Dictatorial repression is often called “systematic,” but its main hallmark is caprice. It relies on the fear that even abject servility might not save one from the secret police. Genrikh Yagoda, Stalin’s head of the NKVD, orchestrated the Great Terror only to himself be “liquidated.” In a marvelously funny scene in Victor Serge’s Last Times, set in the early moments of the Nazi occupation of France, the hapless hotelkeeper Anselme Flotte is interrogated by Lt. Wichter of the Gestapo. On the brink of being released, it strikes Flotte that he might strengthen his case by informing on his neighbor, who, he says, sympathizes with “the Reds in Spain and with the English — in short a man capable of any crime.” Thinking that he will be rewarded, he omits nothing and embellishes much. Instead, he is told: “You had suspicions, Flotte, you even had precise evidence, yet you kept silent. You who seemed to know the need for loyal collaboration so well.” He is classified into Category A — “undesirable” — then taken to be shot. This kind of black irony is characteristic of Serge’s writing.
Partly based on Serge’s own experiences, Last Times follows a motley group fleeing Paris for the unoccupied south. It is a conventional realist novel with a Balzacian social panorama, beginning with Flotte’s sleazy Parisian hotel and ending with Marseille’s criminal world. The narrator is omniscient, relaying exact thoughts word-for-word, though, rather weirdly, he sometimes resorts to hearsay. Serge favored ensemble novels over those focused on one single protagonist. Susan Sontag noted, correctly I think, that this helps explain why his great novel on the Stalinist purge — The Case of Comrade Tulayev — is less remembered than Arthur Koestler’s Darkness at Noon. By staying with Rubashov from beginning to end, Koestler forces the reader to identify with him. But Serge wrote that “individual existences were of no interest to me.” This is perhaps why the characters in Last Times feel slightly hollow. They have political views, but not much emotional weight. Serge would probably not object — he said that he wrote Last Times “not from any love of literature” but to bear witness to the fall of Europe.
Born in Belgium to a family of Russian revolutionaries, Serge moved to Paris, where he became known in louche left-wing circles under the name Le Retif (“Maverick”). The milieu he belonged to had gangsters and intellectuals in equal numbers — some even flattered themselves by thinking that crime was the logical end point of intellectual freedom. Serge was eventually sentenced to five years in prison for refusing to inform on comrades with ties to the Bonnot Gang. Released in 1917, he soon traveled to Russia, where he sided with the Bolsheviks. Yet even before the Kronstadt rebellion, Serge had begun to feel “this sense of danger from inside, a danger within ourselves, in the very temper and character of Bolshevism.” In 1933, he was seized, interrogated in the Lubyanka, and sent into internal exile in Orenburg. “The Case of Comrade Serge” was repeatedly brought up by European fellow travelers, including by Romain Rolland when he met Stalin. Having never confessed to any crime, which by then almost everyone had, Serge could be released with minimal embarrassment.
Few characters in Last Times have Serge’s fortitude. Paris is stupefied by inaction. The Wehrmacht is closing in, but the government has given up. Resistance is scattered, insufficient. “There’s no resistance except in the newspapers,” says one Parisian, but soon, even they slip into “philosophic resignation.” Shortly after the “Boches” breach the Loire, M. Bœuf, vice police officer, is told by his favorite prostitute that she is planning on marrying a German soldier — “bizness is bizness, I’ve decided to drop the extras.” The maid of the respected Dr. Bedoit, more snobbish than her employer, hopes that the Germans might rid Paris of people like Bedoit’s colleague Dr. Simon Ardatov, exiled Russian revolutionary. Felicien Murier, eccentric poet, is meanwhile told by his wife, “You go with anyone you please, whores, toughs, fairies — that’s your taste — but as for Jews, that’s not possible anymore, it’s my duty to tell you that.” Those who stay in Paris must compromise. Those who flee tell themselves that flight too is a form of resistance.
