THE RETURN OF VICTOR SERGE

...In his books there is a vibrant, sometimes desperate voice from a whole tradition of modern democratic radicalism that both the Soviets and Western anti-Communists have done their best to hide...

...It has always been the same...

...the jetties are black...

...which could, if absolutely necessary, be published as they were, incomplete...

...Soldiers, wearing the red star on their cloth helmets, watched us sadly as we went by...

...He looked like an old intellectual in the underground of long ago, true as ever after twenty years of grind and a few dazzling victories...

...From the beginning he aligned himself with those pressing for freedom of speech and of the press, secret ballots, and free elections in the soviets...

...At one point he refers to Riutin, the man who organized the gangs that beat up Serge's Oppositionist comrades in the streets of Moscow in the late 1920s as "a man who happened to be sincere in his blindness...

...Again and again he uses a single incident to sum up a man, a time, a political movement...

...perhaps it is for that reason that I still feel a stubborn aversion for it...

...Now that the Russians have been shot, nobody can any longer see from inside what was the thing by which all those men lived, the thing which constituted their strength and their greatness...

...Serge did just that in Year One of the Russian Revolution, an account of the year 1918...

...There are not more than fifty men on earth who understand Einstein: If they were shot on the same night, it would be all over for a century or two— or three, how do we know...

...Serge's respect for others' humanity carried over even to his opponents...

...Throughout the Cold War, Serge was virtually forgotten...

...But Serge, unlike Orwell, belonged: he joined the parties, endured the jail terms, gave up his friends, his health, his best years to an insider's effort to make the Revolution work...

...As the '20s unfolded, he became part of the opposition to Stalin...

...You learn only in a single sentence that the Soviet secret police confiscated the manuscripts of three of his books, including the novel he thought his finest...

...Russia, the old Russia of the knout and the Cossack's sword, has won out against their dreams...

...They would be worthwhile without that...

...Serge knew that he was writing their elegy for the ages, a book almost certainly destined not to be read for decades in the country it describes...

...At one point he headed the Comintern secretariat...

...One quotes Tolstoy's remark about Russia being the land where Genghis Khan has gotten the use of the telephone, another, Marx: "I sowed dragons...

...The Western writer Serge most resembles is Orwell—who was a great admirer of his...

...They talk of the injustices around them, recall their Old Bolshevik past, agree that things are hopeless and that probably prison and death await them—and then they have a snowball fight...

...We approached a cabman and I bargained for the fare, for we had little money...

...Last year, for instance, saw the publication of Conquered City, a somewhat disappointing novel about Petrograd in 1919...

...Tulayev has a somber dignity that sets it apart from the rest of Serge's novels...

...What literature we have from or about the '30s in the Soviet Union consists mostly of either the officially approved epics of the happy lives of dam-builders, or of the prison memoirs of such writers as Eugenia Ginzburg or Nadezhda Mandelstam whose time in concentration camps was spent after most of the Oppositionists there had been killed off...

...Later, he was exiled to the remote, famine-ridden city of Orenberg in the Urals...

...On the walls of our humble and makeshift lodgings," Serge writes in his Memoirs, "There were always the portraits of men who had been hanged...

...He managed to be dedicated without being fanatical...

...At another he says, "I have always believed that human qualities find their physical expression in a man's personal appearance...

...His own appearance could only have been one of great decency...

...Survivors, that is, who not only managed to live through the Civil War and the purges of the 30s, but who neither capitulated to Stalin nor became professional ex-Communists...

...You are Trotsky, surely...

...For the great majority of its members it had meant resistance to totalitarianism in the name of the democratic ideals expressed at the beginning of the Revolution...

...the flush of victory had given way to the bureaucrats and opportunists...

...Between them, the black waters of the Neva...

...A return to Russia rends the heart...

...Tulayev's strength lies in its sweeping documentary portrayal of the Soviet Union in the middle 30s, Balzacian in its rich sense of social class...

...They shared the same passion for justice...

...in Serge's novel only the Old Bolshevik Rublev can match them...

...Arriving in the midst of the Civil War, he translated Lenin and Trotsky into French, taught history classes for workers, and was put in charge of examining the captured archives of the Okhrana, the Czarist secret police...

...I reaped fleas...

...A loosely plotted account of an imaginary conspiracy manufactured to account for the unsolved shooting of a high Party official, The Case of Comrade Tulayev bears a resemblance to one aspect of the plot of The First Circle, although Solzhenitsyn almost certainly could not have known the earlier novel...

...THE BOOK that should have been republished is Serge's The Case of Comrade Tulayev, his finest novel, now out of print in this country though still available in Britain...

...What is memorable in the book is the sense of what it was like to live through that grim winter, when starving workers stole parts from factories to sell on the black market and people burned floorboards and books for fuel, when pipes froze and heaps of frozen excrement piled up in the hallways and courtyards of Petrograd's apartment houses...

...Get inside, comrade...

...The book is lively and anecdotal, and its American publishers wisely chose to illustrate it with a magnificant collection of photographs...

