Year One of the Russian Revolution

By Victor Serge

An eyewitness account of the world-changing uprising—from the author of Memoirs of a Revolutionary. “A truly remarkable individual . . . an heroic work” (Richard Allday of Counterfire).
 
Brimming with the honesty and passionate conviction for which he has become famous, Victor Serge’s account of the first year of the Russian Revolution—through all of its achievements and challenges—captures both the heroism of the mass upsurge that gave birth to Soviet democracy and the crippling circumstances that began to chip away at its historic gains. Year One of the Russian Revolution is Serge’s attempt to defend the early days of the revolution against those, like Stalin, who would claim its legacy as justification for the repression of dissent within Russia.
 
Praise for Victor Serge
 
“Serge is one of the most compelling of twentieth-century ethical and literary heroes.” —Susan Sontag, MacArthur Fellow and winner of the National Book Award
 
“His political recollections are very important, because they reflect so well the mood of this lost generation . . . His articles and books speak for themselves, and we would be poorer without them.” —Partisan Review
 
“I know of no other writer with whom Serge can be very usefully compared. The essence of the man and his books is to be found in his attitude to the truth.” —John Berger, Booker Prize–winning author
 
“The novels, poems, memoirs and other writings of Victor Serge are among the finest works of literature inspired by the October Revolution that brought the working class to power in Russia in 1917.” —Scott McLemee, writer of the weekly “Intellectual Affairs” column for Inside Higher Ed

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
• Release date: Jan 15, 2017
• ISBN: 9781608466092

Victor Serge

Victor Serge was born to Russian émigré parents in Belgium in 1890. He became active at an early age in revolutionary activities, for which he was imprisoned for five years in France. On his release he returned to revolutionary Russia, where he threw himself into the defence of the fledgling government. After Lenin’s death he became increasingly alienated from Stalin’s clique and was expelled from the Soviet Union in 1936 for speaking out against the purges. He wrote numerous novels, poems, memoirs, and political essays, and died in exile in Mexico in 1947.

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Contents

Preface to the 1938 Edition

Foreword to the 1997 Edition by Wilebaldo Solano

Translator’s Introduction by Peter Sedgwick

Translator’s Acknowledgements

Preface to the 1930 Edition

1 From Serfdom to Proletarian Revolution

2 The Insurrection of 25 October 1917

3 The Urban Middle Classes against the Proletariat

4 The First Flames of the Civil War: The Constituent Assembly

5 Brest-Litovsk

6 The Truce and the Great Retrenchment

7 The Famine and the Czechoslovak Intervention

8 The July-August Crisis

9 The Terror and the Will to Victory

10 The German Revolution

11 War Communism

Notes

Postface: Thirty Years After the Russian Revolution

Postscript: The Allied Part in the Czechoslovak Intervention

Notes 497 Index

More by Victor Serge Available in English

First published as L’An 1 de la revolution russe in 1930.

Translation, Translator’s Introduction, and Notes © 1972, Peter Sedgwick.

This edition published in 2015 by

Haymarket Books

P.O. Box 180165

Chicago, IL 60618

773-583-7884

[e-mail]

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ISBN: 978-1-60846-609-2

Trade distribution:

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All other countries, Publishers Group Worldwide, www.pgw.com

Cover design by Ragina Johnson.

This book was published with the generous support of Lannan Foundation and the Wallace Action Fund.

Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication data is available.

I dedicate this work to two proletarian revolutionaries:

to one now dead, dear Vassili Nikiforovich Chadayev, militant in the Leningrad communist organization, 1917–28, whose principled intelligence, firmness of character and absolute devotion—a unique flame burning within him—never wavered even in the bitterest torment and who perished before he could show the fullness of his powers in the service of the revolution, murdered while accomplishing a mission on 26 August 1928, not far from Armavir (Kuban); and

TO A GREAT LIVING REVOLUTIONARY.

V.S.