There are several ways the defeated flatter themselves. They insist, for example, that they were vanquished because they were too civilized. “France is paying for her errors, for her easy life,” says one. “And yet what is civilization if not an easy life and the repudiation of violence?” Serge lets those who would soonest collaborate be the first to blame others for France’s loss. Flotte is not alone in blaming the Popular Front, Leon Blum (“More Spanish than French, I’m telling you”), and the working class for the easy surrender. “‘It serves us right,” he remarks. “We were taking it too easy, the forty-hour week, paid vacations, the Ministry of Leisure Time — why not a ministry of pleasure, if you please, and free whorehouses for the working class?” Murier tells two winos that he let himself “be carried away by the current of appetites … Decadent, do you think? That’s the name barbaric vigour gives to truly civilized people.” It is bracing that Serge, who himself lead a spartan life, renders Murier’s libertinism so seductively.
Serge’s writing has moral weight. He records how European intellectuals, like himself, were crushed between Hitler and Stalin. Dr. Ardatov becomes a symbol of this: Fleeing from the Wehrmacht, he is murdered on a ferry to the Americas by a Stalinist. Maurice Silber, a Jew, is hunted by the fanatical M. Vibert, who nourishes “several confused but widely ramified hatreds.” Before having Silber killed, Vibert asks himself: “Would ten thousand heads suffice for national rebirth. Or would that many be needed in Marseille alone?” The further events proceed, the firmer the noose grips the refugees. Murier, who has found (relative) safety in Nice, is contacted by the Resistance. Would he be willing to face the “minimal risk” of smuggling a suitcase of explosives by train to Lyon? “The right to be scared,” he muses, is “the last right we have.” He thus gives himself license to refuse, but instead, he consents. His resistance is not heroic, but it is genuine.
Stylistically, Serge offers solid craftsmanship but not much more. He lets paragraph-long lists summarize what should be portrayed subtly — having told us that Rue des Ecouffes houses “the wretched of all nations,” he needn’t list every nationality. He sometimes loses his trust in the reader’s intelligence and over-explains what’s obvious. Serge likes the creature-simile. He compares people to pigs, penguins, carps, bees, greyhounds, rats, boars, shellfish, etc. This is slightly excessive, but the real problem is the vagueness of saying that someone has “the eyes of an animal” or “animal features.” For what kind of animal is that? A tiger or a field mouse? Small flaws, but still.
Serge wrote Last Times exiled in Mexico City. He had little money and a family to support. Even with the help of George Orwell in Britain and Dwight Macdonald in America, he found no publisher that would take The Case of Comrade Tulayev or Memoirs of a Revolutionary. They were, he was told, too hostile to Stalin — then a wartime ally. He thus wrote Last Times in the hope that its conventional structure might make it popular in the U.S. In the introduction, Richard Greeman claims that this explains why Last Times is silent regarding the crimes of Stalinism, instead focusing “on the struggle against fascism.” This is wrong. While Last Times is less overtly anti-Stalinist than Serge’s other works, it is precisely in its condemnation of fascism that its criticism of Stalin emerges.
It is not, I think, a coincidence that Serge mentions the ultra-right L’Action Francaise and the Soviet-sponsored L’Humanite in the same breath. And when Murier faces the Nazi cultural attaches, he opposes their censorship, saying, “I don’t remember what stupid dictator called writers ‘the engineers of souls.’” His criticism is of Hitler, but it was of course Stalin who said it. Serge thus compares Stalin’s censorship to Hitler’s. Then Dr. Ardatov wonders, “What deeper betrayal than the one that entered the soul of a victorious revolution…?” This is, I think it is safe to say, a conscious echo of Trotsky’s The Revolution Betrayed, especially since Serge follows with references to Stalin’s “social fascism” policy, the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, and liquidations of Trotskyists in Valencia. This becomes explicit towards the conclusion, with phrases such as, “A revolution transformed into a dictatorship, executions on an industrial scale.” Finally, Murier compares the Nazi Reich with the “black, totalitarian socialism” of the Soviet Union. Last Times thus records the crimes of both Hitler and Stalin. It is Serge’s triumph to have witnessed both totalitarianisms with courage and irony as his only resources.
Gustav Jonsson is a Swedish freelance writer based in the United Kingdom.
