from New Left Review-Sidecar, 18/09/2026
by Morten Høi Jensen
Prospective biographers of Victor Serge begin at a disadvantage. Memoirs of a Revolutionary (1951) is one of the great autobiographies of the last century, vividly recounting the twists and turns – from Belgium to France, Spain, Russia, Mexico – of a spectacularly dramatic political life. Yet as Mitchell Abidor argues in his recent biography, Serge’s story ‘is more complex than his memoirs would lead the reader to believe’. Victor Serge: Unruly Revolutionary aims to ‘roughen edges’ that the memoirist smoothed over and probe ‘contradictions’ that he minimized. Begun as an attempt to help Richard Greeman complete his own, never completed biography of Serge, Abidor’s account draws on the astonishing archive of material Greeman spent a lifetime assembling. While Suzi Weissman’s impassioned Victor Serge: A Political Biography (2001) was written to rescue Serge’s legacy from post-Cold War triumphalism, Abidor offers a cooler and more sceptical account, leaving no ideological inconsistency unexamined.
Though admiring of his subject, Abidor is keen to dispel the mythology around ‘Saint Serge’. He begins by deflating the family lore with which Memoirs of a Revolutionary opens: that Serge – born Victor Kibalchich in Brussels in 1890 – was distantly related to a Russian revolutionary and bomb maker executed in 1881 for his role in the assassination of Tsar Alexander II. Abidor explains that no genealogical evidence has been found. In his view, ‘Serge’s connection was, instead, an emotional one, a political and moral one, and so became a real one psychologically.’ The idea that he grew up among Russian revolutionary exiles is also a ‘good deal less straightforward’ than he would later suggest. Abidor documents the difficulties of Serge’s early life. His father, Léon, had been expelled from the military academy in St Petersburg for possessing revolutionary propaganda, then fled to Switzerland, where he met Serge’s mother, Vera. They lived a peripatetic and straitened existence, moving between ‘the slums of Brussels, Canterbury, Geneva and London’, before splitting up. Serge ‘was born into a shabby broken home, one he left when he was only a child’. Family mythology it seems, filled a void – and in later years, served as solace in times of great adversity.
Living on his own from the age of twelve and lacking a formal education, Serge immersed himself in Brussels’ left-wing milieu, reading Kropotkin as well as Louis Blanc’s History of the French Revolution, joining the youth branch of the Belgian Workers’ Party and starting a newspaper, Le Communiste, with a group of friends. Yet they soon found this ‘solidly reformist social-democratic’ formation constricting, and left it in 1907, storming out of a party congress after leader Emil Vandervelde called for support for the annexation of Congo. Le Communiste was renamed Le Révolté. Writing under the name Le Rétif – ‘an adjective with many meanings: restive, recalcitrant, refractory, rebel, stubborn, unruly’, Abidor writes – Serge espoused an individualist strain of anarchism that combined disdain for the masses with a quasi-Nietzschean veneration of the individual’s capacity for revolt, in the service of which crime and terror were admissible tactics.
After Le Révolté defended the anarchist bomb maker Abraham Hartenstein, who in February 1909 shot and killed two police officers, Serge found it impossible to continue living in Brussels. That summer, he decamped for Paris, home of ‘anarchy, literature and revolution’. Abidor points to some retrospective modification – ‘a professional deformation of all memoirists’ – in Serge’s description of what drew him there, and what the city represented. As a young anarchist he ‘would not have seen Paris as the city of the Commune, which he mocked in several articles, or the syndicalist CGT, which he would also condemn, and certainly not Lenin, whom he would have been less familiar with than the Bolshevik’s Narodnik brother, the martyred Alexander’, Abidor writes. Serge established himself as a prominent anarchist thinker, writing for the movement’s central newspaper, l’anarchie, under various pseudonyms. He continued to offer vocal support to those he saw as rebelling against the state. ‘The right to live implies the right to kill whoever prevents me from living’, Serge argued at the time. ‘The will to live imposes on me the duty (the necessity) of killing whoever wants to rob me of freedom, without which there is no life’.
