Victor Serge’s revolutionary literature On the anniversary of the October Revolution, we revisit Victor Serge’s life and work. Caught between revolutionary hope and Stalinist betrayal, his writings illuminate Europe’s turbulent twentieth century. Jacobin magazine Nov 7 By Ian Birchall A 1913 courtroom sketch of Victor Serge by Paul Charles Delaroche. (Bibliothèque Nationale de France) Review of Victor Serge: Unruly Revolutionary by Mitchell Abidor (Pluto Press, 2025) Many readers will be familiar with Victor Serge’s literary work: his novels, notably The Case of Comrade Tulayev, and his fascinating autobiography Memoirs of a Revolutionary. All his work centers around the great historical events of the first half of the twentieth century, the hopes aroused by the Russian Revolution of 1917, and its subsequent disastrous outcome. Now Mitchell Abidor has written a biography of Serge, based on extensive research and using documentation collected by the great Serge scholar and translator, Richard Greeman. While Abidor does not fundamentally challenge the account Serge himself presented in the Memoirs, he does add much fascinating detail that places Serge’s political evolution in context. Anarchism and Bolshevism Born to a Russian family in Belgium with the name Viktor Lvovich Kibalchich, Serge went through a remarkable process of intellectual development while still a teenager (he never went to school). He moved to Paris and became active as a writer and editor in the anarchist milieu, ending up in jail for five years. The Russian Revolution of 1917 was the vital turning point in Serge’s development. Abidor devotes the first quarter of the book to Serge’s time as an anarchist. Revolutionaries are not born such, but make themselves, often through a path marked by difficulties and contradictions. Though Serge always retained a certain sympathy for anarchism, Abidor shows that there were some deeply reactionary elements in the Parisian anarchist scene. The influence of radical individualism and a marked pessimism about the possibility of social change meant that Serge was very skeptical about the viability of collective action. It was his later experiences of mass action, first in Spain and then in Russia, that would lead to a fundamental reorientation of his political activity. The Russian Revolution of 1917 was the vital turning point in Serge’s development. For Serge, as for a whole generation devastated by the horrific mass slaughter of World War I, the rise to power of the Bolshevik Party was a moment of hope — hope that it would be possible to construct a quite different social order. The young Serge had engaged in speculation about the possibility of revolution. Now a real revolution had happened, and even if it diverged from his earlier ideas, he was determined to play his part in it. With great difficulty, he made his way across Europe and put himself at the service of the Bolsheviks. Postrevolutionary Russia was no paradise. The main reason — and one which Abidor might have stressed more — was the efforts made by the great powers of the West (Britain, France, the United States, etc.) to subvert and overthrow the new regime and to prevent the hope it embodied from infecting working people elsewhere in the world. Foreign armies invaded Russia to join up with native counterrevolutionaries; the so-called civil war was a war of national defense. Serge, who fought in the armed defense of Petrograd and wrote a powerful history, Year One of the Russian Revolution, understood this well. Certainly Serge had, as Abidor shows, criticisms and reservations about the earliest years of the revolution. But there is no doubt that his main motivation in these years was a commitment to defend and propagate the revolution. He even supported the suppression of the Kronstadt revolt against the Bolsheviks in 1921 (though he changed his mind about this later). Serge developed the concept of “double duty”: the need to confront the external enemies of the revolution but also at the same time the negative factors within the revolution. Like Vladimir Lenin and Leon Trotsky, Serge was convinced that the revolution could only survive and develop if it spread westward. In the mid-1920s, he moved to central Europe, aiming to play his part in the hoped-for German revolution that would have transformed the balance of forces throughout Europe. However illusory the hopes of a German revolution may appear to have been in retrospect, the Germany of 1923, described by Serge in a series of press reports, was on the verge of social and economic collapse — it really did look like a society on the brink of revolution. Midnight in the Century The ten years of revolutionary commitment were, in a sense, the most important years of Serge’s life. They gave him an ideal and a vision of hope against which subsequent deformations and betrayals of the revolution could be measured. By the late 1920s, things had changed catastrophically. Lenin was dead, Trotsky had been sent into exile, and Joseph Stalin was increasingly in control of the USSR. Serge’s sympathies were with Trotsky, a figure whom, despite differences between them, he always admired. But the regime could not tolerate Serge’s support for the Left Opposition, despite — indeed because of — his record as a supporter of the revolution. He was arrested, savagely interrogated, and sent into exile over nine hundred miles from Moscow. In a sense Serge was lucky: he was exiled, but not sent to a concentration camp. Most of his contemporaries who had oppositional sympathies ended up dead. One of the main reasons Serge avoided this fate was the fact that a significant group of friends and comrades in France waged a vigorous campaign for his release. Stalin, who needed allies on the French left, decided to exile him rather than put him on trial. The ten years of revolutionary commitment were, in a sense, the most important years of Serge’s life. Like many people, I have often been asked to express support for people imprisoned in foreign countries, and wondered if there was any point to it. Serge’s release shows that such campaigns can work, sometimes at least. Serge returned to Belgium, then France. He continued to write copiously, both journalism and novels. While he had escaped Stalinism, other threats remained. Throughout Western Europe, fascism was on the rise. After Francisco Franco’s triumphal march into Madrid and Barcelona in 1939, France was surrounded on three sides by fascist regimes in Germany, Italy, and Spain. It was, in a phrase Serge coined as the title for one of his novels, “midnight in the century.” When France was occupied by German troops the following year and a viciously right-wing, antisemitic regime established, Serge aimed to get out of Europe and escape to North America. This was the phase of Serge the asylum seeker. Perhaps few asylum seekers have a political past like Serge’s, or a literary talent like his. But in his efforts to find a place on a boat bound across the Atlantic, Serge reminds us of the problems and torments faced by all refugees from his time to our own. Serge found sanctuary in Mexico, which welcomed many refugees from Europe. Leon Trotsky had been exiled (and murdered by a Stalinist agent) there. Serge spent his last years surrounded by European exiles, with a variety of hopes and aspirations for the postwar world. He continued to write, both for publication and in his notebooks. He died in 1947, aged only fifty-six, in deep poverty (there were holes in his shoes), worn out by a life of struggle and persecution. Unanswered Questions For those like myself who have long admired Serge, the concluding section of Abidor’s book is perhaps the saddest. Abidor has carefully examined Serge’s published and unpublished writings from his last years, and he convincingly concludes that in his last years, Serge saw communism as the “main enemy.” For those like myself who have long admired Serge, the concluding section of Abidor’s book is perhaps the saddest. In one sense, this is scarcely surprising. Stalinist violence was not confined to the USSR: the pro-Stalin Communists in Mexico had physically attacked Serge and may even have tried to kill him. It was small wonder that he would come to see them as his principal enemy. In fact, it is difficult to know how Serge would have developed had he lived longer. He died in the autumn of 1947; the Cold War had begun only earlier that year, with the proclamation of the Truman Doctrine as the US president promised material support to nations resisting communism and the turn to militant strikes by the Communist Parties of Western Europe. For the next forty years, world politics would be dominated by the confrontation between the US and Soviet blocs. Some ex-Communists, like Arthur Koestler, became loyal and enthusiastic supporters of the Western camp. But there was also a much smaller current, represented by figures such as C. L. R. James, Hal Draper, Cornelius Castoriadis, and Tony Cliff, who took a different view. While arguing that Stalinism had nothing in common with socialism, they sought a political path that would be independent of both Washington and Moscow. Would Serge have backed the Americans in Korea and Vietnam, or would he have stood by the spirit of revolutionary independence that had characterized his life so far? We can only speculate. The range of choices facing Serge can be illustrated by looking at some of the companions who shared his exile in Mexico. Marceau Pivert had been the leader of the French Socialist Party’s far-left faction during the 1930s before breaking away to form a group of his own. In 1945, he returned to France and rejoined the Socialist Party. While he opposed all cooperation with the French Communist Party, Pivert became increasingly dissatisfied with the Socialist Party’s rightward drift. In particular, he remained committed to the cause of colonial liberation and strongly opposed the repression of the movement for Algerian independence; this led to his final break with the Socialist Party leadership shortly before his death in 1958. Another of Serge’s close associates, Julián Gorkin, followed a different path. During the Spanish Civil War, he had been a leader of the POUM (Workers’ Party of Marxist Unity), which confronted the Communist Party of Spain from the left. Exiled in Mexico, he helped Serge obtain a Mexican visa, and together with him had faced violence from Mexican Stalinists. However, by the time he moved to Paris in 1948, Gorkin had firmly aligned himself as an anti-communist in the Cold War. He became editor of a Spanish-language journal, Cuadernos, on behalf of the Congress for Cultural Freedom, which (as became widely known) was financed and controlled by the US Central Intelligence Agency. Hope and Betrayal One thing is clear: Serge’s perspective is primarily European. Although he had written a very perceptive article on the Chinese rising of 1927, he otherwise showed little interest in Africa and Asia. Yet the collapse of the old colonial empires was one of the most important developments after 1945. Britain was forced out of India, while France fought two bloody and disastrous wars in Indochina and Algeria. How Serge would have responded we cannot know. If Serge’s death left unanswered questions, his life was a remarkable contribution to the politics of the socialist left. If Serge’s death left unanswered questions, his life was a remarkable contribution to the politics of the socialist left. Abidor’s account is a fascinating and well-documented story; it deserves to be read and hopefully will encourage more people to read Serge’s own writings. All of Serge’s life and work was dominated by a contradiction — the way the very real hope inspired by 1917 gave way to the betrayal of Stalinism. As Serge summed it up: “Out of a magnificent workers’ victory we have seen the rise, on the basis of the socialist ownership of the means of production, of an inhuman regime, profoundly anti-socialist in the way it treats human beings.” It was this contradiction that shaped the world of the twentieth century. The heritage is still with us, as we face midnight in our own century. Thus rebels against the system are labeled “Marxists,” often by people who know little or nothing of what Marxism is. The memory of the Cold War and McCarthyite anti-communism remains with us. There is still much to be learned from the life and work of Victor Serge. Ian Birchall is the author of Sartre Against Stalinism and many articles and essays on the twentieth-century French left.

