynicism, and distrust are the order of the day. For some, probably for Parvenov and Xenia, it is only the thought of a distant but attainable future, as pure as the early morning sky, that can sustain the commitment necessary to keep going. Of course, the belief in a glorious future also legitimizes the worst atrocities of the present. If the Revolution was betrayed it was not merely
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because it was taken over by timeservers and bureaucrats. It was also betrayed by the actions of those who were selflessly committed to its best ideals. But for the moment it is sufficient to note that, contra Benjamin, in 1919 Petrograd it is the thought of an ideal future, not the memory of past injuries, that motivates some of the best of Serge's activists. The motivation does, however, have a feature that Benjamin might have cited with approval: “the general lack of envy which the present day feels towards its future.” (Benjamin, 2003, pp. 389–390). If the revolutionaries are nostalgic, it is not for an imaginary past, but prematurely for an imagined future. It is at those moments when Parvenov, Xenia, and others, speak of a future that will somehow justify the sacrifices they have made and even the betrayals and deaths they have been involved in, that they speak to us.8 Litaev, the professor to whom Parvenov was unburdening himself, is later to be arrested and shot as a spy for the White Army. It is a case of mistaken identity but he himself seems not to mind too much. He has a strange, even reactionary sympathy for the Revolution, but knows he had no place in it. He is an expert on Peter I, and he believes that Russia can achieve greatness only though barbarity and violence (2011, pp. 177–178). His response to Parvenov is not unsympathetic: “Parvenov, you are right to believe in the future. It is the new God, the reincarnation of the oldest divinities, which makes the present bearable” (2011, p. 27). But if many Bolshevik intellectuals and activists are making god out of the future, and their opponents a god out of the past, almost everybody else in Petrograd finds themselves subject to a different master: hunger. Serge, or VS, cites Leon Andreev's play Hunger in which “crowned Hunger, who reigns over the poor, pushes the plebs to revolt, then betrays them and bows down to the rich, for she is always in any case their servant” (2011, p. 117). Hunger serves the interests of the ruling class; it is the enemy of freedom. Hunger informs one of the major themes of Conquered City: the demoralization of the working class. The Wahl Factory is a major industrial center and the site of a proud tradition of working-class militancy. But the workers do not have enough to eat, they have lost faith in the party leadership, and they have taken to dismantling machinery in order to barter bits and pieces for food. They have stopped work, and “demanded two weeks of paid leave for all workers to go to the country to replenish their food supplies individually” (2011, p. 48). The Central Committee knows that it would be disastrous if this were to happen. The city needs the locomotives and cannons it is producing (very inefficiently, but that is another story). To allow the workers to strike and begin to forage for food as individuals would set a disastrous example. All discipline would be lost and the White Army would take over the city. The Committee sends a delegation to a factory meeting. Arkadi, the enforcer, goes with them in order to identify Menshevik and socialist revolutionary troublemakers. To his surprise, he finds none. One of the delegates, Goldin, appeals to the revolutionary tradition of the workers: Do you remember, people without bread? How we drove out the Czar and his little ones, the ministers, the generals, the capitalists, the police? . . . What we could do yesterday, we can do today. What is this Revolution? This Revolution which shoots the bourgeois, conquers the Ukraine, makes the wide world tremble?. . . . The Revolution is us. You and me. What we want, the Revolution needs. Do you understand? And the workers begin to respond: “The men were beginning to feel powerful, they were coming out of their torpor, electrified, awakening to new dreams of exploits” (2011, p. 64). But revolutionary rhetoric is not enough. It might arouse the meeting, but would not survive the day-to-day reality of hunger. The next speaker adds the missing ingredient: food: “The Commune is sending you four boxcars of provisions, canned goods, sugar, rice, and white flour: supplies taken from the imperialists by the glorious Workers’ and Peasants’ Army” (2011, p. 66). The speeches defuse the situation. Members of the delegation then move to choose workers on whom they can depend to organize the distribution and to report on any problems. The trip to the factory had been successful. But as the two delegates and Arkadi leave, they are waylaid by a “bearded, giant of a man:” “Look at us!” he shouted. “We're like dogs. The belly's empty, they growl. Throw ’em a bone, they shut up. Look at me, comrades, little brothers. I'm like that too. Don't hold it against us, little brothers, poverty made us this way.” (2011, p. 68)