In 1911-12, the Bonnot Gang, a group associated with l’anarchie, committed a string of high-profile bank robberies. Serge was arrested along with his first wife, Rirette Maitrejean, after police raided the newspaper’s offices and uncovered two stolen revolvers. Refusing to cooperate, he was tried along with the rest of the gang and sentenced to five years in prison. Abidor offers a careful reconstruction of the trial, which is illustrative of his approach. Quoting liberally from police reports and contemporaneous accounts in the daily press, he shows how the police took pains to frame Serge as the gang’s chief ideologue, putting him in the difficult position of protesting his innocence without compromising himself in the eyes of his fellow anarchists. The reason Abidor devotes so much time to the trial – by comparison, Weissman mentions it only in passing – is that in his estimation it marked an ‘epistemological break’ for Serge, a crucial first step away from anarchism.
If the experience challenged Serge’s individualist philosophy, the outbreak of the First World War laid bare the old order’s fragility. Released from prison in January 1917 and banned from living in France, Serge left for Barcelona, where he began writing for the anarchist periodical Tierra y Libertad. Exposure to revolutionary syndicalism gradually persuaded him of the necessity of mass action, though Abidor argues that this was a gradual process. It was in Spain that he first signed an article as Victor Serge (a pseudonym he never explained). Fittingly, the subject was the February Revolution. The Russians, Serge wrote, ‘have succeeded in dethroning a tsar. And they continue their work, helping us through their example, when it’s not their efforts, to live our life, fighting for LIFE’.
Serge soon embarked on what Abidor describes as his ‘convoluted voyage’ to join the Revolution in Russia. En route, he was arrested in Paris and interned for over a year in a prison camp in Précigné. There he continued to write, now for the anarchist review La Mêlée. Abidor singles out an article published in November 1918 as pivotal in outlining ‘the ideological basis’ for Serge’s adoption of Bolshevism: ‘We can’t retreat from social life. Whether we like it or not, we are social animals, and we can’t, when we want to improve our personal lot, do anything but work to improve the common lot.’ Eventually freed in a prisoner exchange of French officers held in Russia, Serge maintained that he arrived as a supporter of the Bolsheviks ‘because they were doing what was necessary tenaciously, doggedly, with magnificent ardour and a calculated passion’. Too many anarchists, he felt, were lagging behind history, allowing internecine quarrels to stand in the way of meaningful revolutionary action.
Writing in the Bulletin Communiste during his first years in Russia, Serge repeatedly argued that anarchists should join the Bolsheviks, insisting that they had much to contribute to the Revolution. The ‘tragic misfortune’ of these articles, Abidor argues, ‘is that they were written at the height of Bolshevik repression of anarchism’, most notably of the forces of Nestor Makhno in Ukraine. The suppression of the Kronstadt rebellion in 1921 snapped the last brittle ties between anarchists and the Bolsheviks. ‘It is a sign of how painful this event was for Serge that even decades after the fact he was still attempting to come to a final judgement’, Abidor writes, examining his various reflections on it. Caught between his anarchist devotion to freedom on the one hand and loyalty to the Party on the other, Serge’s public defence of the Bolshevik leadership, Abidor argues, diverged from the sentiments he expressed in private to anarchist comrades like Angel Pestaña, Maurice Vandamme and Gaston Leval. Anarchists never really forgave him. As late as 2011, a French anarchist press published a book-length attack titled Victor Serge, l’homme double.
After successive disappointments, Serge felt he was at last on the winning side. ‘There was enough criticism of the Bolsheviks from outside Russia; joining in made one an objective ally of reaction, and that was simply not an option’, Abidor writes. ‘He had his reason to live, and he would cling to it until it was no longer possible to hide the fact that the Revolution was hopelessly, irrevocably lost.’ Concluding that the Soviet state would collapse without foreign support, between 1921 and 1925 Serge worked as a Comintern agent in Central Europe, mostly in Berlin and Vienna, where he encountered leading communist intellectuals including Gramsci and Lukács. He was also translating the writings of Lenin, and had begun contributing to Henri Barbusse’s journal Clarté and Die Rote Fahne, the German Communist Party’s newspaper. From this vantage, he witnessed the onset of hyperinflation and the rise of the Nazi movement. In Russia, however, the Bolshevik party was closing in on itself: when Lenin died in 1924, a long and bitter battle for succession began. Lukács advised Serge to be prudent on his return: ‘Don’t be silly and get yourself deported for nothing, just for the pleasure of voting defiantly’.