Inquisition Mode
Tariq Ali 
Notebooks: 1936-47 by Victor Serge 

translated by Mitchell Abidor and Richard Greeman.
NYRB, 651 pp., £17.99, April 2019, 978 1 68137 270 9

Mexico​ city, 6 July 1946. Victor Serge had a year to live. He had spent the morning, as he sometimes did, with Trotsky’s widow, Natalia Sedova. They had been writing a joint memoir of Trotsky; in it Natalia recalls her husband pacing up and down in his study at Coyoacán, engaged in heated imaginary conversation with old dead Bolsheviks, arguing about Stalin, and how and why they had been defeated by him. Serge noted that Sedova wasn’t looking well:

What gnaws at her in reality is an immense bereavement, infinitely greater than that of Lev Davidovich, which only finished her off. It is grief for an era and an uncountable crowd. And since I’m probably the only person to truly share this with her, our discussions are precious to us, but I nevertheless avoid touching on the numberless dead. Despite us, they rise up: the tomb of a generation is always present. This time ... we recalled Osip Emilievich Mandelstam, who died in prison.

Serge also recalls an evening in Moscow around 1930, when Mandelstam had seemed nervous and uneasy. Serge asked him what was wrong. Mandelstam replied: ‘It’s that you’re a Marxist.’ Serge understood. ‘When I showed him a volume of photos of Paris by night, the strain between us quickly evaporated.’ On another occasion, he ‘stupidly attempted to commit suicide by throwing himself out of too low a window’. In 1935, the year before Serge was expelled from the Soviet Union, Mandelstam jotted down a few satirical lines about how all of them, ‘unpersons’ by this point, might be remembered:

What street’s this one?
– ‘This is Mandelstam Street.
His disposition wasn’t “party-line”
Or “sweet as a flower”.
That’s why this street –
Or, rather, sewer
Or possibly slum –
Has been named after
Osip Mandelstam.’

As a writer Serge has often been compared – foolishly, I think – to Koestler, Silone, Orwell, Camus. But he’s so much better. Liberalism, despite a few clumsy attempts, has not been able to appropriate him. Serge knew better than most how to interpret and record the hopes, fears and defeats that marked a political life dedicated to resistance and revolution. His life spanned the First World War, the Russian Revolution and its aftermath, the triumph and defeat of Mussolini and Hitler, the rise of Franco. These Notebooks, which include some recently discovered material, cover the last decade of his life.

Much has been written about Serge’s life, first and foremost in his own Memoirs of a Revolutionary. Susan Weissman provided a meticulous account in Victor Serge: A Political Biography, published in 2001. Born Victor Lvovich Kibalchich in Brussels in 1890, Serge was the son of poverty-stricken intellectuals who had fled tsarist Russia. The family name itself was suspect. One of his relatives, Nikolai Kibalchich, a chemist by training, had built the bomb that killed Alexander II in 1881. Along with other members of the underground anarchist group which had planned and carried out the assassination – including Sophia Perovskaya, whose father, the governor general of St Petersburg, was responsible for the tsar’s travel and security arrangements – Kibalchich was hanged. But he was celebrated after the revolution and commemorated as a rocket pioneer on Soviet stamps of the 1960s.

In his late teens, Serge, like Kibalchich, was attracted to radical anarchism. After moving to Paris, he joined the Bonnot Gang, a courageous but nutty group intent on committing violent acts, including bank robberies. After one confrontation, Serge was arrested, taken to the prison of La Santé and made an offer. If he gave an account of the group’s leaders he would be rewarded and released. He refused, and was given a five-year prison sentence for conspiracy. On his release in 1917 he went to Barcelona, which is where he was when the news came of revolution in Russia. In Spain, factory workers and trade unionists rejoiced, and a Workers’ Committee was set up to prepare for a revolutionary general strike. Serge noted that in France too an ‘intensely alive electric current was crossing from the trenches to the factories, the same violent hopes were coming to birth’. Militias were organised by workers in Barcelona and unions opened discussions with the Catalan liberal bourgeoisie, with the aim of getting rid of the monarchy – but the movement, isolated geographically and politically, was defeated.

Serge decided it was time for a visit to his ancestral homeland. It wasn’t easy: it took him a year and a half. First, he went back to Paris, where he visited the Russian military HQ on the avenue Rapp, whose officers were now all ‘good republicans’. They were polite, but couldn’t help him. Soldiers from the Russian Expeditionary Force based at the military camp of La Courtine had demanded immediate repatriation to Russia, but the French refused to allow it – and the soldiers mutinied, only to be crushed by French artillery fire. Serge was eventually sent to Russia as part of a prisoner exchange, and arrived in Petrograd in January 1919. Hunger and typhus gripped the city. When he went to the party headquarters to join up, the local commissar for foreign affairs asked: ‘What are they saying about us abroad?’ ‘They’re saying that Bolshevism equals banditry,’ Serge said. ‘There’s something in that,’ the commissar replied. ‘You’ll see for yourself.’ Serge’s Year One of the Russian Revolution conveys the mood of this period brilliantly. Hope and despair mingle in its pages.Revolutionary movements depend on hope. When they’re successful, their supporters can see the path to liberation and happiness, a glimpse of the imagined future. But the transition to that future, always difficult and far removed from these ideals, poses serious problems for many revolutionaries. Some of them despair and sink into political apathy, moral indifference, navel-gazing. A minority continue to insist that if the means bear little or no relationship to the ends, the means will become the ends. They write or say this in public and are silenced or punished for it. Serge belonged to this group. He refused to put down his pen or moderate his opinions. He was lucky that it didn’t cost him his life. For most of the 1920s Serge worked for the Comintern, his Soviet passport of the civil war period describing him as ‘General Staff/Red Army’, and he wrote in support of Lenin’s complaints about the growing bureaucratisation of the party and the ‘Great Russian chauvinism’ that sidelined Georgia and other nations.

After Lenin’s death, he became a supporter of the Trotsky-led Left Opposition, and in 1933 was sent into internal exile in Orenburg, near the Kazakh border. L’Affaire Victor Serge caused a scandal in Paris, where he was known to the French left as a great defender of the Soviet Union. André Gide interceded on his behalf and Romain Rolland spoke directly to Stalin, who released Serge in 1936, authorising his expulsion from the Soviet Union. Serge, along with his first wife and children, went into exile again, first to Belgium and then to France. The NKVD gave him a receipt for the manuscript they confiscated, a book about prewar France to be called ‘Les Hommes perdus’, but all attempts to track it down during the Gorbachev and Yeltsin periods failed. He had never again, Serge said, had time to reread and edit his writing. The other books were rushed, written in instalments with Stendhalian energy, and sent to far-off publishers.