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The bearded giant knows, as the three representatives of the Central Committee know, that the revolutionary promise of bread is not itself a promise of freedom. Freedom is expressed in the revolution, not in the overthrowing of the Czar and his minions, not in the promise of bread, but in the creation of the organizational forms through which workers can organize their work and their lives. The promise of power to the Soviets had not been kept; perhaps it was never possible. Hunger, the enemy of freedom, is omnipresent. The promise of food has become the means by which the workers and others are pulled into line; it is not the promise of the Revolution but a condition of subservience. All those involved in this strange confrontation — the two representatives from the Central Committee, Arkadi, the Chekist, and the worker—are aware of this. The giant has the last word: “And yet,” he stammered . . ., “if you knew what they have done, these hands. If you knew what they are still capable of, comrade. . . .” For a brief minute all the three men could see in front of them were those two hands; dreadful, yet trembling with fatigue, hands which appeared to be charred. (2011, p. 68) The bearded giant does not reappear. But he deserves to be remembered. In his physical presence he represents the immense strength of the proletariat, strength that was exercised, as he reminds the delegates, on behalf of the revolution. The strength has been all but destroyed by hunger, and so has revolutionary will. His final statement is the promise that it will return. If the future is a distant god to whom Xenia, Parvenov, and many others, are ready to sacrifice their lives, many of Serge's activists (and indeed, Serge himself) are committed to a more immediate deity. When Goldin addresses the workers, it is not the future he appeals to but the Revolution itself: “The Revolution is us. You and me. What we want, the Revolution needs. Do you understand?” Just before VS arrives in the new Soviet Union, he addresses himself to the Revolution: “Would we be strong enough? Would we be worthy of you, Revolution?” Serge, the author, was already a revolutionary before he went to Russia—and judging by the title of his Memoirs he remained so until the end of his life. But his commitment now was to the Revolution as embodied in the Bolshevik seizure of power. This was the Revolution he was now addressing and which now demanded his loyalty. The Revolution was to be the normative center not only of Serge's life but of that of most of the activists that he was to describe in his novels and other writings. The background to this conception of the Revolution is the tradition that began with the French Revolution (and, as Hannah Arendt complained, not with the American Revolution, still less with the two English Revolutions in the 17th century) and had continued through the various upsurges of the 19th and early 20th centuries. In this tradition, a revolution was an event, always anticipated but never quite expected, that erupted with enormous force, sufficient to threaten or destroy an old order. The eruption was of those who were oppressed and excluded by the prevailing system of power; it was the condensation of all the forces opposed to the old regime, unified in the demand for change. This eruption created the opportunity to transform the world. The revolution was the moment when history speeded up, when ideals—freedom, equality, universal suffrage, the abolition of poverty—appeared, not as dreams of an imagined future, but as the urgent demands of the present. For many, and more especially for those in the Marxist tradition, the power of the revolution did not lie simply in its promise to realize old goals; it also lay in the creation of new forms of political and social organization (the Commune in 1871 Paris, the Soviets in 1905 St Petersburg). The conception of revolution had enormous normative force. Whenever a revolution broke out it was able to draw activists from all around the world to take part in its struggles. It was able to make demands on its adherents—to sacrifice themselves or others, for hardness in the pursuit of its goals, for an unrelenting attack on its enemies and its false friends. It could make these demands because it was an opportunity not to be lost: it was