Susan Weissman's Victor Serge

...It's the sort of moment that recurs throughout Serge's work, and it is recognizably modernist...

...He would engage in discussions with Kamenev, who had been shot long before...

...Weissman wishes to present Serge as a democratic Marxist, to argue that it is socialism, not capitalism, that is the natural partner of democracy, and this is a worthy project...

...He enjoyed a physical survival, and wrote short, spiritless articles in Comintern journals...

...Stalin eventually, and much to his later regret, ordered his release in 1936...

...I was to meet him and his wife later, in 1928-29, in a Moscow street...

...He closes the notebook—"so he would have closed the eyes of a dead man" and seals it with wax, to be discovered, perhaps, by future generations...

...Perhaps...

...SERGE'S SYMPATHY—perhaps it extended too far...

...This was a capitulation, of sorts, and it could not have come easily to Serge...

...This is a serious mistake for the biographer of a man who, during his lengthy list of Stalin's victims, apologizes when he forgets the name of Yakov Blumkin's secretary, who was shot in Odessa and whom Serge had never met...

...Trotsky was so confused by Serge's diverse contacts upon his release from the USSR that he began to wonder whether he might not be a Soviet agent...

...No predestination condemns us to be the victims of concentration camps—and as for the prison-torturers, we know quite well how people are put against a wall...

...He arrived in Petrograd in January 1919...

...This was 1931 or 1932...

...There are more serious errors, too...

...Expelled instead, and briefly arrested, Serge began to write novels, in French...

...The brief portraits of revolutionaries of which the Memoirs consists catalogue this failure with a remarkable cumulative force...

...And yet in his way Serge saw it more clearly: by its failure he knew it...

...Weissman therefore finds herself in the impossible position of having to resurrect ancient, intricate arguments about events her readers can no longer be expected even to know about...

...By Midnight in the Century (1936- 1939), perhaps Serge's most characteristic book, he has narrowed his focus to a few brave exiled Oppositionists...

...Serge could tell a great deal—it was that kind of life...

...DISSENT / Spring 2002 n 101 BOOKS "We have known how to win," he wrote in Partisan Review in 1942...

...He tells of an episode at Orenburg, when he was approached by a sympathizer who suggested that he form an Oppositionist group...

...Serge canvassed opinion among anarchists and socialists...

...Show me the way...

...The Revolution is hungry" WEISSMAN WRITES that Serge participated in three revolutions...

...She was hospitalized, recovered a little, but "then the old story began again: bread-cards refused, denunciations, arrests, death-sentences demanded over all the loudspeakers at the street corners...

...he was often heard addressing him by name...

...It's not all death and horror with Serge...

...His first two novels lack central characters entirely...

...And this idea—of an early Bolshevik innocence corrupted by outside forces—is at the core of a refusal (only partly shared by Serge) to peer into the dark heart of violent revolution...

...How many people on earth understand Einstein—and if they were shot...

...Every week the system devoured a new class of victim," writes Serge...

...Serge's own 100 n DISSENT / Spring 2002 BOOKS wife, Liuba, could not bear the strain of Stalin's Russia...

...Weissman finds this "vicious," but Trotsky was right—Serge did not think of the revolution as he did...

...Serge taught us that one can hate Stalinist oppression," Lewis Coser wrote, "without becoming so imbued by hatred that one forgets the many evils of this world, seeing only one great evil...

...most of them were killed before they could return the favor...

...He also began writing what was in essence Bolshevik—not propaganda, exactly, but spirited— apologia, for a number of mostly French publications...

...The book displays a crude contempt for the Bolsheviks' opponents...

...Others, less engaged in combat, would perfect a style," he explained in his Memoirs of a Revolutionary, "but what I had to tell, they could not tell...

...Born in Belgium in 1890 to Russian exiles—their bare home in Brussels covered with pictures of revolutionaries who'd been hanged—he became an anarchist newspaper editor in Paris, spent five years in prison, worked for insurrection in Spain in 1917, and then rushed to the "vaster insurrection" taking place in Russia...

