 | Anarchists Never Surrender — Chapter 46 : The Life of Victor SergeBy Victor Serge (1908) |
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| Anarchists Never Surrender — Chapter 46 : The Life of Victor SergeBy Victor Serge (1908) |
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Victor Serge (French: [viktɔʁ sɛʁʒ]), born Victor Lvovich Kibalchich (Russian: Ви́ктор Льво́вич Киба́льчич; December 30, 1890 – November 17, 1947), was a Russian revolutionary and writer. Originally an anarchist, he joined the Bolsheviks five months after arriving in Petrograd in January 1919 and later worked for the Comintern as a journalist, editor and translator. He was critical of the Stalinist regime and remained a revolutionary Marxist until his death. He is best remembered for his Memoirs of a Revolutionary and series of seven "witness-novels" chronicling the lives of revolutionaries of the first half of the 20th century. (From: Wikipedia.org.)
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Chapter 46
| 1890 | Victor Lvovich Kibalchich (Victor Serge) born on December 30 in Brussels to a family of sympathizers with Narodnik terrorism who had fled from Russia after the assassination of Alexander II. |
| 1908 | Photographer’s apprentice and member of the socialist Jeunes-Gardes. Spends a short period in an anarchist ‘utopian’ community in the Ardennes. Leaves for Paris. |
| 1910–1911 | Becomes editor of the French anarchist-individualist magazine, l’anarchie. Writes and agitates. |
| 1912 | Serge is implicated in the trial of the anarchist outlaws known as the Bonnot Gang. Despite arrest, he refuses to turn informer and is sentenced to five years in prison. Three of his co-defendants were guillotined. |
| 1917–1918 | Serge is released from prison and banned from France. Ges to Barcelona where he participates in the syndicalist uprising. Writes his first article signed Victor Serge. Leaves Barcelona to join the Russian army in France. Is detained for over a year in a French concentration camp as a Bolshevik suspect. |
| 1919 | Arrives in Red Petrograd at the height of the Civil War. Gets to work organizing the administration of the Communist International under Zinoviev. |
| 1920–1922 | Participates in Comintern Congresses. Edits various international journals. Exposes Czarist secret-police archives and fights in the defense of the city. |
| 1923–1926 | Serves Comintern as a secret agent and editor of Imprekor in Berlin and Vienna. Returns to the Soviet Union to take part in the last stand of the Left Opposition. |
| 1927 | Series of articles on the Chinese Revolution in which he criticizes Stalin’s complacence towards the Kuomintang and draws attention to the importance of Mao Zedong. |
| 1928 | Expelled from the Communist Party and relieved of all official functions. |
| 1928–1933 | Barred from all other work, Serge takes up writing. He sends his manuscripts to France, since publication in the Soviet Union is impossible. Apart from many articles, he produces Year One of the Russian Revolution, 1930; Men in Prison, 1930; Birth of Our Power, 1931; and Conquered City, 1932. |
| 1933 | Serge is arrested and deported to Orenburg in Central Asia, where he is joined by his young son, Vlady. |
| 1935 | Oppositionists raise the ‘Case of Victor Serge’ at the Congress for the Defense of Culture in Paris. Paris intellectuals campaign for his freedom. |
| 1936 | Serge is released from Orenburg and simultaneously deprived of Soviet citizenship. His manuscripts are confiscated and he is expelled from the USSR. He settles first in Brussels, then in Paris. His return to Europe is accompanied by a slander campaign in the Communist press. |
| 1937 | From Lenin to Stalin and Destiny of a Revolution appear in which Serge analyzes the Stalinist counter-revolution. He is elected a councilor to the Spanish POUM (Independent Marxist Party) and campaigns against the Moscow trials. |
| 1940 | Serge leaves Paris just as the Nazis advance. In Marseilles, he struggles for months to obtain a visa. Finally finds refuge in Mexico. |
| 1940–1947 | Serge lives in isolation and poverty. Writes The Case of Comrade Tulayev and Memoirs of a Revolutionary for his “desk drawer,” since publication was impossible. |
| 1947 | November 17: Serge dies and is buried as a “Spanish Republican” in the French section of the Mexico City cemetery. |
Victor Serge (1890–1947) was born to Russian anti-Czarist exiles living in Brussels. As a young anarchist firebrand, he was sentenced to five years in a French penitentiary in 1912. In 1919, Serge joined the Bolsheviks. An outspoken critic of Stalin, he was expelled from the Party and arrested in 1929. Nonetheless, he managed to complete three novels (Men in Prison, Birth of Our Power, and Conquered City) and a history (Year One of the Russian Revolution), published in Paris. Arrested again in Russia and deported to Central Asia in 1933, he was allowed to leave the USSR in 1936 after international protests by militants and prominent writers such as André Gide and Romain Rolland. Hounded by Stalinist agents, Serge lived in precarious exile in Brussels, Paris, Vichy France, and Mexico City, where he died in 1947.
Mitchell Abidor is the principal French translator for the Marxists Internet Archive and has also translated works from Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, and Esperanto. He has published two earlier collections of his translations: The Great Anger: Ultra-Revolutionary Writing in France from the Atheist Priest to the Bonnot Gang and Communards: The Story of the Paris Commune of 1871 as Told by Those Who Fought for It. Abidor recently translated Jean Jaurès’s Socialist History of the French Revolution into English for the first time, and is editor and translator of several forthcoming books with PM Press, including Voices of the Paris Commune. He lives in Brooklyn.
From : TheAnarchistLibrary.org
Victor Serge (French: [viktɔʁ sɛʁʒ]), born Victor Lvovich Kibalchich (Russian: Ви́ктор Льво́вич Киба́льчич; December 30, 1890 – November 17, 1947), was a Russian revolutionary and writer. Originally an anarchist, he joined the Bolsheviks five months after arriving in Petrograd in January 1919 and later worked for the Comintern as a journalist, editor and translator. He was critical of the Stalinist regime and remained a revolutionary Marxist until his death. He is best remembered for his Memoirs of a Revolutionary and series of seven "witness-novels" chronicling the lives of revolutionaries of the first half of the 20th century. (From: Wikipedia.org.)
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Chapter 46