Many of his comrades were exterminated following the show trials, which he later called the ‘midnight of the century’. What shook Serge and Trotsky, with whom he began to correspond after his expulsion, were the ‘confessions’, which appropriated the language and methods of the Spanish Inquisition. Zinoviev, one of Lenin’s closest comrades, with whom Serge had worked at the Comintern in the early 1920s, ‘confessed’ thus: ‘My defective Bolshevism became transformed into anti-Bolshevism, and through Trotskyism I arrived at fascism. Trotskyism is a variety of fascism and Zinovievism is a variety of Trotskyism.’ (The inquisitors of the 18th century were better writers. Compare: ‘I am a satellite and disciple of Satan. For a long time I was a porter at the gate of hell, but several years ago, with 11 of my companions, I began to lay waste the kingdom of the Franks. As we were ordered, we destroyed the corn, the wine and all the other fruits produced by the earth for the use of man.’) One of the few non-communists to defend the trials was Joseph Davies, the US ambassador to the Soviet Union, who claimed to find the confessions persuasive. Serge regarded them as a consequence of the insistence that party decisions had to be supported whether ‘right or wrong’. For him, the result was an ‘abdication of consciences in the face of a party that had lost its soul’.Many of the survivors of the Bolshevik movement, tired and forlorn, resigned themselves to passive support of the measures taken by Stalin, even when they were irrational and unjustifiable. European fascism was seen as the main enemy. Had Trotsky not warned endlessly in 1931-32 that the birth of fascism and the growing support for it in Germany necessitated a united front of all anti-fascists, especially communists and social democrats? (Later, in December 1938, Trotsky predicted what would follow: ‘It is possible to imagine without difficulty what awaits the Jews at the mere outbreak of the future world war. But even without war the next development of world reaction signifies with certainty the physical extermination of the Jews.’) Serge agreed that fascism had to be defeated however high the cost, but he parted company with many others on the left (Brecht, Benjamin et al) when they insisted that a political truce with Stalin was necessary if that battle was to be won. For Serge this was impossible. Within weeks of his arrival in the West in 1936, he began writing articles and pamphlets denouncing the Moscow trials. Alas, at the time of the Popular Front in France, criticism of Stalin was taboo. Most of Serge’s exposés, based on intimate knowledge of the defendants, were unpublishable, and he was forced to earn his living as a proofreader for the same socialist newspapers that rejected his articles.

Trotsky remained his mentor and friend. Serge loved him despite all their disagreements and translated his essays into French with great enthusiasm and care, improving them along the way. Serge remembers Trotsky hopping off his armoured train during a brief stopover in Moscow in the early 1920s, rushing straight to the translation office of the Comintern, and depositing a hurriedly knocked off 300-page ‘pamphlet’ on Serge’s desk. ‘Must be translated quickly. My response to the slanders of the German social democracy.’ Title? ‘Terrorism and Communism.’ Serge recognised very early that, no matter where Trotsky’s journey ended, he would never become a person of the type mocked by Hegel, someone who would collapse and ‘fall like empty husks’ once his ‘mission in history’ was over. Serge himself was no different.

Stalin’s agents, led by the ever reliable NKVD killer Leonid Eitingon, finally caught up with Trotsky in Mexico City in August 1940. By then, Germany had invaded France and Serge was trying to leave the country. He and his son managed to get places on the last boat to leave Marseille. The long, exhausting sea journey that ended, months later, in Mexico City provided ample time for writing. The Notebooks contain vivid descriptions of the coastline as the freighter full of refugees skirted the North African coast and headed in the direction of Martinique. André Breton was on board; so was Claude Lévi-Strauss. Both were wonderful raconteurs. There are caustic pen portraits of French and Soviet writers and politicians, and descriptions of other passengers. The forward section is ‘densely populated but maintains a chic tone because of a group of filmmakers and well-dressed emigrants with cash who put on airs as if they were at a café on the Left Bank’; the Bretons and Lams lounge on the upper deck, as Jacqueline Lamba, Breton’s wife, ‘sunbathes almost completely nude and scorns the universe which, by ignoring her, vexes her’. Dr S, a French colon and member of the Tunisian Grand Council, is anxious to show Serge something hidden in his cabin:


He unveils a small painting, in fact quite lovely, a recumbent woman dressed in warm blues: it’s a Manet, the portrait of the painter’s wife, dated 1873, bought in Algiers second-hand for ‘five hundred francs, can you imagine!’ Five hundred francs, five thousand, or five million, I don’t give a damn, but to save a painting, to take joy in this, to save a moment of its soul at the moment when the great ship ‘Civilisation’ risks sinking to the bottom with all its Sistines and its Curie laboratories is good, Doctor, is splendid! We drink a glass of cognac – almost friends.

There are interesting conversations with a cultured Viennese bourgeois, who introduces himself as a banker and is on his way to a new life in Brazil. He looks at Serge expectantly. ‘I’m a friend of Mr Trotsky,’ Serge says. To his amusement, the banker tries to conceal his disappointment.

Serge arrived in Mexico City a year or so after Trotsky’s assassination. Observing the war from his remote exile, he wrote in his Notebooks on the anniversary of the revolution: ‘Gloomy anniversary of October. Leningrad and Moscow besieged, Rostov lost, Crimea invaded. How distant am I, despite myself, from the Russian nightmare. And for the first time, I try to imagine it as in some way abstract. Otherwise it would be intolerable.’ Serge himself was soon under attack. As his Notebooks show, the local press, by then under Russian influence, refused to publish his pieces, and a meeting at which he attempted to speak was attacked by Communist Party goons and one of his friends badly injured.

On 15 May 1946, a year before his death, he suffered what may have been a mild heart attack. ‘I was suddenly seized by one of those oppressive dizzy spells that have been striking me very frequently of late, and which weaken me to a distressing extent,’ he wrote in his Notebooks. ‘My heart starts to beat strongly and unevenly, a psychological anxiety ... in the upper chest, more to the left it seems to me, and when it’s really bad I feel such a buzzing vertigo mounting to my head that I fear falling, that remaining upright is becoming impossible.’ He goes on:


The idea of the proximity of death, appearing more clearly than in other recent similar circumstances, causes me no fright, no fear, and isn’t even a real hindrance in my daily activities. The hindrance is physical and great: I am afraid of wandering at random, not knowing whether the dizziness will appear unexpectedly. I feel myself to be in a state of readiness, ready to leave, to disappear simply. Not without effort, I tried to attain and thought I had attained this state of calm readiness at the internal prison of the GPU in Moscow in 1933, when I envisioned my execution. Today I think that at the time I believed I had attained it more than I attained it in truth, and I succeeded in achieving a calm more apparent, more superficial than profound.

Now, whether from the wearing down of life or from a more assured serenity (with its deep-down dose of despair), my readiness is more sure. Enough, in any case, that I do not feel any obsessive anxiety and have not lost the taste for anything I love: those close to me, life, ideas and work ...

A sensual attachment to life, even in its details, its dailiness, a ceaseless curiosity about the earth and ideas.

The wish to see better days, or at least the beginning of better days.

The frustration at being interrupted in the middle of my activity, with a matured mind, a personality filled with detritus but somewhat purified. The disagreeableness of not holding out until some form of victory in the long combat.

Despite​ personal setbacks and political defeats, Serge never renounced or denounced the revolution. In her introduction to a reissue of his finest novel, The Case of Comrade Tulayev, Susan Sontag tried to enlist him in the ranks of ‘anti-communists’. Whatever else, he was never that. He defended the historical validity of the Russian Revolution until the end of his life; he accepted that the ‘germs of Stalinism’ were present from the start, but insisted that there were ‘many other germs as well’. His painter son, Vlady Kibalchich, whom I met a number of times in Mexico City and who was very close to his father, was firm on this point. Serge was a heretic who remained on the left, never a Cold War renegade who sang the virtues of capitalism or colonialism. Had he done so, many avenues would have opened up for him in the West. His books would have been published and liberal magazines would have competed to get hold of his essays. There would have been no shortage of funds. He might have lived longer. As it was, he was largely dependent on handouts from fans in New York, where Dwight and Nancy Macdonald were especially generous despite their differences.