Preface to the 1938 Edition

In January 1930, in Leningrad, I finished off the last pages of this book and began the first pages of the original Foreword which follows. Eight years have flowed by since then. And what years! This book, based entirely on contemporary documents, written in daily contact with participants in the revolution and with the unique purpose of establishing, however hastily, the truth, which was already under threat, has had singular destiny. . . . Today it has become one of the rare witness-based overviews of this period, which, although past and gone, has by the force of circumstance once again become topical, standing out as more alive than most of the works on the subject published since. A certain number of histories have appeared in the USSR. All those that came out before 1937 have now been removed from circulation, removed from libraries, and destroyed. Merely reading or owning one is punishable. For official history, having been ordered to follow the path of the most impudent and bafoonish falsifications, is actively working to destroy the documents, the memoirs, the memory and even the official acts of recent times! Let anyone who reads Russian compare and confront the successive editions of the encyclopedic dictionaries published by the Moscow State Library and he will understand the moderation and exactitude of my statements.

It was my hope to continue this study of the Russian Revolution. Even in captivity, I continued accumulating notes, texts and testimony and setting to paper the draft of a book as ample as this one, whose title was to be Year Two. When I left Russia, banished, in April 1936, with all these materials as well as two other books completely finished, the fruit of long years of labor were seized illegally (the word provokes a smile) by the political police.1 Other scholars, another day, will write Year Two, but their job won’t be easy, for the men of that time, and with them, their works, are being liquidated.

Let us consider for a moment the roads taken by the Russian Revolution these past eight years. In 1925–26, the Revolution is entering what one might call a fourth phase. Economic reconstruction has been completed, a fact which, only five years after the end of the civil war, constitutes an admirable success in a sorely tried country, thrown back on its own resources, where the laboring classes have to take everything into their own hands. The 1913 levels of production and consumption have been attained. From now on, production must be expanded to reach the level of the big European countries. All problems now appear as a function of the relations between agriculture and industry, the peasantry and the dictatorship of the proletariat. It is at this moment when the men of 1917–18 become aware of worrisome transformations within the Party and the State. Power is escaping from their hands, passing over to new men, the Johnny-come-latelys of the revolution, ensconced in the offices of the governing party, men for whom the Secretary General of the Central Committee—a fifty-something Georgian Bolshevik barely known during the decisive years of the revolution, Iossif (Joseph) Djugachvili (Stalin), ex-Koba of the Caucasian terrorist organizations (1906–07)—has become the living symbol and the devious, hardnosed leader. The ideology changes, although the murky arguments respect its external forms in order to retain the prestige of the old ideas. The best known and most illustrious of the fighters of the early days, Lenin’s collaborators, with Trotsky in the lead, propose industrialization and democratization, first of the Party, then of the system—an actively revolutionary international policy, particularly in the Chinese Revolution, largely influenced by the Russians.2 They are expelled at the end of 1927, soon to be imprisoned or deported. The author of this book shares their fate.

The grain crisis, caused by the inability of a socialized industry too weak to meet the needs of the farmers, obliges the Stalin-Rykov-Bukharin triumvirate (which succeeds the Stalin-Zinoviev-Kamenev triumvirate) to impose on the country the near-total forced collectivization of agriculture at the same time as the first Five-Year Plan. Unable to provide the peasants with a merchandize-equivalent of their grain, it is necessary to make them plant and sow under constraint. The years 1926–28 are the years of an extremely profound political crisis. They see the bureaucracy—still far from realizing full collective self-consciousness—drive out of power the revolutionaries who had built the Soviet state.

The forced collectivization of agriculture leads to the eviction and deportation of several million peasants, the destruction of livestock and the general famine of the years 1930–34. This new phase of the regime’s evolution is marked by the recourse to terror against the peasants, the technicians and the workers (to a lesser degree) and by obscure struggles within the ruling circles, which nonetheless ceaselessly trumpet their ‘monolithic’ unity on every occasion. Little by little, the persecution of hidden opposition becomes institutionalized in the Party. The Republic of the Soviets, while building itself a new and formidable industrial infrastructure at an incredible cost in human labor and suffering, becomes a totalitarian state in which police terror is the principal means by which the ‘Political Bureau’ governs.