the chance to transform the world, and it would not come again soon. In every revolution there were tensions between the diversity of goals of those opposed to the old system and the need for unity in the political struggle and also (closely related) between the movement on the streets and the ideals and goals of the political activists ready to provide guidance or leadership. By seizing power in the October Revolution, the Bolsheviks had attempted to resolve these tensions in one stroke. It was the Alexandrian solution: not to disentangle the Gordian Knot, but to cut through it. There was a sense, though a paradoxical one, in which the seizure of power was self-validating. Under Lenin, the Bolsheviks had presented themselves as the truth of the revolutionary movement:
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only they had the strength and commitment to seize the opportunity to take the revolution towards the goal of social and political transformation. That the Bolsheviks were ready and able to seize power was the proof of this claim. Serge, arriving late on the scene, was convinced of this. He allied himself with the Bolsheviks because he believed that they and only they “were doing what was necessary tenaciously, doggedly, with magnificent ardor and a calculated passion. . . . They alone were carrying this out, taking all responsibilities on themselves, all the initiatives, and were demonstrating an astonishing strength of spirit” (2014, p. 89).9 For Serge, the Bolsheviks—especially under the leadership of Lenin and Trotsky —represented the will that was necessary to make the Revolution. But as he was also aware, the “kingdom of will” could be sustained only through force, coercion, and violence. The revolutionary activists with whom Serge most sympathizes are those who recognized what was needed by the Revolution and worked for it in the most practical ways. Hardness was essential: they must be hard on themselves as well as hard on others; they must be prepared to be killed if they claimed the right to kill others. But they also exercised some flexibility in working out what needs to be done. They must work for the Revolution in the most practical of ways but occasionally make a stand on the basis of principle or friendship. What was needed was a practicality informed by a sense of what the Revolution was about. One of Serge's activists was Kirk, who had come to the Revolution from an anarchist background in trade union struggles in the USA but had, like Serge, become a Bolshevik.10 In his first appearance in Conquered City, Kirk has the task of cleaning up the excrement in courtyards, cellars, and streets, before the Spring thaw turns it into putrid, typhoid-bearing slush. He orders that trams be stopped and all who are judged by their appearance to be ex-bourgeois be rounded up for sanitation duty. Kirk is impatient with Parvenov's decision to participate in the armed struggle. Intellectuals can perform more useful tasks than getting killed in battle. On Serge's account, it was this no-nonsense practicality that made people like Kirk indispensable to the Revolution. Another activist whom Serge views in a positive light is Arkadi, the agent of the Special Commission. Arkadi shares the practicality of Kirk, and though his tasks are more directly concerned with the arrest and execution of enemies of the Revolution, he has a certain cynical integrity, especially in respect to the more grandiose declarations of his colleagues. He is often a voice for moderation in the Commission's decision, though—unlike Kirk—he does not undertake battles that he is not likely to win. Arkadi has a mistress, Olga, who is—like too many of Serge's women—naive, beautiful, and, in a childlike way, innocent. Arkadi meets her in the course of his duties, and is able to do her a small favor, arranging for the release of her brother who is under suspicion. They become lovers. The brief times he is able to spend with her provide some release from his work. But the relationship turns out to be a death sentence for both. Olga's brother, Danil, is a White Army spy. When he is captured, Olga is arrested, and the relationship with Arkadi discovered.11 The small favor is revealed. Because he is a member of the Special Commission, Arkadi's case receives the attention of a meeting of the full membership. All vote for his death, except Kirk. Later that night, Kirk takes the issue up with his friend, Osipov, who has been the chair of the committee that had sent Arkadi to his death. Osipov, like Kirk, knows that Arkadi is innocent of any substantial crime, but unlike Kirk, he votes for his death when he sees that the majority is against him. (Arkadi would have done so also.) The vote for Arkadi's death is, Kirk argues, a crime. For Osipov