Serge died in a taxi in Mexico City on the way to see his son. He was 56. His jacket was frayed. His shoes had holes in them. His unidentified body was lying on a slab in the police station where his son found him. He had left a poem:
A night filled with stars, a darkness filled with you:
So that I could love you I had to understand this world
And before I could understand the world, I had to love you.

In his writing, Serge dealt with the street tumults and upheavals of his own time and place, at times excited and inspired, at others repelled by the loud march of history. He was a chronicler and analyst of defeats, of historical regression and its causes, of the fearful shadows of unfettered power. The Notebooks are a treasure chest. The form itself is peculiarly (if not exclusively) French, even if the two most famous examples were written in German and Italian. Marx’s Grundrisse, seven notebooks of self-clarifications developing his ideas and earlier work, was posthumously published in Moscow in 1939 and 1941. Gramsci’s Prison Notebooks, written in an Italian fascist prison between 1929 and 1935, contain essays on the state, civil society, the role of intellectuals, Fordism, Italian history and more. Written in an elliptical style to deceive the prison censors, they had a huge influence on political and cultural debates on almost every continent in the mid-20th century. These were exceptions. In most notebooks, elements of a personal diary are present, if not dominant, and such carnets may be intended for publication. Reflections on history, art, philosophy, literature, politics and sexuality are not uncommon. In Serge’s case there is an additional element: a summary of a life foretold, a warning to future generations (don’t repeat our mistakes), a last will and testament. A balance sheet.

More than half the contents of the new edition were first published in 1952 by Julliard. For unknown reasons, Serge’s widow, Laurette Séjourné, insisted that no unpublished material existed. I asked Richard Greeman, his principal translator and founder of the Victor Serge Foundation, what the story was. Séjourné, he explained,had them in her possession but kept them hidden. She denied this to me, to Susan Weissman and even to Serge’s daughter, Jeannine, when directly asked if she had any papers of Serge’s. However, after her death they ended up in her personal archive, where somebody noticed them and brought them to the attention of [the Mexican academic] Claudio Albertani (to whom Laurette also denied having any Serge papers), and he was able to photocopy them and eventually publish a complete French version of the Carnets.

When Weissman finally managed to interview her, Séjourné said: ‘Why do you want to write his biography? He was nothing.’

Rereading The Case of Comrade Tulayev, written during Serge’s time in Mexico, I was reminded of Eisenstein’s imagery in Ivan the Terrible – the novel has much to teach us in these bad times. It tells the story of the Soviet purges, starting with the assassination of Sergei Kirov in Leningrad. An apolitical citizen with a revolver kills a senior party official. Others pay the price: men and women of Serge’s political generation, some of whom were his friends and relations. He returned to this theme in his last novel, Unforgiving Years, a bleak, pessimistic, lyrical, frightening book, devoid of hope. Set during the Second World War, it was first published in France in 1971 and then in English in 2008 by NYRB Classics, which is gradually publishing Serge’s complete works. The two need to be read in tandem. Many of the characters in the later novel are dazed and demoralised Soviet intelligence agents in Paris. One of them is based on a real-life agent codenamed Ludwig, Ignace Reiss, who said that ‘in times like these it is easier to die than to live.’

When I read The Case of Comrade Tulayev for the first time, in the 1970s, I was struck by Serge’s surprisingly realist, if not sympathetic, assessment of Stalin. In the Notebooks, there is an explanation of sorts, given in answer to a question posed by the French-Polish novelist Jean Malaquais: ‘And Stalin, you think, wasn’t a traitor? To have massacred Lenin’s party, made the Russian Revolution what it’s become, is that not treason?’ Serge replies:


In polemical terms, perhaps ... But I don’t like polemical terms that do violence to the truth. In my blocked novel I think I presented an accurate psychological portrait of Stalin. He didn’t break faith, he changed, and history marched on: he bears the heavy burden of a mediocre and powerful personality. He believes in his mission: he sees himself as the saviour of a revolution threatened by ideologues, the idealistic and the unrealistic (recall Napoleon’s contempt for the ideologues). He fought them as he could, with his inferiority complex, his jealousies, his terror of men superior to him and whom he couldn’t understand. He cast them from his saviour’s path by the only methods he had at his disposal: terror and lies, the methods of a limited intelligence governed by suspicion and placed at the service of an immense vitality.

He made himself and circumstances made him the leader, the symbolic figure of a vast new formation of parvenus of the revolution; headstrong, tough, unscrupulous, clutching on to power, living in fear and panic and claiming to embody the victorious revolution. In reality, they incarnated a new phenomenon that socialist theory never predicted: the totalitarian economic state, one of too weak a culture to allow individual freedom, and thus fated for state-directed thought. Directed thought means at one and the same time absolute confidence in oneself, material confidence, and fear of oneself, awareness of one’s own weakness.Isaac Deutscher, with whom Serge should be but never is compared, held a similar view (as did Sartre, whose Les Temps modernes published a selection of the Notebooks after the war). Deutscher, though, went further. A generation younger than Serge, he was born in Chrzanó in 1907 to a strongly rabbinical household. He joined the Polish Communist Party around 1927, but was horrified by the ultra-sectarian position on fascism espoused by Stalin and won over by Trotsky’s writings on how it should be combated. After being expelled by the Polish CP he became involved with Polish supporters of the Left Opposition. When Trotsky decided to found a Fourth International both Serge and Deutscher were opposed, feeling the timing was wrong. Serge predicted it would lead to a proliferation of squabbling sects, and the Polish delegation to the Founding Conference outside Paris in 1938 read out a statement by Deutscher arguing that in forming the Fourth International the Trotskyists would be isolated from currents inside the communist parties in their own countries. Deutscher moved to London, where he began to write in flawless English, often compared to Conrad’s. In a country without a strong communist party posing a real political threat, Deutscher was able to get a temporary job at the Economist and later wrote for the Observer – even if Isaiah Berlin made sure he was denied a teaching post at Sussex. Serge didn’t have his luck.

Curiously, Deutscher’s magisterial three-volume biography of Trotsky doesn’t mention The Life and Death of Leon Trotsky, which Serge wrote with Natalia Sedova. Of the two men, Deutscher, who died in 1967, was always more aware of the contradictions and weaknesses of Stalinism, while Serge tended to overestimate its hold. It was clear that Soviet expansion into Eastern Europe would even in the medium term weaken the system, inside and outside the Soviet Union. The workers’ uprising in East Berlin in 1953, the Hungarian revolt in 1956, the Polish demonstrations in December that same year and finally the crushing of the Prague Spring in August 1968 marked the end of all hope. Asked when he had decided the system was beyond reform, Solzhenitsyn said: ‘On 21 August 1968.’ He was wrong, but he wasn’t the only one. It was difficult then to imagine Gorbachev, let alone the dismantling of the whole system.

Revolutions elsewhere would never lead to carbon copies of Stalin’s Russia, Deutscher argued, but would accelerate the process of reform in the USSR. Stalin’s 1948 excommunication of Tito, who refused to subordinate the Yugoslav revolution to Moscow’s needs, and Khrushchev’s 1958 breach with Mao, vindicated this analysis. The Twentieth Party Congress in 1956, at which Khrushchev denounced Stalin’s crimes, was followed by a decree ordering the closure of the prison camps. By the time ex-communists took anti-communism as their creed, the Gulag had been gone for almost two decades. When the Soviet Union finally collapsed it was the result of an implosion at the top. The bastard offspring of this process is Putin, in whose muscled and well-oiled figure Father Church embraces and violates Mother Russia. Serge and Deutscher would have had a few things to say about this. 

LRB Vol. 42 No. 14 · 16 July 2020

Trotskyist Cults

The Trotskyist movement is one of full of sectarian splinter groups of all kinds and it has given rise to a prolific number of political movements of both the left and the right.

The movement itself once centred around a broad based left opposition to Stalin called the Fourth International, which soon after being founded became a cult of the Old Man himself, not unlike other Bolshevik Cult of Personalities.

It did so by Trotsky ousting and denouncing other members of the Anti-Stalinist Left like the Spanish POUM and the libertarian-socialist Victor Serge.