Such a transformation implies both a profound betrayal and modification of the social structure, the two phenomena being so totally interconnected as to be one. If the ideas of 1917–18, officially venerated, are in reality trampled upon, this is because the egalitarian revolution, fifteen years on, has ended with a new inequality, profound enough and stable enough to generate an irremediable antagonism between order-givers and order-takers, between the administrators of collectivized wealth, and masters of the state, and the newly exploited working masses. Such is the outcome of a socialist revolution led by a too-weak proletariat in an immense agricultural land surrounded by countries remaining capitalist.

This situation led to the terrible political crisis of 1936–37 in the course of which the dictator of the bureaucracy undertook the successive liquidation first of the Old Party, the Party of the Revolution and the Civil War, and then of his own party, which carried him into power against the former but which was still too permeated with socialist ideas. The best known Bolsheviks perished, shot, after monstrous trials where their very loyalty, knowingly manipulated by an inquisition, was used to dishonor them by means of false confessions. Others, less celebrated, perished by the hundreds and thousands, shot without a trial. Obscure participants in the revolution, hundreds of thousands of these, filled the concentration camps while a supposedly ‘democratic’ Constitution was handed down by the Leader. Six months later, the authors of that constitution are no more. During the elections, dozens of candidates and newly elected representatives to the new Councils (supposedly inviolable) disappeared. But the constitution leaves no trace of the old Soviets, conceived in 1917 as the essential organs of the state.3

Of the outstanding men whose names appear in the pages of this book, only one survives: Trotsky, hunted for nearly ten years and a refugee in Mexico. Lenin, Dzerzhinsky and Chichirin, having died in time, thus avoided proscription. Zinoviev, Kamenev, Rykov, Bukharin were shot. Among the combatants of the November 1917 insurrection, the hero of Moscow, Muralov, was shot. Anonov-Ovseenko, who led the assault on the Winter Palace, disappeared in prison. Kyrlenko, Dybenko, Shliapnikov, Bliebov-Avilov, all members of the first Council of Peoples’ Commissars, succumbed to the same fate as Smilga, who led the Baltic Fleet, as Riaznov, as Sokolnikov and Bubnov of the insurrectional Political Bureau: all in prison if they are still living. Karakhan, negotiator at Brest-Litovsk, shot.

Of the two first leaders of Soviet Ukraine, one Piatakov, was shot; the other, Rakovski, a broken old man, is in prison. The heroes of the battles of Sviajsk and the Volga, Ivan Smirnov, Rosengolt and Tukhachevsky, shot. Raskolnikov, outlawed, has disappeared. Among the fighters of the Ural, Mratchkovsky was shot, Bieloborodov disappeared in prison. Sapronov and Vladimir Smirnov, Moscow fighters, disappeared in prison. Similarly Preobrajensky, the theoretician of war communism, and Sosnovsky, Bolshevik Party spokesman at the first Central Executive of the dictatorship, shot. Also Enukidze, first secretary of that Executive. Nadejda Krupskaya, Lenin’s companion, lives out her last days in who knows what kind of indescribable captivity.

Of the men of the German revolution, Joffe committed suicide; Karl Radek is in prison; Krestinski, who continued their action in Germany, was shot. Of the socialist-revolutionary opposition of 1918, Maria Spiridovnov, Trutovsky, Kamkov, and Karelin probably survive, but have been in captivity for the past eighteen years. Blumkin, who went over to the Communist Party, shot. Of the men who during Year II made sure the revolution survived victorious, only a small number survive for the moment. The military leaders of the first Red Armies, Kork, Iakir, Uborevich, Primakov, and Mulevich, were shot. Evdokimov and Bakayev, the defenders of Petrograd, shot. The Bolsheviks of the Caucasus, Mdivani, Okudjava, and Eliava, shot. Likewise shot Fayçulla Khodjayev, who played a big part in the sovietization of Central Asia. The President of the Council of Commissars of the Hungarian Soviets, Bela-Kun, disappeared in prison. . . .

The revolutionary victory, all things considered, caused relatively few losses among the victors. Eighteen years later, on the contrary, the bureaucratic reaction, which conquered power without fighting, annihilated a whole generation, carried off in waves of blood and filth . . . that’s where things stand today. One of the essential problems of the moment is to know if the totalitarian dictatorship in its present form, that is to say a terrorist police state, is compatible with the simple functioning of nationalized production. There are reasons to doubt this.