...this book, and one or two chapters in his memoirs, remind one of how much was hopeful at the beginning: the open debates and internal Party democracy, the short-lived system in which high officials' wages and living conditions were equal to those of skilled workers, and the wonderful flourishing of experimental art and poetry in the '20s...

...Serge died an impoverished and forgotten exile in Mexico City in 1947...

...But by the time he wrote his Memoirs, Serge had forged a style for himself, colorful, telegraphically compact, as crisp and shorn of superfluities as modern French narrative in the hands of its masters, from Merimee onward...

...At every hour it brought me voices of panic-stricken women who spoke of arrests, imminent executions, and injustice, and begged me to intervene at once, for the love of God...

...One feels like saying, Don't bother with these inventions of plot and characters—you were there, just tell it as it happened...

...He had been born in 1890 in Brussels, to Russian refugee parents...

...He did not complete the first of his dozen or so full-length books until he was 38 years old and could no longer be a political activist in the increasingly Stalinized Soviet Union...

...There the resemblance ends...

...A simple, rather trite thought, but unexpected in the midst of an account of a revolution's fate...

...Think of it: Bolshevism raised millions of men above themselves, in Europe, in Asia, for ten years...

...Of the men and women at the heart of the Russian Revolution, Victor Serge, the Belgianborn writer whose works are now seeing a modest revival, was one of the few survivors...

...Serge shows us not only the prisons but also the tiny villages of the Siberian exile, the sleazy city apartments, the bureaucrats' dachas, the collective 90 farm where tractors had run out of gasoline, the meetings of high officials where, when people sensed that someone was about to be arrested, they would not take the seat next to him...

...Some writers can effectively make a city's mood the central subject of a work and still have it remain a novel: Bulgakov did it well for the Kiev of 1918 in The White Guard...

...As in The First Circle, one of the key characters has an interview with an ironically benign Stalin...

...they had the same love of human eccentricities...

...But Serge's skills lay elsewhere...

...He always discriminated between those of them who he felt were unscrupulous or opportunistic and those he felt were misguided...

...Beyond that, the book recalls the tragedy of the time when, as one character says: "We have conquered everything and everything has slipped out of our grasp...

...They were gaunt and grey as the earth . . . At Tallinn, Estonia, I stopped, overwhelmed with emotion, in front of some houses that were being built...

...the fictional element seems mere, superimposed interference...

...Only then, recovering from a near-fatal illness, did he suddenly feel a need to record what he had seen...

...I had seen so much destruction that the simple work of bricklayers moved me deeply...

...When Serge does mention his feelings it is only, like Orwell, to swiftly make a political point...

...Two rows of dotted lamplight extend far back into the night...

...And so he hit his stride as a writer when describing this group of people, the "fifty men who understood Einstein," who were being wiped from the earth...

...he talks of personal matters rarely, although they seem more poignant because of that...

...After a youth spent largely on the streets of Brussels and Paris, and in prison for his activities in the French anarchist movement, Serge went to Russia in 1919...

...Orwell's description of the betrayal of the Spanish Revolution has the greater brilliance of narrative—Serge's of the betrayal of the Russian Revolution the greater echo of tragedy...

...IN A SENSE, the force of Serge's writing comes from the fact that he possessed a writer's gifts, yet was not first of all a writer...

...they will become indecipherable and, after them, the world will fall below them...

...agitation from Andre Gide, Romain Rolland, and other intellectuals finally got him out of Russia in 1936, the last political prisoner to be released before the Great Purge began...

...he could write an agitatorial pamphlet yet see the beauty in a pool of rainwater...

...they supported the same faction in the Spanish Civil War...

...As long as Trotsky remained in the U.S.S.R., Serge, like most of what there was of an Opposition in the late '20s, was one of The Old Man's followers...

...I understood his inflexibility: he was, after all, the last survivor of a generation of giants...

...A whole vision of the universe would vanish into nothingness...

...In the street Leon Davidovich put up his overcoat collar and lowered the peak of his cap so as not to be recognized...

...His books contain too much hope to be used as proof that all revolutions turn out badly, as, say, Cold War intellectuals could use Koestler's Darkness at Noon or the work of Orwell by misreading Animal Farm and 1984 and ignoring the rest...

...If, in his exile from the U.S.S.R., he had made himself the ideologist of a renewed Socialism, critical in outlook and fearing diversity less than dogmatism, perhaps he would have attained a new greatness...

...He often interceded with the Cheka...

...By this time Serge, whose novels and journalism were widely read in France, had become a "case...

...I asked myself every day . . . whether I would not be arrested in the night...

...Solzhenitsyn's characters are better realized...

...These two mingled strains had, between 1923 and 1928, surrounded Trotsky's vigorous personality with a tremendous aura...

...The telephone became my personal enemy...

...for a number of our Old Bolshevik leaders it meant, on the contrary, the defense of doctrinal orthodoxy which, while not excluding a certain tendency towards democracy, was authoritarian through and through...

...But they had a falling out—though Serge remained enough of an admirer to later coauthor a favorable biography—when both men were in exile ten years later...

