Victor Serge: A Political Biography
Language: English
Pages: 368
ISBN: B00JXVEAQC
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
The first biography to give due weight to the commitment and optimism of this great political thinker.
Revolutionary novelist, historian, anarchist, Bolshevik and dissident – Victor Serge is one of the most compelling figures to have emerged from the history of the Soviet Union. A dedicated activist who joined the Bolsheviks in 1919 and fought in the siege of Petrograd, only to be later consigned to poverty and persecution for rejecting both capitalism and Stalinism, he was a keen observer of his times. Carefully wrought and meticulously researched, Susan Weissman’s Victor Serge is the definitive biography of an extraordinary man.
Psychopathen von dazumal (Erzählungen)
Trotskyist journals refused to publish my corrections. In the hearts of the persecuted I encountered the same attitudes as in their persecutors … Trotskyism was displaying symptoms of an outlook in harmony with that of the very Stalinism against which it had taken its stand, and by which it was being ground into powder … I was heartbroken by it all, because it is my firm belief that the tenacity and will power of some men can, despite all odds, break with the traditions that suffocate, and
tavern filled with British soldiers. Serge had been released from fifteen months incarceration in a French prison camp whose regime was notable for the lack of food and the Spanish flu epidemic that killed one quarter of the camp population. Serge was in a group of forty ‘Bolshevik suspects’ to be exchanged for French military officers held by the Russians. The shabby appearance of Serge and his group attracted the attention of the soldiers, who approached them. ‘Who are you?’ Serge answered
of 1923 in Germany gave the measure of the differences on the scale of that gigantic class struggle. It was then and on that basis that the Russian Opposition was formed.49 The deliberations on the German question marked the first time Stalin had participated in the life of the Comintern. His attitude was revealed six years later when Brandler (expelled from the International) sought to clear himself by publishing Stalin’s letter to Zinoviev and Bukharin opposing the insurrection: ‘It is in our
midnight by a telephone call warning them that the GPU was on its way to arrest them all. Political life had deteriorated greatly by this point. It was difficult to maintain morale. The Central Committee had gangs of ‘activist’ thugs out breaking up ‘illegal meetings’ by force. The situation was grim and Serge was certain that they would be defeated since the mass of workers were indifferent to their struggle. He confided this to Trotsky, who told him: ‘There is always some risk to be run.
made of cabbage, water and salt. We always sat down to eat, and after ‘dinner’ we read poetry, even my father’s verses. Then my father went back to work.25 Serge was plagued by boils, which began to abscess, leading to an infected tumour in his left breast. No medical treatment was allowed until the ‘GPU woke up, since they had to answer for us to the Central Collegium’.26 Serge was finally taken to hospital, probably in late December 1934, just after Kirov’s assassination. Serge wondered if