In the bitter succession battle that followed Lenin’s death in 1924, Serge sided with Trotsky and the Left Opposition. ‘I see only one thing to do: not throw out the baby with the bathwater; not grow bitter. The moment has come to calmly swim against the tide, as difficult as that might be’, he wrote. Serge was expelled from the Party in 1928 and briefly imprisoned. Disillusioned, he devoted his energies to writing, completing three novels (Men in Prison, The Birth of Our Power and Conquered City) and a work of history (Year One of the Russian Revolution) in just five years. During this period, Serge and his family – he had remarried in 1919 and had a son, Vlady in 1920 – were subjected to an escalating campaign of harassment, so severe that Serge’s wife, Liuba Russakova, began to suffer from intermittent psychosis. Serge’s solitude, Abidor notes, was absolute: ‘Not a single comrade; all those with whom I was connected deported, imprisoned, dead, lost’, he wrote to friends in Paris. Stalin’s regime, he wrote in a letter of 1933, was in ‘total contradiction’ with the Revolution: socialism ‘will only prove its superiority to capitalism, not by the construction of tanks, but through the organization of social life, only if it offers man better conditions than capitalism: more material well-being, more justice, more freedom and a higher dignity.’
That year, Serge was arrested again on suspicion of taking part in underground Trotskyist work and interrogated over the course of two months. He proved unbreakable and didn’t hold back from criticizing the regime for its intolerance of dissent. To do so at such a time ‘demonstrates unequalled courage’, Abidor writes. He was sentenced to three years of internal exile in Orenburg in the Ural Mountains. L’affaire Victor Serge threatened to derail the proceedings of the Moscow-sponsored Paris Antifascist Congress of 1935, when the French journalist Magdeleine Paz raised the issue from the floor. Unexpectedly granted permission to leave the Soviet Union in 1936, Serge returned to Paris where he became ‘one of the most important analysts of Soviet politics and policy’. He was never entirely safe from Stalinist agents – as shown by the assassination in Madrid of Serge’s old friend Andreu Nin, the leader of Spain’s POUM, in 1937. He lived in an ambient state of paranoia. In his posthumous novel Unforgiving Years (1971), a revolutionary on the run describes this ‘semi-lunatic’s game . . . this need to distrust himself, to suspect his own suspicions’.
‘Serge was in many ways a left-wing Zelig’, Abidor writes upon examining the contents of Serge’s address book covering the years 1936 to 1940 – which included André Breton, CLR James, Ignazio Silone, Frida Kahlo, André Gide and Max Shachtman. When the Nazis invaded France in 1940, Serge was able to draw on his contacts, living for a time with Breton in a house in Marseilles rented by Varian Fry and the Emergency Rescue Committee, who helped Serge and thousands of other exiles escape Europe. Serge secured passage on a steamer headed to Mexico City, his fare paid by Dwight and Nancy Macdonald. There he completed The Case of Comrade Tulayev (1948), widely considered his masterpiece. Abidor describes Serge’s final years in Mexico as ‘difficult and unhappy ones’ – impoverished, far from Europe, fearful of assassins. A life on the barricades had exacted its toll. When he died of a heart attack in the back of a taxi in 1947, Serge was just fifty-six but looked much older. Julian Gorkin, the POUM leader who identified the body, observed that ‘the soles of his shoes, worn down to nothing, had holes in them’ and that ‘the body could have been that of a hobo, picked up out of charity’. He was buried in an unmarked grave among Spanish exiles.