Post WWII Trotskyism further dissolved into various political tendencies, icnluding lots of little cults of personalities. It also fragmented because many post WWII leftists included a wide assortment of those who saw the Soviet Union as state capitalist, or as being ruled by a new bueraucratic elite.

The later became hardbitten anti-Soviet liberals during the long cold war, and founding fathers of the neo conservative movement.

And some Trotskyists went even further right as we can see with Lyndon LaRouche. He would feel right at home with these guys.

TROTSKYISTS IN SPACE

Juan R Posadas was no ordinary Trotskyite; socialists from outer space, the benefits of nuclear war and communication with dolphins were all part of his revolutionary programme. Matt Salusbury tells the story of one of the World’s strangest political thinkers.

The word ‘bizarre’ does no justice to the Posadist belief system. While writing this article, I joked to a friend that the Posadists had everything except a Kennedy assassination conspiracy theory. Then I came across the January 1964 edition of Red Flag with four pages of closely printed, incomprehensible rant on Why The Pentagon Killed Kennedy, by J Posadas.

Of course Posadas was right about one thing, in order to really achieve colonisation of space we need socialism, as Star Trek proves.

See

UFO


Find blog posts, photos, events and more off-site about:
Victor Serge, POUM, Fourth International, Trotsky, Trotskyists, Trotskyite, Trotskyism, neo-conservatives, Juan R Posadas, Lyndon Larouche, UFO, Dolphins, Kennedy Assassination, Star Trek,

We Can Only Go Beyond Communism by Coming to Terms With Its History

Thirty years ago today, the Soviet Union collapsed. Twentieth-century communism should be understood in all its complexity, as revolution and regime, a spur to anti-colonialism and an alternative form of social democracy.

Joseph Stalin (1879-1953) Soviet leader, addressing the Sixteenth Congress of the Russian Communist Party, 1930. (Universal History Archive / Getty Images)

LONG READ

BYENZO TRAVERSO
12.26.2021

JACOBIN

This is an extract from Enzo Traverso’s new book Revolution: An Intellectual History, available from Verso Books.

The legacy of the October Revolution is torn between two antipodal interpretations. The rise to power of the Bolsheviks appeared, on the one hand, as the announcement of a global socialist transformation; on the other hand, as the event that set the stage for an epoch of totalitarianism. The most radical versions of these opposed interpretations — official communism and Cold War anti-communism — also converge insofar as, for both of them, the Communist Party was a kind of demiurgic historical force.

Several decades after its exhaustion, the communist experience does not need to be defended, idealized, or demonized. It deserves to be critically understood as a whole, as a dialectical totality shaped by internal tensions and contradictions, presenting multiple dimensions in a vast spectrum of shades, from redemptive élans to totalitarian violence, from participatory democracy and collective deliberation to blind oppression and mass extermination, from the most utopian imagination to the most bureaucratic domination — sometimes shifting from one to the other in a short span of time.

Like many other “isms” of our political and philosophical lexicon, communism is a polysemic and ultimately “ambiguous” word. Its ambiguity does not lie exclusively in the discrepancy that separates the communist idea from its historical embodiments. It lies in the extreme diversity of its expressions. Not only because Russian, Chinese, and Italian communism were different, but also because in the long run many communist movements underwent deep changes, despite keeping their leaders and their ideological references.

Considering its historical trajectory as a world phenomenon, communism appears as a mosaic of communisms. Sketching its “anatomy,” one can distinguish at least four broad forms, interrelated and not necessarily opposed to each other, but different enough to be recognized on their own: communism as revolution; communism as regime; communism as anti-colonialism; and finally, communism as a variant of social democracy.

Revolutionary Template

It is important to remember the mood of the Russian Revolution, because it powerfully contributed to creating an iconic image that survived the misfortunes of the USSR and cast its shadow over the entire twentieth century. Its aura attracted millions of human beings across the world, and remained relatively well-preserved even when the aura of the communist regimes completely fell apart. In the 1960s and 1970s, it fuelled a new wave of political radicalization that not only claimed autonomy from the USSR and its allies, but also perceived them as enemies.

The Russian Revolution came out of the Great War. It was a product of the collapse of the ‘long nineteenth century.’

The Russian Revolution came out of the Great War. It was a product of the collapse of the “long nineteenth century,” and the symbiotic link between war and revolution shaped the entire trajectory of twentieth-century communism. Emerging from the Franco-Prussian War of 1870, the Paris Commune had been a forerunner of militarized politics, as many Bolshevik thinkers emphasized, but the October Revolution amplified it to an incomparably larger scale.

World War I transformed Bolshevism itself, altering many of its features: several canonical works of the communist tradition, like Lenin’s The Proletarian Revolution and the Renegade Kautsky (1918) or Leon Trotsky’s Terrorism and Communism (1920), simply could not be imagined before 1914. Just as 1789 introduced a new concept of revolution — no longer defined as an astronomical rotation but rather as a social and political break — October 1917 reframed it in military terms: a crisis of the old order, mass mobilization, dualism of power, armed insurrection, proletarian dictatorship, civil war, and a violent clash with counterrevolution.

Lenin’s State and Revolution formalized Bolshevism as both an ideology (an interpretation of Karl Marx’s ideas) and a unity of strategic precepts distinguishing it from social democratic reformism, a politics belonging to the exhausted age of nineteenth-century liberalism. Bolshevism came out of a time of increasing brutalization, when war erupted into politics, changing its language and its practices. It was a product of the anthropological transformation that shaped the old continent at the end of the Great War.

This genetic code of Bolshevism was visible everywhere, from texts to languages, from iconography to songs, from symbols to rituals. It outlasted World War II and continued to fuel the rebellious movements of the 1970s, whose slogans and liturgies obsessively emphasized the idea of a violent clash with the state. Bolshevism created a military paradigm of revolution that deeply shaped communist experiences throughout the planet.

The European Resistance, as well as the socialist transformations in China, Korea, Vietnam, and Cuba reproduced a similar symbiotic link between war and revolution. The international communist movement was therefore envisioned as a revolutionary army formed by millions of combatants, and this had inevitable consequences in terms of organization, authoritarianism, discipline, division of labor, and, last but not least, gender hierarchies. In a movement of warriors, female leaders could only be exceptions.

Earthquake

The Bolsheviks were deeply convinced that they were acting in accordance with the “laws of history.” The earthquake of 1917 was born from the entanglement of many factors, some set in the longue durée of Russian history and others more temporary, abruptly synchronized by the war: an extremely violent peasant uprising against the landed aristocracy, a revolt of the urban proletariat affected by the economic crisis, and finally the dislocation of the army, formed of peasant-soldiers who were exhausted after three years of a terrible conflict, which they neither understood nor perceived as nearing an end.

If these were the premises of the Russian Revolution, it is difficult to grasp in it any supposed historical necessity. The Soviet experiment was fragile, precarious, and unstable during its first years of existence. It was constantly threatened, and its survival required both inexhaustible energies and enormous sacrifices. A witness to those years, Victor Serge, wrote that in 1919 the Bolsheviks considered the collapse of the Soviet regime likely, but instead of discouraging them, this awareness multiplied their tenacity. The victory of the counterrevolution would have been an immense bloodbath. The Soviet experiment was fragile, precarious, and unstable during its first years of existence.

Maybe their resistance was possible because they were animated by the profound conviction of acting in accordance with the “laws of history.” But, in reality, they did not follow any natural tendency; they were inventing a new world, unable to know what would come out of their endeavor, inspired by an astonishingly powerful utopian imagination, and certainly incapable of imagining its totalitarian outcome.

Despite their usual appeal to the positivistic lexicon of “historical laws,” the Bolsheviks had inherited their military conception of revolution from the Great War. The Russian revolutionaries read Clausewitz and dealt with the interminable controversies about the legacy of Blanquism and the art of insurrection, but the violence of the Russian Revolution did not arise from an ideological impulse; it stemmed from a society brutalized by war.

This genetic trauma had profound consequences. The war had reshaped politics by changing its codes, introducing previously unknown forms of authoritarianism. In 1917, chaos and spontaneity still prevailed in a mass party composed mostly of new members and directed by a group of exiles, but authoritarianism quickly consolidated during the civil war. Lenin and Trotsky claimed the legacy of the Paris Commune of 1871, but Julius Martov was right when he pointed out that their true ancestor was the Jacobin Terror of 1793–94.

