Victor Serge The Course Is Set on Hope by Susan Weissman Verso, 320 pp., $35 WHO NOW READS Victor Serge? The novelist is nearly unknown these days, even among the most literate readers. Few of his titles–“Men in Prison,” “Birth of Our Power,” “Conquered City,” “Midnight in the Century,” “The Case of Comrade Tulayev,” “The Long Dusk”–can be found in bookstores. His once classic “Memoirs of a Revolutionary” has fallen far below the memory horizon. Born in Belgium in 1891, Serge was the scion of a family of eminent Russian exiles (his uncle Nikolai Kibalchich, for instance, was a famous nineteenth-century conspirator against the tsar). His first ideological commitment was to the proletarian anarchism that flourished in western Europe in those days, and so he became involved with a notorious group of “social bandits,” the Bonnot Gang, who were mainly involved in bank robberies and shootouts with the police. In 1913, after the most famous “anarchist trial” of the time, he went to jail in France, the experience that produced his first novel, “Men in Prison.” Serge was freed when the advance of German troops encouraged his guards to run away in 1916, and he went to revolutionary Russia by way of equally insurrectionary Barcelona (the experience that produced, in turn, “Birth of Our Power”). The Bolsheviks were in the saddle in the former tsarist empire, and he gave himself to the new dispensation heart and soul. The former anarchist bandit became a functionary of the new regime–and the result was “Conquered City,” a nearly unique work: a mystery story set among the police agents of the Cheka, forerunner of the KGB. But Serge also saw that a moral gap separated the Bolshevik dictators from their promises of democracy and improvement in the people’s welfare. He became a supporter of Trotsky and ended up again in prison, with his next novel, “Midnight in the Century,” a description of life in the Gulag. “The Case of Comrade Tulayev” (the favorite of many critics) is an account of Russian communism at the moment when the worst Stalinist purges began. In 1936, following protests by Andre Gide, Andre Malraux, and Romain Rolland, Serge was released and allowed to leave Russia–one of the very few cases to anticipate the similar destiny, decades later, of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. He went to Spain in time to see the revolutionary movement there caught between the grindstones of fascism and Stalinism. Along the way, as he developed serious differences with the exiled Trotsky, he began to insist that the Bolshevik experiment had been antidemocratic from the beginning. It is largely thanks to Serge that the early Bolshevik massacre of dissident sailors at Kronstadt in 1921 is known to the rest of the world. With the fall of France to the Nazis, Serge fled to Mexico, where he died in mysterious circumstances in 1947, very likely murdered by a death squad of Mexican Communist cab drivers, whose activities were later revealed in the Venona decryptions of KGB messages. In his last years he was a contributor to the anti-Communist New Leader and Partisan Review. By the time of his death he belonged to the group perhaps best described as “anticipatory neoconservatives.” ALL OF WHICH presents a problem for his biographer, Susan Weissman, in her “Victor Serge: The Course Is Set on Hope.” Weissman remains a partisan of the radical left, wearing her politics on her sleeve, and she does what she can to preserve the image of Serge as never anything except a full-blown radical. But she is also conscientious–and even somewhat courageous: Accompanied by Serge’s son Vlady, a painter in Mexico, Weissman went to Russia after the fall of communism and searched relentlessly through the archives for documents on Serge’s case, including lost manuscripts. In the course of her research, she turned up quite a bit of new evidence about Stalinist terrorism in the West during the 1930s and 1940s. The result in “Victor Serge” is a fine book that no one is likely to read. Serge’s natural audience among general readers has forgotten that the novelist ever existed, while the bedraggled ends of the socialist left–who do remember Serge, as they never forget or forgive anything–demand that he be resurrected only to be attacked. For example, take a look at the unpleasant hatchet-job performed on “Victor Serge” in the Spring issue of Dissent, organ of the recusant anti-anti-Communist school of Irving Howe. The Dissent review makes some gestures toward claiming Serge as a perduring man of the left. It quotes Lewis Coser, for instance, who wrote, “Serge taught us that one can hate Stalinist oppression, without becoming so imbued by hatred that one forgets the many evils of this world, seeing only one great evil.” In other words, Serge was good because, even after having seen the evils of the Soviet system, he still condemned unjust capitalism. (How is this an answer? The same might be said of everyone from George Orwell to John Paul II.) The review also quotes Dwight Macdonald’s warning to Serge in 1945 that his “Memoirs of a Revolutionary” could not be published in the United States at that time–making it sound like a victim of American anti-leftism when, in reality, the obstacle was the Stalinist grip on New York publishing. But mostly what Dissent aims to do is to undermine Serge by sabotaging Weissman’s biography and obscuring the real evils of Moscow’s secret police and the anger of Serge’s reaction to them. Susan Weissman’s description of the Russian poet Marina Tsvetayeva as a participant in a KGB network in France in the 1930s is denounced, for example, as “especially cruel”–when, in reality, the Tsvetayeva case is one of the most appalling in the history of the Stalinist misuse of intellectuals. The truth is that Victor Serge is valuable less for political reasons than for literary ones. He showed us–at a moment at which the lesson was particularly