The immense enterprise of social transformation, begun in 1917 in a backward land devastated by war, remains nonetheless in many ways admirable because of the energies and the hopes it raised up and by its historical advances. The foundation remains for a new order no longer based on private property of the means of production but on socialized property. This economy, regulated by a single plan and despite being in the hands of an often unintelligent and almost always brutal power, has shown itself endowed with extraordinary vitality and creative capacity. One would really have to despair of man and ignore everything about the paths of history to conclude that the present reaction, which reminds us in so many ways of the Russian despotism of centuries past, is the Russian Revolution’s final word. This nightmare state will be carried off, like so many other have been before it. The true balance sheet of the Russian Revolution can only be drawn when the seeds sown so generously by a great people during the years of its rising have grown up.

Victor Serge

Paris, September 1938

Translated by Richard Greeman

Foreword to the 1997 Edition

by Wilebaldo Solano, POUM*

From Brussels to Moscow by Way of Barcelona

Victor Serge was born in Brussels on December 30, 1890, into a family of Russian revolutionary exiles and died in Mexico in November 1947 at the early age of fifty-seven at the height of his intellectual powers. In Brussels, Serge belonged to the Socialist Young Guard, then, rapidly, became active with the French anarchists, which led him to prison, where he remained incarcerated for five years.1 (Serge described the French penitentiary system in his 1928 novel Men in Prison, which I read in Spanish translation as young man and which prepared me to face my own years of prison.)

Right out of prison, he left for Barcelona where he joined the powerful Spanish anarcho-syndicalist movement, became friends with Salvador Segui, one of its most important figures, and participated in the preparation of the 1917 general strike. It can even be said that the writer Victor Serge was ‘born’ in Barcelona, because it was there that the young Victor Kibalchich (his real name) adopted the ‘Serge’ pseudonym to write Tierra y Libertad and began his novel Birth of Our Power, inspired by the Spanish workers’ movement of that period.

In the summer of 1917 Serge left for Russia, dazzled, like so many others, by the Russian Revolution. Detained by the French in a wartime concentration camp, he arrived in 1919 and joined up with the Bolsheviks, but without naive illusions. Unlike many others, Serge retained a sharp critical sense. Joaquin Maurin, the POUM leader, knew Serge in Moscow in those early days and wrote, much later, that ‘Victor Serge was clear and sincere. He pointed out the defects and the virtues, the failures and the successes.’ No higher praise was possible at a time dominated by either unconditional admiration or systematic denigration. Thus Victor Serge became intensely active within the Communist International.

At the time he was the principle contributor to the famous magazine Inprekor (an abbreviation for International Correspondence). Zinoviev sent him on to Berlin and Vienna in the early 20s. He wrote works like The Revolution in Danger, chronicled the rise of Hitler in Eyewitness to the German Revolution, reported on life in the USSR and Russian revolutionary culture and literature, analyzed the Chinese Revolution and produced the first history of Year One of the Russian Revolution. He was friends with the great Russian writers of the period, Yessenin and Mayakovsky, with Pasternak and Mandelstam as well.

When the bureaucratization of the state and the party worsened, Serge joined the Left Opposition, and he never abandoned his political and intellectual resistance to Stalinism. This was the period (1927–30) when Stalin was sending Russian Oppositionists and non-conformist intellectuals to the Gulag, but he didn’t dare arrest well-known foreign revolutionaries. Victor Serge and the Spaniard Andrés Nin, inseparable friends since 1921, founded with Alexandra Bronstein (Trotsky’s first wife) the last organized cell of resistance against bureaucratic despotism. Nin was expelled from the USSR in September 1930 and Serge was arrested and deported to Orenburg in 1933. He was finally liberated and expelled in 1936 after an international campaign orchestrated by the writers Magdeleine Paz, André Gide and Marcel Martinet.