The military paradigm of the revolution should not be mistaken, however, for a cult of violence. In his History of the Russian Revolution, Trotsky put forward solid arguments against the thesis widely spread from the 1920s onward of a Bolshevik “coup.” Rejecting the ingenuity of the idyllic vision of the taking of the Winter Palace as a spontaneous popular uprising, he dedicated many pages to the methodical preparation of an insurrection that required, well beyond a rigorous and efficient military organization, an in-depth evaluation of its political conditions and a careful choice of its execution times.

The result was the dismissal of the interim government and the arrest of its members practically without bloodshed. The disintegration of the old state apparatus and the construction of a new one was a painful process that lasted for more than three years of civil war. Of course, the insurrection required a technical preparation and was implemented by a minority, but this did not equate to a “conspiracy.” In opposition to the pervasive view spread by Curzio Malaparte, a victorious insurrection, Trotsky wrote, “is widely separated both in method and historical significance from a governmental overturn accomplished by conspirators acting in concealment from the masses.”

There is no doubt that the taking of the Winter Palace and the dismissal of the provisional government was a major turn within the revolutionary process: Lenin called it an “overthrowing” or an “uprising” (perevorot). Nevertheless, most historians recognize that this twist took place in a period of extraordinary effervescence, characterized by a permanent mobilization of society and constant recourse to the use of force; in a paradoxical context in which Russia, while remaining involved in a world war, was a state that no longer possessed the monopoly on the legitimate use of violence.

Disillusionment

Paradoxically, the thesis of the Bolshevik “coup” is the crossing point between conservative and anarchist criticisms of the October Revolution. Their reasons were certainly different — not to say antipodal — but their conclusions converged: Lenin and Trotsky had established a dictatorship.

Emma Goldman and Alexander Berkman, expelled from the United States in 1919 because of their enthusiastic support of the Russian Revolution, could not accept Bolshevik rule and, after the repression of the Kronstadt rebellion in March 1921, decided to leave the USSR. Goldman published My Disillusionment in Russia (1923) and Berkman The Bolshevik Myth (1925), whose conclusion expressed a bitter and severe assessment:

Gray are the passing days. One by one the embers of hope have died out. Terror and despotism have crushed the life born in October. The slogans of the Revolution are foresworn, its ideals stifled in the blood of the people. The breath of yesterday is dooming millions to death; the shadow of today hangs like a black pall over the country. Dictatorship is trampling the masses underfoot. The Revolution is dead; its spirit cries in the wilderness.

Their criticism certainly deserves attention, since it came from inside the revolution itself. Their diagnostic was pitiless: the Bolsheviks had established a party dictatorship that ruled not only in name of the soviets but sometimes — as in Kronstadt — against them, and whose authoritarian features had becoming more and more suffocating.

In fact, the Bolsheviks themselves did not contest this trenchant appraisal. In Year One of the Russian Revolution (1930), Victor Serge described the USSR during the Civil War in this way:

At this moment, the party fulfilled within the working class the functions of a brain and of a nervous system. It saw, it felt, it knew, it thought, it willed for and through the masses; its consciousness, its organization were a makeweight for the weakness of the individual members of the mass. Without it, the mass would have been no more than a heap of human dust, experiencing confused aspirations shot through by flashes of intelligence — these, in the absence of a mechanism capable of leading to large-scale action, doomed to waste themselves — and experiencing more insistently the pangs of suffering. Through its incessant agitation and propaganda, always telling the unvarnished truth, the party raised the workers above their own narrow, individual horizon, and revealed to them the vast perspectives of history. After the winter of 1918–19, the revolution becomes the work of the Communist party.

The Bolsheviks’ eulogy of party dictatorship, their defense of the militarization of work and their violent language against any left-wing criticism — either social democratic or anarchist — of their power, was certainly abhorrent and dangerous. It was during the Civil War that Stalinism found its premises. The fact remains that a left-wing alternative was not an easy option. As Serge himself lucidly recognized, the most probable alternative to Bolshevism was simply counterrevolutionary terror.

Without being a coup, the October Revolution meant the seizure of power by a party that represented a minority, and which remained even more isolated after its decision to dissolve the Constituent Assembly. At the end of the Russian Civil War, however, the Bolsheviks had conquered the majority, thus becoming the hegemonic force in a devastated country.

This dramatic change did not happen because of the Cheka and state terror, as pitiless as it was, but because of the division of their enemies, the support of the working class and the passing over to their side of both the peasantry and the non-Russian nationalities. If the final outcome was the dictatorship of a revolutionary party, the alternative was not a democratic regime; the only alternative was a military dictatorship of Russian nationalists, aristocratic landowners. and pogromists.'

Revolution From Above

The communist regime institutionalized the military dimension of revolution. It destroyed the creative, anarchistic, and self-emancipatory spirit of 1917, but at the same time inscribed itself into the revolutionary process. The shift of the revolution toward the Soviet regime passed through different steps: the Civil War (1918–21), the collectivization of agriculture (1930–33), and the political purges of the Moscow Trials (1936–38).

Dissolving the Constituent Assembly, in December 1917, the Bolsheviks affirmed the superiority of Soviet democracy, but by the end of the Civil War the latter was dying. During this atrocious and bloody conflict, the USSR introduced censorship, suppressed political pluralism to the point of finally abolishing any fraction within the Communist Party itself, militarized labor and created the first forced labor camps, and instituted a new political secret police (Cheka). In March 1921, the violent repression of Kronstadt symbolized the end of Soviet democracy and the USSR emerged from the Civil War as a single-party dictatorship.In the second half of the 1930s, the political purges physically eliminated the vestiges of revolutionary Bolshevism and disciplined the entire society by establishing the rule of terror.

Ten years later, the collectivization of agriculture brutally ended the peasant revolution and invented new forms of totalitarian violence and bureaucratically centralized modernization of the country. In the second half of the 1930s, the political purges physically eliminated the vestiges of revolutionary Bolshevism and disciplined the entire society by establishing the rule of terror. For two decades, the USSR created a gigantic system of concentration camps.

From the mid-1930s, the USSR roughly corresponded with the classical definition of totalitarianism elaborated a few years later by many conservative political thinkers: a correlation of official ideology, charismatic leadership, single-party dictatorship, suppression of rule of law and political pluralism, monopoly of all means of communication through state propaganda, social and political terror backed by a system of concentration camps, and the suppression of free-market capitalism by a centralized economy.

This description, currently used to point out the similarities between communism and fascism, is not wrong but extremely superficial. Even if one overlooks the enormous differences that separated the communist and fascist ideologies, as well as the social and economic content of their political systems, the fact remains that such a canonical definition of totalitarianism does not grasp the internal dynamic of the Soviet regime. It is simply unable to inscribe it into the historical process of the Russian Revolution. It depicts the USSR as a static, monolithic system, whereas the advent of Stalinism meant a deep and protracted transformation of society and culture.

Equally unsatisfactory is the definition of Stalinism as a bureaucratic counterrevolution or a “betrayed” revolution. Stalinism certainly signified a radical departure from any idea of democracy and self-emancipation, but it was not, properly speaking, a counterrevolution. A comparison with the Napoleonic Empire is pertinent insofar as Stalinism consciously linked the transformations engendered by the Russian Revolution to both the Enlightenment and the tradition of Russian Empire, but Stalinism was not the restoration of the Old Regime, neither politically or economically, nor even culturally. 

Far from restoring the power of the old aristocracy, Stalinism created a completely new economic, managerial, scientific, and intellectual elite.

Far from restoring the power of the old aristocracy, Stalinism created a completely new economic, managerial, scientific, and intellectual elite, recruited from the lower classes of Soviet societies — notably the peasantry — and educated by new communist institutions. This is the key to explaining why Stalinism benefited from a social consensus, notwithstanding the Terror and mass deportations.

Monumental and Monstrous

Interpreting Stalinism as a step in the process of the Russian Revolution does not mean sketching a linear track. The first wave of terror took place during a civil war, when the existence of the USSR itself was threatened by an international coalition. The brutality of the White counterrevolution, the extreme violence of its propaganda and of its practices — pogroms and massacres — pushed the Bolsheviks to establish a pitiless dictatorship.