it is, at worst, a mistake. He argues that for Kirk to oppose it on a matter of principle is a form of egoism: “Maybe that amuses you, but it serves no useful purpose.” When it comes to the point, the death of one individual does not matter: “this whole affair is no longer of any importance.” And he sends Kirk off on the more pressing task of housing, equipping, and training 600 new recruits who have just arrived (2011, p. 163). The issue between the two men—friends as well as comrades—had been rehearsed in a long conversation earlier. For Osipov, the problem—both for Kirk and himself—is that they are still caught up in “the mythology of the ego.” This must be overcome. However, it is not yet clear how: “We haven't yet discovered what is the new place of the individual in the age of the masses. A place which is certainly very great and almost insignificant at the same time.” (2011, p. 137) But the discovery of the new place for the individual is a matter for the future. In the present situation, in the context of the Revolution, the place of the individual is “almost insignificant.” What counts, he tells Kirk, is not the death of Arkadi or, for that matter, his own death (Osipov is a dedicated revolutionary; there is no reason to doubt his courage or his sincerity), but the contribution they can make to the revolution. Perhaps the new society will find a way to recognize
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the greatness of the individual, but until then, the place of the individual can only be an insignificant moment in the greater whole. Serge allows his young Cheka activist, Xenia, to have the last words on this: Each of us . . . is only a droplet participating in the sweep of the waves; a droplet in which, before it dissolves, is reflected a vast strip of landscape, skies, rocks, groundswells, pondering spray, rainbows. How clear it all is, when you think it through. I am glad to be a mere drop in the wave which is beating against old overturned rocks here. I consent to everything. Here I am. (2011, p. 124) We read of Xenia's death—“two bullets in the belly”—in a minor skirmish in the last pages of the novel. When Serge committed himself to the path of revolutionary will, he was committing himself to a political program in which individuals like Xenia, Arkadi, Olga, Litaev, Sam, and countless others would die. Some of the deaths would be necessary, in the sense that the revolution required it; others would not be. Most of these lives lost were matters of small moment below the level of history. Serge was certainly tough-minded enough to confront this. He was neither a pacifist, nor, at least when it came to the demands of the Revolution in times of crisis, was he a strong believer in the rights of the individual. He regarded the arguments, indeed the warnings, of his erstwhile anarchist comrades as naive and dangerous, given the threat of counterrevolution. He certainly objected, early and courageously, to the excesses of the Revolution. But it was the excesses that he objected to—and even then, he knew that some excesses were inevitable. Serge accepted what we might call the normative power of the Revolution: it had the right to demand and inflict death and suffering. The condition was that the death and suffering bear some intelligible relationship to the aims and values of the Revolution. What makes Serge more interesting than many Bolshevik dissidents was his commitment to the novel, not as a cultural diversion, but as a vehicle of truth. This allowed him the freedom to display the many currents and forces at work in a revolutionary situation, the complexity of the choices confronting his characters, and the atrocities committed against and on behalf of the Revolution. But more important in the present context was that in his novels he recognized the rights of his characters to have lives of their own, and even—as he said — to surprise him by what they did or thought. Serge as author gives himself the space to explore, indeed to discover, the inner lives of his characters. When the double agent Sam is confronted with revolutionary justice, we share the last 10 minutes of his life. When Osipov argues for the insignificance of the individual, we hear the authentic voice of someone trying to make sense of his own struggles and commitments. When Xenia tells us that she is one of the million drops in an oceanic wave, we know something of the personal struggles (her relationship with her mother, her arguments with neighbors, her tentative exploration of her sexuality) through which she has reached this insight. It is, for that reason, individual and unique. Paradoxically, the moments when his characters affirm the unimportance of their individual existence show us how important they really are.