The Struggle Against Stalinism

Arriving in Brussels, Serge undertook the work of unmasking of Stalinism with an iron will and amazing energy all the while defending the persecuted, deported and murdered Soviet writers. On the eve of his own deportation in 1933, Serge had managed to transmit to Magdeleine Paz a ‘letter-testament’ in which he declared himself ‘an unshakable resistor on three points: defense of man, defense of the truth, defense of thought.’ Thus, at the time of the first Moscow Trial in 1936, Serge created the Committee for the Defence of Freedom of Opinion Within the Revolution and published The Sixteen Who Were Shot: the Zinoviev-Kamenev-Smirnov Trial; it was the first serious analysis of the Stalinist terror and the witchcraft trials organized by the GPU, criticized only by the POUM in Spain, some very small organizations in the workers’ movement and a few left-wing intellectuals.

Scarcely a year later, the same Committee was obliged to foment a big international campaign to try to save Andrés Nin and the POUM, victims of cruel repression in Republican Spain under Stalin’s orders. Never weakening, Serge defended his Russian and Spanish comrades. ‘In truth,’ he wrote later, ‘it was the struggle of a handful of consciences against the total crushing of the truth, at the very moment when crimes were being committed that decapitated the USSR and prepared the defeat of the Spanish Republic.’

Throughout this period of struggle, Serge continued writing, publishing From Lenin to Stalin, Russia Twenty Years After, and Midnight in the Century and beginning one of his best novels, The Case of Comrade Tulayev, a profound analysis of the mechanism of the ‘confessions’ of the Moscow Trials. Recently, this novel has finally been published in Russia, where unfortunately the manuscripts of this anti-Stalinist revolutionary writer confiscated by the GPU have not yet been recovered.

Serge and the POUM

It was my good fortune to meet Victor Serge in Paris in February 1939. Our meeting was the end of a long odyssey which led our little group of POUM leaders from the Barcelona State Prison to the French capital by way of the improvised prison of Cadaqués, over the border in the Pyrenees, to a rendezvous with a commando group organized by Marceau Pivert and led by Daniel Guérin to save us from a possible Stalinist attack and from being thrown into a French concentration camp, and finally to freedom on the banks of the Seine.2 Naturally, one of our first acts was to go and greet Victor Serge.

Throughout the whole Spanish revolutionary process, that is to say from July 19, 1936 [Franco’s coup], Victor Serge worked closely with the POUM. From Brussels and from Paris he regularly sent us articles for La Batalla, the main newspaper of our organization. He wrote to us frequently, sending us messages, keeping us informed of developments in the international workers’ movement, in the USSR under Stalin and in European intellectual circles, fascinated by the great struggle against Franco. All of this was very valuable to the POUM leadership, especially Serge’s analysis of the crises within the Stalinist apparatus and of the evolution of the Kremlin’s policy toward intervention in Spain.

We were indebted to Serge and that is why we decided to organize the first official meeting of the Executive Committee of the POUM at his apartment. On a cold February morning, we headed for the workers’ housing project in Pré-Saint-Gervais where the author of Year One of the Russian Revolution and Russia Twenty Years After was living. The group consisted of Juan Andrade, Julian Gorkin, Pedro Bonet, Jordi Arquer, Josep Rovira, E. Gironella, N. Molins and me. The gathering was moving and unforgettable. Only Gorkin and Molins had actually met Serge before; the rest of us were seeing him for the first time, but we already know a great deal about him. The absence of the two most important figures of the POUM, Andrés Nin, murdered by Stalin’s police at Alcalá de Henares, and Joaquin Maurin, a prisoner in Franco Spain, was striking. We wanted to free Maurin and shed light on what was then being called ‘the mystery of Nin’ (the circumstances under which his sequestration and assassination had taken place). We soon arrived at a plan to further these objectives, and Serge’s advice was particularly precious.

At Serge’s, we drew up a balance sheet of the Spanish revolutionary process and took the first measures to aid our comrades who had remained in Spain, both in the South-Central part of the country, which was still out of Franco’s control, and in Catalonia, where the Francoist terror had already been unleashed. Serge asked us lots of questions and wanted to know everything. Then we had a long discussion with him on the international situation in general and more particularly on the political crisis in the USSR, where the trials of oppositionists were continuing and the Stalinist repression intensifying. Above all, this meeting opened a long period of collaboration between the POUM and Victor Serge, which the invasion of France by Hitler’s troops did not interrupt and which continued until his death in exile in Mexico, as witnessed by the letters he frequently sent to the Executive Committee of the POUM in exile in Paris and his comments reading La Batalla, then published in Paris.