...Despite living through enough poverty, prison, war, and exile to turn anyone else to hardness or cynicism, Serge always retained a kind of gentleness...

...It has not cast its misery aside...

...The volume is particularly valuable for its detailed account of that brief twilight period when something resembling free elections were held in the U.S.S.R...

...Others, less engaged in combat, would perfect a style...

...Serge's relations with Trotsky were complex...

...In 1926-28 Serge worked closely with Trotsky...

...Like Solzhenitsyn, Serge in Tulayev attains a breadth and compassion by showing both the men in prison and the government officials on the other side...

...though they knew the Party bureaucrats couldn't be beaten, Trotsky was still a hero to millions of Russians: I was with Trotsky as he left one of these meetings in some ramshackle apartment scarred by poverty...

...There is one particularly moving scene in Tulavev where three Opportunists meet on skis in the woods outside Moscow...

...For my books I adopted an appropriate form: I had to construct them in detached fragments which could each be separately completed and sent abroad post-haste...

...92...

...In the Soviet Union, of course, his works have been banned since the '30s...

...This is a graphic portrayal of a portion of Soviet history—the Old Bolsheviks awaiting death in the purges—of which there are practically no first-hand accounts...

...in Conquered City, the thumbnail portraits, sharply-etched details, and political passion have the urgent ring of a survivor's report...

...Blended with the flashes of his superb intelligence I could see the systematic schematizing of old-time Bolshevism, whose resurrection, in all countries of the world, he believed to be inevitable...

...However, convinced as I was that the great historical traditions are prolonged only by renewal, I believed that Socialism too had to renew itself in the 91 world of today, and that this must take place through the jettisoning of the authoritarian, intolerant tradition of turn-of-the-century Russian Marxism...

...Earth of Russia," wrote the poet Tyutchev, "no corner of you is untouched by Christ the slave...

...Orwell had his experiences largely in order to write about them...

...Taken as a whole, Serge's work constitutes an almost year-byyear portrayal of the darkness coming over Russia...

...Perhaps because we live in a time when our approach to literature has been conditioned by Paris Review interviews, by questions of how authors forge new techniques, search for the "right" material, or overcome writing blocks, most people who've written on Serge quote a passage where he talks about his own style: I knew that I would never have time to polish my works properly...

...WHAT Tulayev is to Serge's novels, Memoirs of a Revolutionary 1901-1941 is to his nonfiction...

...It was too late for the kind of political journalism he had practiced most of his life, some of it in the form of novels: after 1938 the generation of men who "understood Einstein" had almost all been shot...

...Compared to modern confessions it is an oldfashioned book...

...Victor Serge was not, strictly speaking, an Old Bolshevik himself, having come to Russia and joined the Party after the Revolution...

...He wrote the book in Mexico in the 1940s, ten years and half the world away from the Russia he was describing...

...Serge's comments on the break show great insight into Trotsky, and reveal clearly his own unique, party-less brand of libertarian socialism: .1 had prevailed on him to include in the Opposition's program a declaration of freedom for all parties accepting the Soviet system...

...But in a deeper sense he was one: because of the revolutionary tradition in his family, because of his own years in prison, and because of the way, like Trotsky and Lenin, he felt at home in the socialist movements of many countries...

...But Orwell was always first a writer: when he describes Spain, you feel he is casting his writer's eye upon an experience that involves commitment but that he can still hold at arm's length—as in the famous passage in Homage to Catalonia where he tells how it feels to be hit by a bullet...

...The characters are stereotypic, the sketchy plot is almost an afterthought...

...you learn only in a translator's footnote that Serge's wife, driven insane by the persecutions they suffered, died in a Paris mental hospital...

...This gentleness served him well as a writer though perhaps because of it he never attained nor sought high political power...

...1 came to the conclusion that our Opposition had simultaneously contained two opposing lines of significance...

...He describes the Trotskyists' attempts to organize within the Party...

...His last and best books were without publishers, written, as the Russians say, for the desk drawer...

...But with dtente 89 and a growing interest in non-Stalinist radicalism, Serge's books are reappearing...

...The cabman, a bearded peasant straight out of old Russia, leaned down and said, "For you the fare is nothing...

...In 1933 he was imprisoned in Butyrki, the same Moscow jail that had housed thousands of opponents of the Czars, and through which Solzhenitsyn was to pass a dozen years later...

...On both sides, cut into two, the dark city: inhospitable...

...Throughout the book the characters are grappling with the question of why the Revolution went wrong...

...Western intellectuals were uncomfortable with him because, despite his polemic against Stalin, he remained a revolutionary socialist to the end...

...One can be thankful for the new interest in Serge, but, as often happens when authors are rediscovered, publishers are reissuing the wrong books...

...but what I had to tell, they could not tell...

...Here, for example, Serge describes returning to Leningrad in the middle 1920s: It is raining...

...Here he describes leaving Russia in 1922: The train crossed a dismal no-man's land furrowed with abandoned trenches, bristling with barbed wire...