...My mind was made up...

...He refused it...

...Serge's searches did not win him many friends...

...I have migraines that medicine has not yet named," says one old Bolshevik: "a little pain the color of fire fixes itself in the back of my neck...

...Tulayev ends with the NKVD interrogator Fleischman reading the final testament of the recently executed Rublev: -You thought well, Rublev,' said Fleischman, and it made him feel a sort of pride...

...As a novelist, too, Serge was able to inhabit the most disparate personages...

...Ivan Smirnov would later appear on the dock alongside Kamenev and Zinoviev in the first of the Moscow Trials...

...in practice it suggests that a great historical do-over might be in order...

...Edmund Wilson, then still at work on To the Finland Station, was deeply impressed by Russia: Twenty Years After (1937...

...When he wrote these lines, in 1943, Serge knew about the Nazi death camps...

...According to Weissman, the Bolsheviks did not monopolize power—they kept up a "lively and creative" dialogue with the other socialist parties for as long as was possible...

...He returned to Russia in 1926 in hopes of supporting Trotsky's Left Opposition and reviving the moribund Party from within...

...If he never quite made it back to the night of October 25, it was because, so far as he could tell, there was no other way...

...he nodded, and then asked if we had any food...

...Here, take it...

...And here is Weissman: "Serge finally defined the Soviet state as 'bureaucratic totalitarian with collectivist leanings.' His use of the term totalitarian was different from the later totalitarian school of analysis just as his usage of bureaucratic and collectivist differed from the 'bureaucratic collectivist' school...

...Later he would argue that the Cheka destroyed the revolution...

...It is, unfortunately, a disappointing work...

...As a writer, Serge had set out to defy all bourgeois conventions...

...I was neither against the Bolsheviks nor neutral...

...This is especially cruel: Marina Tsvetaeva, a wonderful poet who committed suicide in 1941 in utter agony, starvation, and despair, had a tough enough time of it without the next generation of Trotskyists believing she was Stalin's secret agent...

...Perhaps that really was the only road possible for "us"—an insistence, which bordered on the absurd, on the possibility of future regeneration...

...And again, he had seen the revolution in swaddling clothes, and he could not forget it...

...No wonder Lukács refused to shake hands when they met on a Moscow street—Serge never washed his of anything...

...Every conversation I had with them convinced me that, face to face with the ruthlessness of history, they were wrong...

...It was a horrible disaster, and Serge was one of the first to say so...

...Let me be done with this digression ; those were the only roads possible for us...

...Dora would be glad," he thinks...

...When, on January 5, 1918, Bolshevik troops cut short an unarmed and peaceful demonstration in support of the Constituent Assembly by firing upon it, this may have been "lively," but it was not creative...

...Serge would meet many more...

...His old friend Jacques Sadoul called him a "common criminal" in l'Humanité ("an exceptional article," said Trotsky, "even for that prostituted publication...

...Things got to the point where Irving Howe could accuse Tulayev (1940- 1942) of being too "stately," too much like the nineteenthcentury bourgeois novel...

...And the anecdotes...

...No American publisher will touch your [Memoirs] at present...

...We have apologists who call themselves realists, and an increasing number who do not feel it necessary to apologize at all...

...This sympathy, this bizarre optimism, affects Serge's historical analysis as well, so that he sometimes seems to hold all positions simultaneously...

...There are dozens of stories like these in Serge's memoirs, and their endings are all very much alike...

...He wanted to depict the consciousness of entire cities, of social classes...

...He said impossibly contradictory things, and he said them incomparably well...

...And, unlike Trotsky and Bukharin, he felt keenly his own culpability (being so much slighter, it may have been easier to feel): "We wrote good books," says one of his characters, "we created ideological frameworks on mountains of statistics, observations, scientific findings—we did not suspect that we were passing through the magic gates of hell...

...This may have been violent wartime rhetoric, but Serge never knew any peace...

...he was convinced that all communist insurgency movements were nothing more than pawns of the Kremlin...