By the time of his death, Abidor argues, Serge had ceased to believe in the viability of proletarian revolution. Although he ‘never wavered in his belief that the Bolshevik Revolution was at its outset a positive event and that Stalinism was a perversion of Leninism, not its continuation’, Abidor writes, this nevertheless represented a ‘shift that is hard for admirers of the Serge myth to accept’. Here lies the most contentious part of Abidor’s account: his verdict that Serge ultimately ‘went beyond’ anti-Stalinism to become an ‘anti-communist’. Weissman and others have disputed this (‘Serge’s legacy is not that of a man who abandoned socialism for Cold War anti-communism. It is that of a socialist thinker who refused every capitulation – to Stalinism, to liberalism, to despair – and who paid the full price of that refusal.’). Abidor has subsequently defended his position. Whatever conclusions may be drawn from reading the notebooks and letters of Serge’s final years, one ought to bear in mind that he died in the uneasy interregnum between the cataclysm of the Second World War and the emerging bipolar world order. His likely trajectory had he lived longer must remain a matter of speculation.
For Abidor, it is ultimately Serge’s oscillations – ‘which follow a definite pattern and share a common basis and motive’ – that make him so important a figure. In his estimation, ‘Serge’s apparent mutability was, in fact, a search for an effective way to ensure true freedom and democracy’. What changed was ‘the means of achieving his goal’, he writes. Serge’s mind was certainly in constant motion – revolutionary in both senses – and he never lingered long enough for dogma to harden. As he put it in 1938, ‘The truth is never fixed; it is constantly in the process of becoming and no absolute border sets it apart from error’. ‘The feeling of possessing the truth goes hand in hand with a certain contempt for man’, he wrote. Serge remains so attractive a figure not only for his optimism of the spirit, but this imperishable openness to the world. And for that, we need to return to his own writings. For all the suffering and failure of his final years, Serge felt he still had ‘too many things to do, to know, to understand’. Knowing death was near, he told himself in his notebooks to ‘continue life as if all of it lay ahead of me . . .’
Read on: Victor Serge, ‘Mexican Notebooks: 1940-1947’, NLR 82.
See an archive of texts and documents by and about Victor Serge on libcom.org
Against the Tide
from New Left Review-Sidecar, 18/09/2026
by Morten Høi Jensen
Prospective biographers of Victor Serge begin at a disadvantage. Memoirs of a Revolutionary (1951) is one of the great autobiographies of the last century, vividly recounting the twists and turns – from Belgium to France, Spain, Russia, Mexico – of a spectacularly dramatic political life. Yet as Mitchell Abidor argues in his recent biography, Serge’s story ‘is more complex than his memoirs would lead the reader to believe’. Victor Serge: Unruly Revolutionary aims to ‘roughen edges’ that the memoirist smoothed over and probe ‘contradictions’ that he minimized. Begun as an attempt to help Richard Greeman complete his own, never completed biography of Serge, Abidor’s account draws on the astonishing archive of material Greeman spent a lifetime assembling. While Suzi Weissman’s impassioned Victor Serge: A Political Biography (2001) was written to rescue Serge’s legacy from post-Cold War triumphalism, Abidor offers a cooler and more sceptical account, leaving no ideological inconsistency unexamined.
Though admiring of his subject, Abidor is keen to dispel the mythology around ‘Saint Serge’. He begins by deflating the family lore with which Memoirs of a Revolutionary opens: that Serge – born Victor Kibalchich in Brussels in 1890 – was distantly related to a Russian revolutionary and bomb maker executed in 1881 for his role in the assassination of Tsar Alexander II. Abidor explains that no genealogical evidence has been found. In his view, ‘Serge’s connection was, instead, an emotional one, a political and moral one, and so became a real one psychologically.’ The idea that he grew up among Russian revolutionary exiles is also a ‘good deal less straightforward’ than he would later suggest. Abidor documents the difficulties of Serge’s early life. His father, Léon, had been expelled from the military academy in St Petersburg for possessing revolutionary propaganda, then fled to Switzerland, where he met Serge’s mother, Vera. They lived a peripatetic and straitened existence, moving between ‘the slums of Brussels, Canterbury, Geneva and London’, before splitting up. Serge ‘was born into a shabby broken home, one he left when he was only a child’. Family mythology it seems, filled a void – and in later years, served as solace in times of great adversity.
