In 1941, reflecting on his own life, which spanned several revolutions, exile, and prison, Victor Serge commented:

The only meaning of life lies in conscious participation in the making of history. The more I think of that, the more deeply true it seems to be. It follows that one must range oneself actively against everything that diminishes man, and involve oneself in all struggles which tend to liberate and enlarge him. This categorical imperative is in no way lessened by the fact that such an involvement is inevitably soiled by error: it is a worse error to live for oneself, caught within traditions which are soiled by inhumanity . [1]





For Victor Serge, there was no life possible that could be separated from a commitment to the revolutionary struggle. And his life-spanned the first World War to the Russian Revolution, the rise of fascism in Germany and Spain, the rise of Stalin and the cataclysm of World War II. Serge lived through the heights of revolutionary triumph to the darkness of what he termed “the midnight of the century.” That commitment ranged from involvement in anarchism, syndicalism, Bolshevism, Trotskyism and what is best described as socialist humanism. Serge's revolutionary career saw him take up such varied roles as organizer, journalist, theoretician, militant, soldier, translator, a prisoner under at least five different regimes, secret agent, and a historian.



Serge, while always desiring a world beyond capitalism, was also an independent thinker with his own dissident style of Marxism that allowed him to critically record the experience of his generation. His writing was done in a number of works, historical, autobiographical and theoretical. In these works, Serge sought to honestly and faithfully, although not without criticism, tell the story of those who fought for revolution with both their successes and their failures, and perhaps most importantly to understand via a rigorous use of the Marxist method.



Serge was also a talented novelist. He wrote seven surviving novels, and he conceived of his fictional works as a revolutionary project that would break with the bourgeois novel and render the discontinuities and rupture of social conventions which are characteristic of revolutions. In Serge's novels there are no unique characters, but rather crowds and collectives in motion, who are filled with dynamism and caught up in the hurricane of events which are described with brutal realism and touching honesty. His fiction wound up being a masterpiece which showcased the complexity, reality and the purpose of struggle and revolution in both victory and defeat.

I. Life

Victor Serge (Kibalchich) was born in 1891 in Belgium to exiled Russian revolutionaries. Serge grew up in extreme poverty, suffering hunger and losing a younger brother at an early age. Serge’s father passed on his revolutionary beliefs to his son. Serge, who had no formal education, entered the workforce during his fifteenth year, laboring for ten hours or more. During his adolescence, Serge befriended a group of young rebels. Serge describes his friends as “lean young wolves, full of pride and thought: dangerous types. We had a certain fear of becoming careerists, as we considered many of our elders to be who had made some show of being revolutionary, and afterwards…” [2] Suffice to say, Serge and his radical friends were not inclined toward the gradualist methods that were taking hold in the mainstream socialist parties.



Initially, Serge did join the Belgian Socialist Youth. Serge had a different view of socialism than the party though. He believed that “socialism gave a meaning to life, and that was: struggle.” [3] This revolutionary edge put him in conflict with the party as he said of the conflict with the leadership: “we had satisfied ourselves with a Socialism of battle, and it was the great age of reformism.” [4] Serge later left the party, when its leader Vandervelde advocated and justified the brutal Belgian annexation of the Congo. Following his departure from the socialist party, Serge became an active anarchist of an individualistic variety who advocated illegalism and banditry. Serge said of bandits that he was with them because they “demonstrate their determination to live.” [5] Following these convictions, Serge moved to France and became a supporter of the infamous Bonnot gang, who were a group of anarchists involved in bank robberies and shootouts.



Serge was arrested in France in 1911 for a connection to a shoot-out. However, Serge was not involved in the shootout, but he was a journalist who was “singled out as the intellectual author of the Bonnot band’s crimes.” [6] Serge was sentenced to a prison term that lasted from 1913 to 1917, where he reflected on his worldview. Serge turned from his anarchist individualist philosophy, believing that the Bonnot gang “was like a collective suicide.” [7] Serge’s imprisonment coincided with the outbreak of World War One. To Serge, the behavior of socialist parties and syndicalists supporting the war “was incomprehensible to us. Did they then believe nothing of what they preached yesterday?” [8] Serge was caught up in the despair that had gripped many revolutionaries with the outbreak of the war.



Serge was released from jail in early 1917 and was told to leave France by the authorities. Following his release from prison, Serge made his way to Spain where he became involved with the anarcho-syndicalist CNT, the largest union in the country. Serge’s involvement with the CNT marked a definite change in his thinking. He said in a letter to a friend: "I feel myself capable of working with all those who, animated by the same desire for a better life, clearer and more intelligent, advance towards their future, even by different roads than mine and even if they give our common goal in reality different names that I don’t know." [9]



In Spain, revolution was in the air, mixed with the intense exploitation of the proletariat and fired by the energies of the Russian Revolution. The CNT made an abortive attempt to stage a revolutionary uprising in July 1917, that Serge partook in. However, by now Serge was transfixed by Bolshevism, which came to power in November, and he desired to reach Russia to be a part of the great event.



Serge fled Spain and reentered France, only to be imprisoned as a “Bolshevik suspect” until 1919. Serge and other political prisoners were eventually exchanged for other French prisoners then being held in Russia. At this time, the impoverished Soviet Republic was locked in a desperate civil war with foreign and internal counterrevolutionaries, where no quarter was given. For Serge, there was no doubt which side he was on. As he said, "I would support the Bolsheviks because they were doing what was necessary tenaciously, doggedly, with magnificent ardour and a calculated passion; I would be with them because they alone were carrying this out, taking all responsibilities on themselves, all the initiatives, and were demonstrating an astonishing strength of spirit." [10] He joined the Communist Party, fought in the Red Army during the defense of Petrograd in 1919 and became a translator for the Communist International.