...When Maxim Gorky, the dean of Russian letters, offered him a post at his Menshevized publishing house, Serge recoiled...

...In 1933, he was arrested again and exiled to the distant city of Orenburg...

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

...But the scene avoids sentimentality also because we know it is bubbling up from deep personal sorrow...

...Nothing is ever lost, and events repeat themselves: we still have scribblers who lie, or avert their gaze, for the simple reason that it is easier to do so...

...The man turned out to be Nikolai Gumilev, the husband of Anna Akhmatova and himself an important poet...

...So although she is highly critical (with Trotsky) of Stalinist incompetence and opportunism and (with Serge) of political terror, she mostly blames the "counterrevolution"— a wonderful term that encompasses General Denikin, Stalin, the world bourgeoisie, and the social democrats...

...Luckily—and, as he well knew, thousands were not so lucky—Serge was a significant figure on the French left, which mobilized a campaign on his behalf...

...Like an astronomer seeking the origin of the universe in the radiation of far-flung galaxies, Serge kept trying to figure out where it went wrong...

...Of Georg Lukács: "In him I saw a first-class brain which could have endowed Communism with a true intellectual greatness...

...In this atmosphere my wife lost her reason...

...His Tulayev is filled with a very physical foreboding...

...He began to tell the world about the Stalinist terror and the frame-up of the Moscow Trials, and was vilified for it in the communist press...

...For Serge, nearly the worst aspect of the murders was their squalor...

...he believed that postwar Europe would be a quasitotalitarian superstate...

...As an apologist, he had mocked the people who thought one could simply waltz into the "free city of communism," with "no repression after the workers' victory, no revolutionary tribunals, no Cheka—above all, ye gods, no Cheka...

...Wonderful stuff, but confidence in the future...

...On Trotsky: "The end of his life was played out in loneliness...

...He is often maudlin, sometimes silly...

...It was in Orenburg, too, that Serge managed briefly to make a living by sending manuscripts to France via registered mail—the manuscripts disappeared into the censor's bureau, but the post office dutifully recompensed Serge for his losses...

...We have seen the generals, the ministers, the financiers and archbishops smile ingratiatingly and tremble before us...

...For his work in the Berlin outpost of the Comintern, the Gestapo might have liked to speak with Serge...

...I have more confidence in mankind and in the future than ever before...

...But when he refers some time later to "my wife," the translator must insert a footnote to explain that this is Serge's next wife, Liuba having been placed, incurable, in a sanatorium in southern France...

...Politically, Weissman is a Trotskyist with a slight Sergist deviation...

...The revolution, after all, is just fifteen months old, an infant...

...Mostly, though, The Course is Set on Hope reveals how little we learn of Serge by stacking up his position papers...

...His novels are permeated with a palpable warmth...

...Kiril, as it happens, does not show the way—he capitulates...

...And this sort of analysis can be useful in a discussion of actually existing states...

...Weissman is an inelegant writer, which sometimes leads her into a very un-Sergean slandering of the dead...

...Apostasy, a complete Koestler-like abjuring of his past beliefs, might have bought Serge a pass through the magic gates of cold war superstardom and lent his life a nice narrative arc...

...Further and further back he went, from Stalin to Kronstadt to the birth of the Cheka (December 1917...

...No American publisher ever did, and in the years since his death one of the most important political writers of that era has just about disappeared...

...Weissman makes Serge's optimism the centerpiece of her argument, and in a way she is right—it is unbelievable that someone who saw so clearly could avoid despair...

...He was a regular contributor to the golden-age Partisan Review and Dwight Macdonald's Politics...

...Serge is as unlikely now as ever...

...KEITH LESSEN was the books columnist for www.feedmag.com . 102 n DISSENT / Spring 2002...

...He was interested in everyone, over-generous in his characterizations (even ex-friend Sadoul receives a fair portrait in the memoirs...

...He did not excuse them or himself...

...She would say, 'I'm certain I won't survive you long, Kiril...

...There were other reasons...

...Behind us lies a victorious revolution gone astray, several abortive attempts at revolution, and massacres in so great a number as to inspire a certain dizziness...