Living on his own from the age of twelve and lacking a formal education, Serge immersed himself in Brussels’ left-wing milieu, reading Kropotkin as well as Louis Blanc’s History of the French Revolution, joining the youth branch of the Belgian Workers’ Party and starting a newspaper, Le Communiste, with a group of friends. Yet they soon found this ‘solidly reformist social-democratic’ formation constricting, and left it in 1907, storming out of a party congress after leader Emil Vandervelde called for support for the annexation of Congo. Le Communiste was renamed Le Révolté. Writing under the name Le Rétif – ‘an adjective with many meanings: restive, recalcitrant, refractory, rebel, stubborn, unruly’, Abidor writes – Serge espoused an individualist strain of anarchism that combined disdain for the masses with a quasi-Nietzschean veneration of the individual’s capacity for revolt, in the service of which crime and terror were admissible tactics.
After Le Révolté defended the anarchist bomb maker Abraham Hartenstein, who in February 1909 shot and killed two police officers, Serge found it impossible to continue living in Brussels. That summer, he decamped for Paris, home of ‘anarchy, literature and revolution’. Abidor points to some retrospective modification – ‘a professional deformation of all memoirists’ – in Serge’s description of what drew him there, and what the city represented. As a young anarchist he ‘would not have seen Paris as the city of the Commune, which he mocked in several articles, or the syndicalist CGT, which he would also condemn, and certainly not Lenin, whom he would have been less familiar with than the Bolshevik’s Narodnik brother, the martyred Alexander’, Abidor writes. Serge established himself as a prominent anarchist thinker, writing for the movement’s central newspaper, l’anarchie, under various pseudonyms. He continued to offer vocal support to those he saw as rebelling against the state. ‘The right to live implies the right to kill whoever prevents me from living’, Serge argued at the time. ‘The will to live imposes on me the duty (the necessity) of killing whoever wants to rob me of freedom, without which there is no life’.
In 1911-12, the Bonnot Gang, a group associated with l’anarchie, committed a string of high-profile bank robberies. Serge was arrested along with his first wife, Rirette Maitrejean, after police raided the newspaper’s offices and uncovered two stolen revolvers. Refusing to cooperate, he was tried along with the rest of the gang and sentenced to five years in prison. Abidor offers a careful reconstruction of the trial, which is illustrative of his approach. Quoting liberally from police reports and contemporaneous accounts in the daily press, he shows how the police took pains to frame Serge as the gang’s chief ideologue, putting him in the difficult position of protesting his innocence without compromising himself in the eyes of his fellow anarchists. The reason Abidor devotes so much time to the trial – by comparison, Weissman mentions it only in passing – is that in his estimation it marked an ‘epistemological break’ for Serge, a crucial first step away from anarchism.
If the experience challenged Serge’s individualist philosophy, the outbreak of the First World War laid bare the old order’s fragility. Released from prison in January 1917 and banned from living in France, Serge left for Barcelona, where he began writing for the anarchist periodical Tierra y Libertad. Exposure to revolutionary syndicalism gradually persuaded him of the necessity of mass action, though Abidor argues that this was a gradual process. It was in Spain that he first signed an article as Victor Serge (a pseudonym he never explained). Fittingly, the subject was the February Revolution. The Russians, Serge wrote, ‘have succeeded in dethroning a tsar. And they continue their work, helping us through their example, when it’s not their efforts, to live our life, fighting for LIFE’.
Serge soon embarked on what Abidor describes as his ‘convoluted voyage’ to join the Revolution in Russia. En route, he was arrested in Paris and interned for over a year in a prison camp in Précigné. There he continued to write, now for the anarchist review La Mêlée. Abidor singles out an article published in November 1918 as pivotal in outlining ‘the ideological basis’ for Serge’s adoption of Bolshevism: ‘We can’t retreat from social life. Whether we like it or not, we are social animals, and we can’t, when we want to improve our personal lot, do anything but work to improve the common lot.’ Eventually freed in a prisoner exchange of French officers held in Russia, Serge maintained that he arrived as a supporter of the Bolsheviks ‘because they were doing what was necessary tenaciously, doggedly, with magnificent ardour and a calculated passion’. Too many anarchists, he felt, were lagging behind history, allowing internecine quarrels to stand in the way of meaningful revolutionary action.