Stalin initiated the second and third waves of terror during the 1930s — collectivization and the purges — in a pacified country whose borders had been internationally recognized and whose political power had been menaced neither by external nor by internal forces. Of course, the rise to power of Hitler in Germany clearly signaled the possibility of a new war in the medium term, but the massive, blind, and irrational character of Stalin’s violence significantly weakened the USSR instead of reinforcing and equipping it to face such dangers.

The massive, blind, and irrational character of Stalin’s violence significantly weakened the USSR instead of reinforcing and equipping it to face the dangers of Nazism.

Stalinism was a “revolution from above,” a paradoxical mixture of modernization and social regression, whose final result was mass deportation, a system of concentration camps, an ensemble of trials exhuming the fantasies of the Inquisition, and a wave of mass executions that decapitated the state, the party, and the army. 

In rural areas, Stalinism meant, according to Nikolai Bukharin, the return to a “feudal exploitation” of the peasantry with catastrophic economic effects. At the same time as the kulaks were starving in Ukraine, the Soviet regime was transforming tens of thousands of peasants into technicians and engineers.

In short, Soviet totalitarianism merged modernism and barbarism; it was a peculiar, frightening, Promethean trend. Arno Mayer defines it as “an uneven and unstable amalgam of monumental achievements and monstrous crimes.” Of course, any left scholar or activist could easily share Victor Serge’s assessment on the moral, philosophical, and political line that radically separated Stalinism from authentic socialism, insofar as Stalin’s USSR had become in his words “an absolute, castocratic totalitarian state, drunk with its own power, for which man does not count.” But this does not change the fact, recognized by Serge himself, that this red totalitarianism unfolded in and prolonged a historical process started by the October Revolution.

Avoiding any teleological approach, one could observe that this result was neither historically ineluctable nor coherently inscribed into a Marxist ideological pattern. The origins of Stalinism, nevertheless, cannot simply be imputed, as radical functionalism suggests, to the historical circumstances of war and the social backwardness of a gigantic country with an absolutist past, a country in which building socialism inevitably required reproducing the gruesomeness of “primitive capital accumulation.”

Bolshevik ideology played a role during the Russian Civil War in this metamorphosis from democratic upsurge to ruthless, totalitarian dictatorship. Its normative vision of violence as the “midwife of history” and its culpable indifference to the juridical framework of a revolutionary state, historically transitional and doomed to extinction, certainly favored the emergence of an authoritarian, single-party regime.

Multiple threads run from revolution to Stalinism, as well as from the USSR to the communist movements acting across the world. Stalinism was both a totalitarian regime and, for several decades, the hegemonic current of the Left on an international scale.

From Moscow to Hunan

The Bolsheviks were radical Westernizers. Bolshevik literature was full of references to the French Revolution, 1848 and the Paris Commune, but it never mentioned the Haitian Revolution or the Mexican Revolution. For Trotsky and Lenin, who loved this metaphor, the “wheel of history” rolled from Petrograd to Berlin, not from the boundless Russian countryside to the fields of Morelos or the Antillean plantations.

In a chapter of his History of the Russian Revolution, Trotsky deplored the fact that peasants were usually ignored by the history books, just as theater critics pay no attention to the workers who, behind the scenes, operate the curtains and change the scenery. In his own book, however, the peasants appear mostly as an anonymous mass. They are not neglected but are observed from afar, with analytical detachment rather than empathy.

The Bolsheviks had started to question their vision of the peasantry — inherited from Marx’s writings on French Bonapartism — as a culturally backward and politically conservative class, but their proletarian tropism was too strong to complete this revision. This was done, not without theoretical and strategic confrontations, by anti-colonial communism in the years between the two world wars.

In China, the communist turn toward the peasantry resulted from both the devastating defeat of the urban revolutions of the mid-1920s and the effort to inscribe Marxism into a national history and culture. After the bloody repression inflicted by the Kuomintang (GMD), the Communist Party cells had been almost completely dismantled in the cities, and its members imprisoned and persecuted. Retreating into the country, where they found protection and could reorganize their movement, many communist leaders started looking at the peasantry with different eyes, abandoning their former Westernized gaze on Asian “backwardness.”

This strategic turn, the object of sharp controversies between the Communist International and its Chinese section during the 1930s, was claimed by Mao Zedong at the beginning of 1927, even before the massacres perpetrated by the GMD in Shanghai and Canton that year. Coming back to his native Hunan, Mao wrote a famous report in which he designated the peasantry — instead of the urban proletariat — as the driving force of the Chinese Revolution.

Against the Moscow agents who conceived of peasant militias exclusively as triggers of urban uprisings, in 1931, Mao persisted in building a Soviet republic in Jiangxi. Without believing in the rural character of the Chinese Revolution, he could not have organized the Long March in order to resist the annihilation campaign launched by the GMD. Initially considered as a tragic defeat, this epic undertaking paved the way for a successful struggle in the following decade, first against the Japanese occupation and then against the GMD itself. 

The three major dimensions of communism — revolution, regime, and anti-colonialism — emblematically merged in the Chinese Revolution.

The proclamation of the People’s Republic of China in Beijing in 1949 was the result of a process that, from the uprisings of 1925 to the Long March and the anti-Japanese struggle, found one of its necessary premises in October 1917; but it was also the product of a strategic revision. There was a complex genetic link between the Chinese and the Russian Revolutions. The three major dimensions of communism — revolution, regime, and anti-colonialism — emblematically merged in the Chinese Revolution.

As a radical break with the traditional order, it was incontestably a revolution that heralded the end of centuries of oppression; as the conclusion of a civil war, it resulted in the conquest of power by a militarized party which, since the beginning, established its dictatorship in the most authoritarian forms. And as the conclusion of fifteen years of struggle, first against the Japanese occupation and then against the GMD — a nationalist force that had become the agent of Western great powers — the communist victory of 1949 marked not only the end of colonialism in China but also, on a broader scale, a significant moment in the global process of decolonization.

The Wind From Baku

After the Russian Revolution, socialism crossed the boundaries of Europe and became an agenda item in the South and the colonial world. Because of its intermediary position between Europe and Asia, with a gigantic territory extending across both continents, inhabited by a variety of national, religious, and ethnic communities, the USSR became the locus of a new crossroads between the West and the colonial world. Bolshevism was able to speak equally to the proletarian classes of the industrialized countries and to the colonized peoples of the South. Bolshevism was able to speak equally to the proletarian classes of the industrialized countries and to the colonized peoples of the South.

During the nineteenth century, anti-colonialism was almost nonexistent in the West, with the notable exception of the anarchist movement, whose activists and ideas widely circulated between Southern and Eastern Europe, Latin America, and different Asian countries. After Marx’s death, socialism based its hopes and expectations on the growing strength of the industrial working class, mostly white and male, and was concentrated in the developed (mostly Protestant) capitalist countries of the West.

Every mass socialist party included powerful currents defending the “civilizing mission” of Europe throughout the world. Social democratic parties — particularly those located in the biggest empires — postponed colonial liberation until after the socialist transformation of Europe and the United States. The Bolsheviks radically broke with such a tradition.

The second congress of the Communist International, held in Moscow in July 1920, approved a programmatic document calling for colonial revolutions against imperialism: its goal was the creation of communist parties in the colonial world and the support of national liberation movements. The congress clearly affirmed a radical turn away from the old social democratic views on colonialism.

A couple of months later, the Bolsheviks organized a Congress of the Peoples of the East in Baku, Azerbaijan Soviet Socialist Republic, which convened almost two thousand delegates from twenty-nine Asian nationalities. Grigory Zinoviev explicitly affirmed that the Communist International had broken with older social democratic attitudes, according to which “civilized Europe” could and must “act as tutor to ‘barbarous’ Asia.” Revolution was no longer considered as the exclusive realm of “white” European and American workers, and socialism could not be imagined without the liberation of colonized peoples.

The conflicting relationships between communism and nationalism would be clarified in the following decades, but the October Revolution was the inaugural moment of global anti-colonialism. In the 1920s, anti-colonialism suddenly shifted from the realm of historical possibility to the field of political strategy and military organization. The Baku conference announced this historic change.

The alliance between communism and anti-colonialism experienced several moments of crisis and tension, related to both ideological conflicts and the imperatives of the USSR’s foreign policies. At the end of World War II, the French Communist Party participated in a coalition government that violently repressed anti-colonial revolts in Algeria and Madagascar, and in the following decade it supported Prime Minister Guy Mollet at the beginning of the Algerian War. In India, the communist movement was marginalized during World War II because of its decision to suspend its anti-colonial struggle and to support the British Empire’s involvement in a military alliance with the USSR against the Axis powers.

