Vagabond Witness: Victor Serge and the Politics of Hope
Language: English
Pages: 125
ISBN: 1780993277
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
Victor Serge was the first and the greatest witness of the twentieth century. An anarchist in France, a syndicalist in Spain, a critical Bolshevik in Russia, an agent of the Comintern in Germany and Austria, an exile, Serge once said that people judged history, but they did so without knowing what really happened and who the actors really were. All his work - novels. reportage, poetry, criticism - was an attempt to show what really happened, and why. Serge never lost hope, that ordinary people would act for themselves and take control of their own lives. On the ship taking him to exile in Mexico, where he would die isolated and in poverty, he recalled, 'The Russians and Spaniards among us know what it is to take the world into their hands, to set the railways running and the factories working...no kind of predestination impels us to become the offal of the concentration camps.'
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only to see a very different reality at almost every turn: We have conquered everything and everything has slipped out of our grasp. We have conquered bread, and there is famine. We have declared peace in a war-weary world, and war has moved into every house. We have proclaimed the liberation of men, and we need prisons …and we are the bringers of dictatorship. We have proclaimed fraternity, but it is the ‘fraternity and death’ in reality. Even the snow is not bright, but grey. Everywhere
his report done in time for it to be useful in the preparations for the party conference. He is also ambitious and wants very much to see his report published in the monthly bulletin of the Security Department. But even Kostrov is resisting, despite the lack of news from his wife and child, the filthy cell he is kept in, and the fact that every day he looks older. Meanwhile, Rodion says he will confess, ‘For everything. I’m the one who did everything. Alone, I confess!’ This, of course, is
land: the experience of exile Serge spent many years of his life in some form of exile, first in Orenburg, near Kazakhstan, 1,000 miles from the Soviet capital, then in Europe and, finally, in Mexico. Not only was he able to understand what this actually meant as a human experience; he was able to capture it in his writing in ways that no one else had done. In Midnight in the Century (1939) and in The Long Dusk (1946), both written in exile, and his poetry, most of which was written in
made aware of the extent to which the Russian secret police and military were collaborating with the Gestapo. A formal pact between the two countries could not be far off. And, of course, he was right. Today reading Destiny of a Revolution, Serge’s account of Russia after 20 years, one is struck by the appalling accumulation of evidence about the everyday lives of ordinary Russian people - the food shortages, the alcoholism, the fear, the ruthless oppression of any opposition, however minor, the
expressed his support for them and when police raided the offices of the newspaper he edited, they found a couple of revolvers. He refused to give evidence against the robbers, was convicted and given what could only be seen as a vindictive sentence of five years imprisonment. Writing nearly 30 years later, Serge wrote, with an honesty and self-evident pain, of the emotional legacy this had left him: It burdened me with an experience so heavy, so intolerable to endure, that long afterwards, when