...Thus the need to write, even when life pressed powerful claims...

...DISSENT / Spring 2002 n 97 BOOKS Serge's work in the International soon took him to Berlin, where he sowed revolution, then to Vienna, where he befriended the intellectual giants of European communism...

...I looked deep into his eyes," writes Serge, "and thought to myself: 'You, my friend, are an agent provocateur!' At moments like these it almost feels as if Serge, far from being a hardened revolutionary, were still playing at one...

...Serge plays with the concept of revolution," said the Old Man, "writes poems about it, but is incapable of understanding it as it is...

...He often paced up and down in his study in Coyodcan talking to himself...

...He joined the Party, was charged with organizing— under Grigory Zinoviev—the Third Communist International, and immediately began interceding for anarchists, Mensheviks, and whoever else found themselves in the Chekist maw...

...This," writes Serge, "afforded me the income of a well-paid technician...

...Serge is absent from the indexes of learned histories, slighted in discussions of the political novel...

...Gumilev was the first major writer killed by the Bolsheviks...

...sUSAN WEISSMAN 'S The Course is Set on Hope, the first attempt at anything like a book-length biography of Serge, is meant to mitigate this neglect...

...Though Serge has proved resistant to resurrection, he is still worth the trouble—but as a portraitist of terror and resistance, not as the source for a political program...

...as an actuality it began to press hard on us...

...But Serge is different, he refuses to stop at the ironic disjunction...

...On several occasions a press with a vast circulation has hurled filth at me because I spoke the truth...

...Choking with joy," he writes of his arrival in Soviet Russia in 1919, "we shouted 'Greetings, Comrade!' to a Red sentry...

...Leon] Sedov's recollection of this young man was full of warmth," writes Serge, "but my overburdened memory has let his name slip...

...Eventually expelled from Belgium because of Soviet pressure, Serge found himself in Paris and then, finally, Mexico, where he would die in 1947—poor, isolated, and very soon forgotten...

...After a public debate about Kronstadt, Trotsky declared him a bourgeois moralist...

...In fact, he missed all three—he was in Barcelona for the failed July 1917 insurrection, but not for the more seriously failed one in August...

...And this was dangerous—"Of one thing, anyway, I'm sure," Macdonald wrote him in 1945...

...Not, however," he assures us, "from any love of literature...

...This is the wrong tack...

...Ivan Smirnov, an old hero of the Civil War, is removed from his cabinet post...

...But the Soviet Union is dead...

...pleased, in a way, he goes down to the Labor Exchange, hoping to find work as an engineer...

...Though his fame was in France, Serge's influence may have been greater here...

...all" the White Russian groups in Paris are said to have been "delighted" by Stalin's terror, and in what is otherwise the book's strongest section, on Serge in France in the late 1930s, "Maria" Tsvetaeva is enlisted into the service of the NKVD...

...It is characteristic of Weissman's book that she does nothing to tell us more about a woman with whom Serge spent twenty years...

...A man ends by concentrating a certain unique clarity in himself, a certain irreplaceable experience," one character explains on the eve of his arrest in The Case of Comrade Tulayev, the novel Serge was then writing...

...Serge is fully aware of the irony: between their "choking with joy" and the soldier's laconic nod lies a vast chasm of future disappointment...

...We quickly became friends...

...but it is undermined by Weissman's own lack of commitment to the history of Russian democracy...

...for his fearless denunciations of Stalin, the NKVD would have liked to silence him...

...And he knew, especially on this last score, that he was partially to blame...

...I own nothing...

...When she is not paraphrasing his memoirs, Weissman dutifully introduces the Serge viewpoint into the great debates of early Soviet history—Serge on the Cheka, Serge on Kronstadt, the New Economic Policy, the Canton uprising of 1927...

...Serge, too, watched a generation of men—in his estimation, the best of them—murdered by the revolution he had spent his life preparing...

...The bureaucracy had already become a menace: "I witnessed members of government driven to telephoning Lenin to obtain a railway ticket or a room in the [official] hotel...