Writing in the Bulletin Communiste during his first years in Russia, Serge repeatedly argued that anarchists should join the Bolsheviks, insisting that they had much to contribute to the Revolution. The ‘tragic misfortune’ of these articles, Abidor argues, ‘is that they were written at the height of Bolshevik repression of anarchism’, most notably of the forces of Nestor Makhno in Ukraine. The suppression of the Kronstadt rebellion in 1921 snapped the last brittle ties between anarchists and the Bolsheviks. ‘It is a sign of how painful this event was for Serge that even decades after the fact he was still attempting to come to a final judgement’, Abidor writes, examining his various reflections on it. Caught between his anarchist devotion to freedom on the one hand and loyalty to the Party on the other, Serge’s public defence of the Bolshevik leadership, Abidor argues, diverged from the sentiments he expressed in private to anarchist comrades like Angel Pestaña, Maurice Vandamme and Gaston Leval. Anarchists never really forgave him. As late as 2011, a French anarchist press published a book-length attack titled Victor Serge, l’homme double.
After successive disappointments, Serge felt he was at last on the winning side. ‘There was enough criticism of the Bolsheviks from outside Russia; joining in made one an objective ally of reaction, and that was simply not an option’, Abidor writes. ‘He had his reason to live, and he would cling to it until it was no longer possible to hide the fact that the Revolution was hopelessly, irrevocably lost.’ Concluding that the Soviet state would collapse without foreign support, between 1921 and 1925 Serge worked as a Comintern agent in Central Europe, mostly in Berlin and Vienna, where he encountered leading communist intellectuals including Gramsci and Lukács. He was also translating the writings of Lenin, and had begun contributing to Henri Barbusse’s journal Clarté and Die Rote Fahne, the German Communist Party’s newspaper. From this vantage, he witnessed the onset of hyperinflation and the rise of the Nazi movement. In Russia, however, the Bolshevik party was closing in on itself: when Lenin died in 1924, a long and bitter battle for succession began. Lukács advised Serge to be prudent on his return: ‘Don’t be silly and get yourself deported for nothing, just for the pleasure of voting defiantly’.
In the bitter succession battle that followed Lenin’s death in 1924, Serge sided with Trotsky and the Left Opposition. ‘I see only one thing to do: not throw out the baby with the bathwater; not grow bitter. The moment has come to calmly swim against the tide, as difficult as that might be’, he wrote. Serge was expelled from the Party in 1928 and briefly imprisoned. Disillusioned, he devoted his energies to writing, completing three novels (Men in Prison, The Birth of Our Power and Conquered City) and a work of history (Year One of the Russian Revolution) in just five years. During this period, Serge and his family – he had remarried in 1919 and had a son, Vlady in 1920 – were subjected to an escalating campaign of harassment, so severe that Serge’s wife, Liuba Russakova, began to suffer from intermittent psychosis. Serge’s solitude, Abidor notes, was absolute: ‘Not a single comrade; all those with whom I was connected deported, imprisoned, dead, lost’, he wrote to friends in Paris. Stalin’s regime, he wrote in a letter of 1933, was in ‘total contradiction’ with the Revolution: socialism ‘will only prove its superiority to capitalism, not by the construction of tanks, but through the organization of social life, only if it offers man better conditions than capitalism: more material well-being, more justice, more freedom and a higher dignity.’
