Marxist Writers: Victor Serge
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“It is often said that ‘the germ of all Stalinism was in Bolshevism at its beginning’. Well, I have no objection. Only, Bolshevism also contained many other germs, a mass of other germs, and those who lived through the enthusiasm of the first years of the first victorious socialist revolution ought not to forget it. To judge the living man by the death germs which the autopsy reveals in the corpse – and which he may have carried in him since his birth – is that very sensible?” – From Lenin to Stalin, 1937.
Biography
Biographical
Note by Jean Riére
Victor
Serge: The Kibalchich Legend, by Richard Greeman
Victor Lvovich Khibalchich (better known as Victor Serge) was born in Brussels, the son of Russian Narodnik exiles. Originally an anarchist, he joined the Russian Communist Party on arriving in Petrograd in February 1919 and worked for the newly founded Communist International as a journalist, editor and translator. As a Comintern representative in Germany he helped prepare the aborted insurrection in the autumn of 1923.
In 1923 he also joined the Left Opposition. He was expelled from the party in 1928 and briefly imprisoned. At this time he turned to writing fiction, which was published mainly in France. In 1933 he was arrested and exiled. After an international campaign he was eventually deported from Russia in April 1936 on the eve of the Moscow Show Trials.
Upon arrival in the West he renewed contact with Trotsky but political differences developed and a bitter controversy developed between the two remaining veterans of the pre-Stalinist Russian Communist Party. Escaping from Paris in 1940 just ahead of the invading Nazi troops he found refuge in Mexico. During his last years Serge lived in isolation and died penniless shortly after the 30th anniversary of the Bolshevik revolution in November 1947.
Works:
June 1908 |
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February 1909 |
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February 1910 |
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April 1910 |
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June 1911 |
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June 1911 |
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January 1912 |
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January 1912 |
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February 1912 |
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January 1912 |
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April 1912 |
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January 1913 |
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March 1917 |
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December 1917 |
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May 1919 |
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July 1919 |
Machine Gun (poem) |
1920/21 |
Flame on the Snow (prose) |
1923 |
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April 1923 |
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Mar./Apr. 1924 |
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1926 |
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Aug. 1926 |
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Feb. 1927 |
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1927/28 |
The Class Struggle in the
Chinese Revolution (5 letters): |
Early 1928 |
Canton, December 1927 (as Paul Sizoff) |
1926–1929 |
Year One of the Russian
Revolution |
1930 |
Hail the Red Army! (extract from Year One of the Russian Revolution) |
1932 |
Conquered City (novel) |
1935 |
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1936 |
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10 August 1936 |
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13 August 1936 |
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14 August 1936 |
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29 August 1936 |
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7-8 November 1936 |
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1937 |
From Lenin to Stalin Full PDF of 1st Edition [copyright not renewed by 1965] |
6–7 March 1937 |
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August 1937 |
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13 August 1937 |
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October 1937 |
Bureaucracy Adopts Barbaric Penal Code to Punish Smallest Offenses in Russia |
October 1937 |
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November 1937 |
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December 1937 |
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1938 |
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1938 |
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1938 |
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1938–44 |
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January 1938 |
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February 1938 |
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28 April 1938 |
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October 1938 |
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1939 |
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1940 |
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1942 |
Again, Riazanov and Sneevliet (letter) |
1943 |
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1943 |
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1944 |
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1944 |
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September 1944 |
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October 1944 |
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1944/45 |
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1945 |
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May 1945 |
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July 1945 |
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1945 |
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1945 |
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1945 |
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1945 |
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1945 |
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undated |
The document below was not written by Victor Serge, but was ascribed to him by Trotsky in his polemic against Serge in the essay Moralists and Sychpohants Against Marxism. The text was included in a promotional leaflet for Trotsky’s book Their Morals and Ours, which Serge had translated into French. In his book The Serge-Trotsky Papers, David Cotterill points to suspicions that it may actually have been written by or under the influence of Marc Zborowski (known as Comrade Etienne), who was effectively running the Fourth International in Paris at that time, but was in reality an agent of the NKVD. Whatever the case may be, this document effectively destroyed the relationship between the last two surviving members of the Russian Left Opposition of the 1920s. For this reason we include it here in this archive.
September 1938 |
Last updated on 24 April 2015