...In 1921," Serge recalled, "I was to struggle vainly for several days, trying to stop the Cheka [All-Russian Extraordinary Commission for Combating Counter-Revolution and Sabotage] from shooting him...

...Serge writes of his wife with great tenderness, and he was buying sedatives one cold winter morning for "my poor invalid," as he called her, when he was himself arrested...

...Serge had no illusions about the revolution...

...In Tulayev, the imprisoned Bolshevik economist, Kiril Rublev—his mind otherwise filled with statistics, projections, corrections—imagines himself talking to his wife, Dora, after deciding to resist the interrogation...

...It would all be over for a century or two—or three, how do we know...

...So did they have any food...

...On the way there, in the waiting room of the Russian Embassy in Paris, he met a fiery monarchist, also heading for Russia, and in the great tradition of that country they immediately began arguing, confessing, and pacing up and down...

...he was in Germany in preparation for the 1923 uprising, but was sent to Vienna before it was crushed...

...And to think that it is not over yet...

...In a brief, powerful summary of his career in the Memoirs, Serge writes: I have undergone a little over ten years of various forms of captivity, agitated in seven countries, and written twenty books...

...We had...

...But it so happened that as he began to think of the revolution less in terms of historical forces and more in terms of the individual lives lost, his books became a sort of listing of the dead...

...his third, Conquered City, has characters, but it's hard to tell what's going on...

...Serge may have been the first to describe the Soviet Union as "totalitarian," but he knew just how small a consolation this was to the victims: -Totalitarianism' did not yet exist as a word [in 1921...

...Of Vassily Chadayev, an old Bolshevik and Oppositionist murdered in 1928: "All I ever saw of him again were some dreadful photographs: the dumdum bullets, fired from sawed-off rifles, had harrowed his face and chest monstrously" Since his death was kept secret, he writes of another Oppositionist, it "did not even serve as an example...

...Though a delegation of Soviet writers in Paris refused to acknowledge his existence ("these," cried Serge in his memoirs, "my good colleagues of the Soviet Writers' Union...

...He memorialized so many of his contemporaries in his Memoirs...

...I was with them...

...To Russia he came, so to speak, as soon as he heard, but the glorious period had already passed...

...Despite this, or because of it, the revolution's degeneration became his great theme...

...In Russia he is almost completely unknown...

...his tragic sense of the revolution as an action carried out by the best men in Europe is as disturbing...

...Refused a visa to several European countries, Serge ended up in Belgium...

...And yet it's a funny thing, the antibourgeois memoir...

...As he says of meeting Raymond Lefebvre, a French socialist who had written a tome about the First World War with the excellent title Revolution or Death!: "He spoke for the survivors of a generation now lying buried in communal graves...

...She knows her Yevgeny Preobrazhensky instead of her Constituent Assembly—and what Both it profit a writer to have studied primitive socialist accumulation if she does not mention even in passing the dispersal of a democratically elected 98 n DISSENT / Spring 2002 BOOKS convention that incidentally consisted—since the liberals were already outlawed—exclusively of socialists...

...Serge dedicated Midnight in the Century to "the memory of Kurt Landau, Andres Nin, Erwin Wolf, who disappeared in Barcelona and whose very death was stolen from us...

...The city was a shambles—the factories had ceased operation, the streets were lined with frozen excrement, and the people were burning precious housing stock for fuel...

...He found the Mensheviks "intelligent, honest and devoted to Socialism, but completely overtaken by events...

...To believe this you must skip over uncomfortable facts, and Weissman does...

...Some snooty little official," Serge reports, "saw this tall, graying, bright-eyed innocent bending in front of his window, and writing on the form he had to fill in, under the heading Last Employment: 'People's Commissar for Posts and Telegraphs.'" The official called the Central Committee, and the job hopeful was promptly deported...

...Although he was fairly welldisposed towards me, he did not care to shake my hand in a public place, since I was expelled DISSENT / Spring 2002 n 99 BOOKS and a known Oppositionist...