4
THE RUSSIAN REVOLUTION NOW
It is easy to condescend to Xenia when she imagines that reading Marx and Engels will provide her with a better understanding of a future in which there is “neither war, nor famine, nor fear, nor anguish, nor night patrols, that will not have seen man strike down man.” But for all their skepticism about utopias, much of the moral force of the work of Marx and Engels comes from the thought that a much better society—one in which there is fundamental equality, where humans are able to live and work together harmoniously, where people control the conditions of their life rather than being controlled by them—was on the historical agenda. No doubt, the illusion that all that was needed was one more effort, the repression of one more opponent, to achieve this goal has played an enormously destructive role, especially in the Soviet experiment. But without belief—or hope— political struggle degenerates into a nihilistic search for power or the pettiest of reformism. For us, a century after the October Revolution and after years of social democracy, liberalism, and neoliberalism, the idea of a qualitatively different society may seem beyond imagination. As someone once said to Fredric Jameson (2003, p. 76), “It is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism.” That this has become a cliché speaks of its cultural and political resonance in the world of today. Without a future to aspire to, it seems that the best we can we can hope for is Sweden on a very good day. But if so, this is a loss. As we condescend
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to Xenia, it is likely that we also envy her the confidence that there a much better world to come and that it is a world worth fighting and dying for. There was, of course, too much fighting and far too much dying in the world described by Victor Serge. Much of the fighting and dying was motivated and justified by another belief: that the Revolution was the key to social transformation. For those of Serge's revolutionaries for whom the future was too distant and abstract a goal, it was the present Revolution that made sense of their day to day struggles. The Revolution was the opportunity to change history, an opportunity that could not be missed. And this required organization, coordination, discipline, and (not least) leadership. This was the conception of revolution that Serge had acquired though his dissatisfaction with various forms of anarchism. It is present in the way he presents the lives and activities of his various protagonists. He is not quite able to reject it. But what was not easy for Serge, is possible—indeed necessary for us. We can no longer believe in the Revolution in the sense in which it was inherited from the 19th century and transformed by the Bolsheviks. Revolutions are made by minorities. This was not simply because they are eventually led and guided by small groups of dedicated individuals. Even in the early moments of revolutionary spontaneity, revolutions are made by those who take to the streets, fight on the barricades, participate in the soviets, live in the major cities, and so on. Those who make the revolution claim to speak on behalf of the people as a whole (at least, the vast majority), and this claim will be more credible in some cases than in others. However, there is always a gap between those who make the revolution and those who will be ruled by it. To some extent, the gap can be diminished after the revolutionary tumult is over. Voting procedures and local forms of government can be created or revived. But if a revolution is to fulfill its promise of rapid social and political transformation, the gap is essential. The opportunity to speed up history cannot wait on processes of participation, consultation, and education. In the case of the Russian Empire appropriated by the Bolsheviks there was little chance of putting procedures in place, let alone of securing popular consent. Serge admired the Bolsheviks for their revolutionary will: only they had the firmness of purpose to complete the revolution. In the comment I have used as an epigraph in this article, he describes his arrival in the new Soviet Union as entering the kingdom of will. When it comes to the point, however, a kingdom of will can be ruled only by centralization, coercion, and violence. Serge's revolutionary activists make sense of what they are doing by reference to a yet to be understood future, or to a conception of the revolution, or to both. Both future and revolution function as moral sources in something like the sense described by Charles Taylor (1989, chapter 4). It is their relationship with these sources that makes sense of what Serge's protagonists are doing and suffering. The sources provide the values that give meaning to their lives. They refer to something that has a moral claim on each individual and to which each has a commitment. What is characteristic of a moral source, on Taylor's account, is that it is never fully defined. Indeed, arguments about what precisely it requires is part and parcel of the lives of those who share a moral source. It is the future that justifies to Xenia what she is doing. But she needs to read, learn and no doubt argue about the detail of this conception. Of course, she is also devoted to the revolution, and if she had lived to rise in the party, this might become have more central as a moral source. For the more experienced activists, well aware of the corruption, inefficiency, occasional cowardice, and self-seeking in the party, the concept of the revolution provides the moral source necessary to look beyond these, to the commitments, values, and promises it embodies. Like the future, the concept of revolution had a certain indeterminacy, and those committed to it—and for much too short a time, these included anarchists, social revolutionaries, and other radicals—might differ and argue about what precisely it involved and required. The concept of a revolution that these activists inherited from the 19th century still has its attractions. It allows us to imagine an unexpected rupture (an “event,” as this term has come to be used), something that breaks through the cynicism and pessimism of the present. But without mass involvement and commitment to a program of change the promise of a revolution is illusory. The loss of the future is even more damaging. Even though we condescend to Xenia and Parvenov's confidence we probably feel a little envy. Many of us would like to believe in a future of the kind they believed in. It is here that Benjamin has been a false prophet. He was right to seek the sparks of hope in past revolutionary struggles, and right to search for them in the “courage, humor, cunning, and fortitude” of revolutionary activists. But he missed the extent to which these sparks were informed, not by anger at past wrongs, but by hopes for the future. Indeed, that their concerns were with the future is one of the reasons that their struggles speak to us. We are the future that they were trying to make.