That year, Serge was arrested again on suspicion of taking part in underground Trotskyist work and interrogated over the course of two months. He proved unbreakable and didn’t hold back from criticizing the regime for its intolerance of dissent. To do so at such a time ‘demonstrates unequalled courage’, Abidor writes. He was sentenced to three years of internal exile in Orenburg in the Ural Mountains. L’affaire Victor Serge threatened to derail the proceedings of the Moscow-sponsored Paris Antifascist Congress of 1935, when the French journalist Magdeleine Paz raised the issue from the floor. Unexpectedly granted permission to leave the Soviet Union in 1936, Serge returned to Paris where he became ‘one of the most important analysts of Soviet politics and policy’. He was never entirely safe from Stalinist agents – as shown by the assassination in Madrid of Serge’s old friend Andreu Nin, the leader of Spain’s POUM, in 1937. He lived in an ambient state of paranoia. In his posthumous novel Unforgiving Years (1971), a revolutionary on the run describes this ‘semi-lunatic’s game . . . this need to distrust himself, to suspect his own suspicions’.
‘Serge was in many ways a left-wing Zelig’, Abidor writes upon examining the contents of Serge’s address book covering the years 1936 to 1940 – which included André Breton, CLR James, Ignazio Silone, Frida Kahlo, André Gide and Max Shachtman. When the Nazis invaded France in 1940, Serge was able to draw on his contacts, living for a time with Breton in a house in Marseilles rented by Varian Fry and the Emergency Rescue Committee, who helped Serge and thousands of other exiles escape Europe. Serge secured passage on a steamer headed to Mexico City, his fare paid by Dwight and Nancy Macdonald. There he completed The Case of Comrade Tulayev (1948), widely considered his masterpiece. Abidor describes Serge’s final years in Mexico as ‘difficult and unhappy ones’ – impoverished, far from Europe, fearful of assassins. A life on the barricades had exacted its toll. When he died of a heart attack in the back of a taxi in 1947, Serge was just fifty-six but looked much older. Julian Gorkin, the POUM leader who identified the body, observed that ‘the soles of his shoes, worn down to nothing, had holes in them’ and that ‘the body could have been that of a hobo, picked up out of charity’. He was buried in an unmarked grave among Spanish exiles.
By the time of his death, Abidor argues, Serge had ceased to believe in the viability of proletarian revolution. Although he ‘never wavered in his belief that the Bolshevik Revolution was at its outset a positive event and that Stalinism was a perversion of Leninism, not its continuation’, Abidor writes, this nevertheless represented a ‘shift that is hard for admirers of the Serge myth to accept’. Here lies the most contentious part of Abidor’s account: his verdict that Serge ultimately ‘went beyond’ anti-Stalinism to become an ‘anti-communist’. Weissman and others have disputed this (‘Serge’s legacy is not that of a man who abandoned socialism for Cold War anti-communism. It is that of a socialist thinker who refused every capitulation – to Stalinism, to liberalism, to despair – and who paid the full price of that refusal.’). Abidor has subsequently defended his position. Whatever conclusions may be drawn from reading the notebooks and letters of Serge’s final years, one ought to bear in mind that he died in the uneasy interregnum between the cataclysm of the Second World War and the emerging bipolar world order. His likely trajectory had he lived longer must remain a matter of speculation.
For Abidor, it is ultimately Serge’s oscillations – ‘which follow a definite pattern and share a common basis and motive’ – that make him so important a figure. In his estimation, ‘Serge’s apparent mutability was, in fact, a search for an effective way to ensure true freedom and democracy’. What changed was ‘the means of achieving his goal’, he writes. Serge’s mind was certainly in constant motion – revolutionary in both senses – and he never lingered long enough for dogma to harden. As he put it in 1938, ‘The truth is never fixed; it is constantly in the process of becoming and no absolute border sets it apart from error’. ‘The feeling of possessing the truth goes hand in hand with a certain contempt for man’, he wrote. Serge remains so attractive a figure not only for his optimism of the spirit, but this imperishable openness to the world. And for that, we need to return to his own writings. For all the suffering and failure of his final years, Serge felt he still had ‘too many things to do, to know, to understand’. Knowing death was near, he told himself in his notebooks to ‘continue life as if all of it lay ahead of me . . .’
Read on: Victor Serge, ‘Mexican Notebooks: 1940-1947’, NLR 82.
See an archive of texts and documents by and about Victor Serge on libcom.org