valuable–that realistic left-wing fiction could be written without sounding like a bad imitation of “The Grapes of Wrath.” Take Serge’s “The Case of Comrade Tulayev,” written in Mexican exile during World War II and published in English posthumously in 1950. Criticized by Irving Howe as “stately” (meaning old-fashioned and bourgeois), it is a rich panorama of life at the onset of extreme Stalinism. But the book, like all of Serge’s later work, also represents a kind of “memory cabinet” of the civilization he saw perish in the horrors of totalitarianism: a society of idealism, sentimentality, and stability. Inevitably, the novel also details the descent of millions of people into collective insanity. The narrative focuses on the incident that served as a pretext for the wholesale liquidation of the old Bolsheviks: the murder of Leningrad party secretary Sergei Mironovich Kirov in 1934. A popular leader, Kirov was shot to death in the corridors of Smolny, the local party headquarters. A young man named Nikolayev fired the shot. But the Kirov affair remains, even today, one of the murkiest chapters in Soviet history. The ensuing purges certainly paralleled the Nazis’ murderous “night of the long knives” that had taken place five months before. There is much evidence that Stalin himself ordered Kirov murdered. Although as Leningrad party chief he was known as a firm member of the Stalinist faction, Kirov had also argued against the execution of a dissident named Ryutin in 1931, and the seventeenth Bolshevik party congress, in January 1934, saw an unsuccessful attempt to replace Stalin with Kirov. SERGE HAD an intimate knowledge of the Leningrad Communist milieu and of the old Bolsheviks Lev Kamenev and Grigory Zinoviev, whose followers were massacred in the aftermath of the assassination. Yet he used “The Case of Comrade Tulayev” to suggest that the crime was an individual one–an act of vengeance by the silent, powerless mass against the Communist rulers, enacted through the anger of a single individual. In the novel, Kostya, a young man at the bottom of the Soviet order, having obtained a revolver, kills the party secretary in a moment o
f blind protest, enraged at the suicide of a young woman abused by the party machine. The shooting of Tulayev is the sort of act Serge had lived with throughout his life as a European anarchist and Russian revolutionary, but it has inexorable consequences. The second chapter, entitled “The Sword is Blind,” evokes the claustrophobia and panic in the control apparatus of the dictatorship: “The papers briefly announced ‘the premature death of Comrade Tulayev.’ The first secret investigation produced sixty-seven arrests in three days. Suspicion at first fell on Tulayev’s secretary, who was also the mistress of a student who was not a Party member. Then it shifted to the chauffeur who had brought Tulayev to his door–a Security man with a good record, not a drinker, no questionable relations, a former soldier in the special troops, and a member of the Bureau of his garage cell. Why had he not waited until Tulayev had entered the house, before driving off? Why, instead of going in immediately, had Tulayev walked a few paces down the sidewalk? Why? The entire mystery of the crime seemed to center in these two unknowns. No one was aware that Tulayev had hoped to spend a few minutes with the wife of an absent friend; that a bottle of vodka and two dimpled arms, a milky body, warm under a house dress, were waiting for him. . . . But the fatal bullet had not been shot from the chauffeur’s pistol; and the fatal weapon remained undiscoverable.” Later come more arrests, interrogations, an attempt to organize Western opinion against the advancing purge, executions. Because it centers on a crime, “The Case of Comrade Tulayev” is a unique mystery novel through the mirror: a detective story in which all is known from the beginning, and in which, rather than watching a rational effort to search out and punish a perpetrator, we see disorganized and vain attempts to punish whole strata of the populace for allowing such a thing to occur. Unlike a common crime, or even a political assassination, in a normal, Western country, the Tulayev case cannot simply be investigated and resolved. The shooting of a high official has laid bare the entire perverse nature of the regime; it is the kind of fateful and dramatic event that rips the mask from a whole society. In this context, and with genius, Serge applied the techniques of the nineteenth-century French novel to the examination of the totalitarian order. But with a significant difference: In the Communist universe, corruption is everywhere, eating into the soul of every citizen. Even today, we in the West, far from the ex-Communist lands, know little of the texture of Stalinism’s evil, the devastating effect on human beings of a system of naked power with no accountability and no institutions from which to obtain even a modicum of justice. We know that millions were killed in the Gulag, that the voices of poets were stifled at the same time that vast numbers of ordinary peasants were deliberately starved to death. Many Western intellectuals wish us to forget these details. That is, perhaps, the real reason Victor Serge has slipped away, and we have forgotten his powerful accounting of that immense system of atrocities and the lives of its victims–as well as of the hope and conscience of the old revolutionary movements, which died with them. That Serge escaped to tell the tale, like Ishmael in the waters of the ocean after the shipwreck in “Moby-Dick,” was a miracle. Susan Weissman deserves honor for trying to restore Serge’s reputation. Both as literature and as a window into the past, his books command a respect that has been denied them. Stephen Schwartz’s “Two Faces of Islam: The House of Sa’ud from Tradition to Terror” will be published at the end of the summer.