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What, then, is the claim that they make on us? What is the “weak redemptive power” assigned to the present in relation to the past? At the moment, that power is minimal. It is to recapture something of the hope, of the illusions, of the suffering, and of the courage of those early revolutionaries, even if they were doomed to be defeated—a defeat all the more bitter because they won. It is to recognize, even if only through their proxies in Serge's novels, those who might otherwise not even count as footnotes to history. Even where we cannot forget the catastrophe that was to follow, it is important—morally and politically, as well as epistemically—to seek to understand those who did not know the future and would not have wanted it, even as they contributed to it. It is also to remember a political world that we have lost.
NOTES 1 Serge's thoughts on arriving in the Soviet Union (see Serge, 2014, p. 78). This was written in 1943–1944 and first published
in French in 1952. A truncated English translation by Peter Sedgwick was published in 1964. The New York Review Books edition uses the Sedgwick translation, with the missing text translated by George Paizis. 2 Benjamin (2003) makes the much more ambitious claim that (appropriate) recognition of the past empowers the present. He
provides a more modest understanding in his response to Horkheimer's criticism that his conception of history was theological. He wrote (1999, p. 471) that “history is not simply a science but also and not least a form of remembrance. What science has determined,” remembrance can modify.” I will not be concerned with the more ambitious claim here. 3
Trotsky (2005, pp. 76–86) also described Pilnyak, not unsympathetically, as a fellow traveler, and made a similar criticism. Pilnyak was shot in 1938.
4 Astonishingly,
this included Stalin in The Case of Comrade Tulayev (Serge, 2004b). However, there are limits. By and large, Serge was not good on women. His depiction of the apparatchik, Zvereva, is pretty much a caricature (see Sontag, 2004).
5
Dario is based on the syndicalist leader, Salvador Segui who was assassinated in 1923. In The Birth of Our Power, Serge (2015) has his narrator hearing of Dario's death in 1919. The inaccuracy allows Dario's death to coincide with Serge throwing in his lot with the Bolsheviks (see Serge, 2015, pp. 47–51, 59–63, 86–92).
6
The Special Commission was, of course, Cheka. I often follow Serge's own usage, as followed by his translator, Richard Greeman. The Special Commission was supposed, and was understood by many, to be a temporary expedient. The terminology reflects that (mis)understanding.
7 Parvenov was probably based on Serge's friend, Vladimir Mazin. Mazin gave up his relatively safe position in the city to serve
as a commissar in the army. He was killed in action, beaten to death with a rifle butt (see Serge, 2014, pp. 103–105). Conquered City records the death of the author of Goethe's philosophy, Mazin, at the hands of the White Army (see Serge, 2011, p. 152). 8 Benjamin
(2003), pp. 389–390. Benjamin insists that the struggles of the past speak to us, perhaps even that they speak for us, and that there is in those struggles a “secret index referring to redemption.” This suggests that the past struggles must have an intentionality, and perhaps even an intention, that addresses the future, that is, us. There is at least a tension, and perhaps an inconsistency here, between the “secret index” and Benjamin's claim that the motivation of these struggles was not the future but the past.