If these examples clearly show the contradictions of communist anti-colonialism, they do not change the historical role played by the USSR as a rear base for many anti-colonial revolutions. The entire process of decolonization took place in the context of the Cold War, within the relations of force established by the existence of the USSR.

Retrospectively, decolonization appears as a historical experience in which the contradictory dimensions of communism previously mentioned — emancipation and authoritarianism, revolution and dictatorial power — permanently merged. In most cases, anti-colonial struggles were conceived and organized like military campaigns carried out by liberation armies, and the political regimes they established were, from the beginning, one-party dictatorships.

In Cambodia, at the end of a ferocious war, the military dimension of the anti-colonial struggle completely suffocated any emancipatory impulse, and the conquest of power by the Khmer Rouge immediately resulted in the establishment of a genocidal power. The happiness of insurgent Havana on the first of January 1959 and the terror of the Cambodian killing fields are the dialectical poles of communism as anti-colonialism.

Revolutionary Reformists

The fourth dimension of twentieth-century communism is social democratic: in certain countries and periods, communism played the role traditionally fulfilled by social democracy. This happened in some Western countries, mostly in the postwar decades, thanks to a set of circumstances related to international context, the foreign policy of the USSR, and the absence or weakness of classic social democratic parties; and it also occurred in some countries born from decolonization.

In certain countries and periods, communism played the role traditionally fulfilled by social democracy.

The most significant examples of this peculiar phenomenon are found in the United States, at the time of the New Deal, in postwar France and Italy, as well as in India (Kerala and West Bengal). Of course, social democratic communism was geographically and chronologically more circumscribed than its other forms, but it existed nonetheless. To a certain extent, the rebirth of social democracy itself after 1945 was a by-product of the October Revolution, which had changed the balance of power on a global scale and compelled capitalism to transform significantly, adopting a “human face.”

Social democratic communism is an oxymoronic definition that does not ignore the links of French, Italian, or Indian communism with revolutions, Stalinism, and decolonization. It does not neglect the capacity of these movements to lead insurgencies — notably during the Resistance against the Nazi occupation — nor their organic connections with Moscow for several decades. Their first open criticism of the USSR’s foreign policy took place only in the 1960s, first with the Sino-Soviet split, then with the invasion of Czechoslovakia by Soviet tanks.

Even their internal structure and organization was, at least until the end of the 1970s, much more Stalinist than social democratic, as well as their culture, theoretical sources, and political imagination. In spite of these clearly recognizable features, such parties played a typical social democratic role: reforming capitalism, containing social inequalities, getting accessible health care, education, and leisure to the largest number of people; in short, improving the living conditions of the laboring classes and giving them political representation.

Of course, one of the peculiar features of social democratic communism was its exclusion from political power, except for a couple of years between the end of Word War II and the breakout of the Cold War (the swan song of social democratic communism took place in France at the beginning of the 1980s, when the (French Communist Party (PCF) participated in a left coalition government under François Mitterrand). Unlike the British Labour Party, the German Social Democratic Party (SPD), or Scandinavia’s social democracies, it could not claim paternity of the welfare state.

In the United States, the Communist Party was one of the left pillars of the New Deal, along with the trade unions, but it never entered the Roosevelt administration. It did not experience power, only the purges of McCarthyism. In France and Italy, the communist parties were strongly influential in the birth of postwar social policies simply because of their strength and their capacity to put pressure on governments.

The arena of their social reformism was “municipal socialism” in the cities they led as hegemonic strongholds, like Bologna, or the Parisian “red belt.” In a much bigger country like India, the communist governments of Kerala and West Bengal could be considered equivalent forms of “local,” postcolonial welfare states.

In Europe, social democratic communism had two necessary premises: on the one hand, the Resistance that legitimized communist parties as democratic forces; on the other, the economic growth that followed the postwar reconstruction. By the 1980s, the time of social democratic communism was over. Therefore, the end of communism in 1989 throws a new light on the historical trajectory of social democracy itself.

An accomplished form of the social democratic welfare state only existed in Scandinavia. Elsewhere, the welfare state was much more the result of a capitalist self-reformation than a social democratic conquest. At the end of World War II, in the midst of a continent in ruins, capitalism was unable to restart without powerful state intervention. Despite its obvious — and largely achieved — goal of defending the principle of the “free market” against the Soviet economy, the Marshall Plan was, as its name indicated, a “plan” that assured the transition from total war to peaceful reconstruction. 

The postwar welfare state was an unexpected outcome of the complex and contradictory confrontation between communism and capitalism that had begun in 1917.

Without such massive American help, many materially destroyed European countries would have been unable to recover quickly, and the United States worried that a new economic collapse might push entire countries toward communism. From this point of view, the postwar welfare state was an unexpected outcome of the complex and contradictory confrontation between communism and capitalism that had begun in 1917.

Whatever the values, convictions, and commitments of its members and even its leaders, social democracy played a rentier’s role: it could defend freedom, democracy, and the welfare state in the capitalist countries simply because the USSR existed, and capitalism had been compelled to transform itself in the context of the Cold War. After 1989, capitalism recovered its “savage” face, rediscovered the élan of its heroic times, and dismantled the welfare state almost everywhere.

In most Western countries, social democracy turned to neoliberalism and became an essential tool of this transition. And alongside old-style social democracy, even social democratic communism disappeared. The self-dissolution of the Italian Communist Party, in 1991, was the emblematic epilogue of this process: it did not turn into a classic social democratic party but rather an advocate of center-left liberalism, with the explicitly claimed model of the American Democratic Party.

After the Fall

In 1989, the fall of communism closed the curtain on a play as epic as it was tragic, as exciting as it was terrifying. The time of decolonization and the welfare state was over, but the collapse of communism-as-regime also took with it communism-as-revolution. Instead of liberating new forces, the end of the USSR engendered a widespread awareness of the historical defeat of twentieth-century revolutions: paradoxically, the shipwreck of real socialism engulfed the communist utopia.

The twenty-first-century left is compelled to reinvent itself, to distance itself from previous patterns. It is creating new models, new ideas, and a new utopian imagination. This reconstruction is not an easy task, insofar as the fall of communism left the world without alternatives to capitalism and created a different mental landscape. A new generation has grown up in a neoliberal world in which capitalism has become a “natural” form of life.

The Left rediscovered an ensemble of revolutionary traditions that had been suppressed or marginalized over the course of a century, anarchism foremost among them, and recognized a plurality of political subjects previously ignored or relegated to a secondary position. The experiences of the “alter-globalization” movements, the Arab Spring, Occupy Wall Street, the Spanish Indignados, Syriza, the French Nuit debout and gilets jaunes, feminist and LGBT movements, and Black Lives Matter are steps in the process of building a new revolutionary imagination, discontinuous, nourished by memory but at the same time severed from twentieth-century history and deprived of a usable legacy.

Born as an attempt at taking heaven by storm, twentieth-century communism became, with and against fascism, an expression of the dialectic of the Enlightenment. Ultimately, the Soviet-style industrial cities, five-year plans, agricultural collectivization, spacecraft, gulags converted into factories, nuclear weapons, and ecological catastrophes, were different forms of the triumph of instrumental reason.

Was not communism the frightening face of a Promethean dream, of an idea of Progress that erased and destroyed any experience of self-emancipation? Was not Stalinism a storm “piling wreckage upon wreckage,” in Walter Benjamin’s image, and which millions of people mistakenly called “Progress”? Fascism merged a set of conservative values inherited from the counter-Enlightenment with a modern cult of science, technology, and mechanical strength. Stalinism combined a similar cult of technical modernity with a radical and authoritarian form of Enlightenment: socialism transformed into a “cold utopia.”

A new, global left will not succeed without working through this historical experience. Extracting the emancipatory core of communism from this field of ruins is not an abstract, merely intellectual operation; it will require new battles, new constellations, in which all of a sudden the past will reemerge and “memory flash up.” Revolutions cannot be scheduled, they always come unexpectedly.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Enzo Traverso teaches at Cornell University. His most recent book is Revolution: An Intellectual History.