9
This passage comes towards the end of a presentation of the various political positions available (see 2014, pp. 82– 89). Serge goes on to mention the tendencies towards centralism, dogmatism, and authoritarianism, but argues that if “one had to counter them with freedom of spirit and the spirit of freedom, it must be with them and not against them.”
10
Kirk was based on Bill Shatov, a Russian émigré to America, who had returned to Russia after the Revolution. He organized the defense of Petrograd during the siege, was a commander in the Red Army, and later organized the construction of the Turkestan–Siberia railway (see Serge, 2014, pp. 99, 104, 106). In the USA Shatov had been an anarcho-syndicalist, active in trade union and émigré politics. He had been a friend of Emma Goldman, but she was disappointed when she met him in the Soviet Union by his commitment to the Russian Revolution (see Goldman, 1970, pp. 595–596, 728–734). Goldman reports a story that Cheka had decided to kill Shatov for his anarchist sympathies and that Lenin had him sent to work in Siberia to be out of harm's way. There is perhaps a hint of this (Serge, 2011, pp. 160–161). For whatever reason, Shatov survived the early revolutionary years. He was eventually shot in 1937.
11
One of the reasons why Danil is identified is that while he is with a prostitute, he finds himself reliving and describing to her a horrifying execution that he had witnessed. (It is apparent that Danil is suffering from what would now be called posttraumatic stress disorder.) The prostitute, Lyda, is disturbed, and suddenly reminded “that she was naked in front of a man who had seen these things” (Serge, 2011, p. 87). The memory remains with her, so she is able to describe Danil when she is interviewed by agents of the Special Commission who are searching for the White Army spy. It is this description that enables Xenia to identify him after a house-to-house search.
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REFERENCES Benjamin, W. (1999). The arcades project. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Benjamin, W. (2003). On the concept of history. In W. Benjamin, Selected writings. Vol. 4. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Goldman, E. (1972). Living my life. Vol. 2. New York: Dover. Greeman, R. (2011). Forward, V. Serge, Conquered city (R. Greeman, Trans.), pp. v–xxii. New York: New York Review Books. Hobsbawm, E. (1997). Can we write the history of the Russian Revolution? In E. Hobsbawn, On History pp. 241–252. New York: New Press. Jameson, F. (2003). Future city. New Left Review, 21, 65–79. Serge, V. (1939). Reply to Ciliga. The New Internationalist, 5, 53–55. Retrieved from https://www.marxists.org/archive/serge/ 1939/02/letter.htm Serge, V. (1977). Men in prison. (R. Greeman, Trans.). London: Writers and Readers Publishing Cooperative. Serge, V. (2004a). Collected writings on literature and revolution. (A. Richardson Ed. & Trans.). London: Francis Boutle. Serge, V. (2004b). The case of Comrade Tulayev. (W. R. Trask, Trans), pp. vii–xxix. New York: New York Review Books. Serge, V. (2011). Conquered city. (R. Greeman, Trans.). New York: New York Review Books. Serge, V. (2014). Memoirs of a revolutionary. (P. Sedgewick & G. Paizis, Trans.). New York: New York Review Books. Serge, V. (2015). The birth of our power. (R. Greeman, Trans.). Oakland, CA: PM Press. Sontag, S. (2004). Introduction. In V. Serge, The case of Comrade Tulayev, (W. R. Trask, Trans), pp. vii–xxix. New York: New York Review Books. Taylor, C. (1989). Sources of the self. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Trotsky, L. (2005). Literature and revolution. (R. Strunsky, Trans.). Chicago IL: Haymarket Books. Weissman, S. (2001/2013). Victor Serge: A political biography. London and New York: Verso.
AUTHOR'S BIOGRAPHY Ross Poole teaches philosophy and politics at the New School for Social Research, New York. In recent years his main research interests have been in human rights and the philosophy and politics of memory.
How to cite this article: Poole R. A world we have lost: Remembering the Russian Revolution through Victor Serge. Constellations. 2017;00:1–12. https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-8675.12330