Remembering a Writer-Fighter

The time is overdue to re-issue the works of Victor Serge, long unjustly neglected. Serge is not a writer like the others, he is an outstanding author and militant of the twentieth century. He suffered prison, exile and every kind of persecution in his struggle for a free, authentic socialism. And if he died too soon, he left behind him a body of work essential for understanding the great events of the twentieth century. The spectacular collapse of the USSR, the fall of the Berlin Wall and the decomposition of the international Communist movement disfigured by Stalinism represent an unprecedented phenomenon which poses a problem for everyone: for defenders of the capitalist system (including those who believe in the ‘end of history’), for Communists and post-Communists, for nominal social-democrats as well as for revolutionary Marxists, who were the first to recognized the degeneration of the Russian Revolution and to struggle with the weapons of theory and practice against the great fraud of Stalinism and its successors. Victor Serge’s life, his struggle and his work place him in that category. He was one of the most clear-sighted militants of his epoch. For this reason, one must turn to his works if we want to try to understand the character and historical meaning of Stalinism and make sense of its negative consequences. In the midst of the confusion which reigns today among the left-wing forces that have not given up on the perspective of socialist liberation, Serge and his work constitute a kind of beacon capable of illuminating the past and useful for better apprehending the future.

Many claim that Year One of the Russian Revolution is one of Serge’s best books, in a sense a classic. Others affirm that his essay ‘Thirty Years After the Russian Revolution,’ written during July–August 1947, is in a sense a political testament of the great revolutionary writer, who died prematurely in Mexico soon after, still dreaming of returning to Europe to pursue his struggle and his work. In either case, the value of Year One of the Russian Revolution is obvious. As for ‘Thirty Years After the Russian Revolution,’ the least one can says is that it is a precious document in which Serge demonstrates his intellectual honesty at the summit of his critical spirit.

Today, after the spectacular 1989 collapse of the Stalinist system, the 1917 Russian Revolution is universally denigrated and dismissed both by the former Communist bureaucrats who have made themselves into capitalist oligarchs by privatizing the social wealth created at great sacrifice by generations of Soviet workers and by scornful, self-satisfied neoliberal capitalist ideologues proclaiming the ‘end of history’ and the intrinsic evil not only of socialism but of any kind of revolutionary agitation. Serge’s ‘political testament’ is thus precious for all who want to understand what Stalinism really was, how it was able to triumph over authentically socialist or communist tendencies and last so long and especially how a revolution that raised so many hopes throughout the world could have transformed itself into a totalitarian, slave society and fall of its own weight in the most repellant of historical disasters. [Translator’s note: for this reason, we have included it as a Postface to this edition of Serge’s Year One.]

Critical Defense of the Russian Revolution

Obviously, Victor Serge defends the Russian Revolution and justifies it in the face of all those falsifiers ‘who speak and write without informing themselves.’ They existed then and they continue to exist today. He defends that revolution brilliantly, pointing up the value of Lenin and Trotsky, their successes and merits, without ever avoiding or hiding the difficulties, the errors, the mistakes that in his opinion they committed. This is not unimportant when we recall that for years many writers and historians produced unreserved apologetics of the Russian Revolution, presenting it as a model to imitate or copy without deviating on any pretext.

Victor Serge was a man and a militant of a different stripe. His temperament, his culture and his political history allowed him to keep his eyes open always and never to fall into facility and complacency. Thus he never hesitated to say that the lack of democratic traditions was extremely serious for the revolution and that in reality only the left Mensheviks of Martov’s tendency had a democratic conception of the revolution. This was only one of his many ‘heresies.’ When he deals with the subject of the ‘errors and mistakes’ of the Bolsheviks, Serge is very severe and lets little go by. For him, the most ‘incomprehensible’ error remained the creation of the Cheka [secret police], a thesis he had already developed in 1939 in his Portrait of Stalin and to which he returns with a vengeance in ‘Thirty Years After.’ After the Cheka came Kronstadt,3 and Serge goes over the arguments which led to a bitter polemic and break with Trotsky in 1938. Serge felt that his argument on Kronstadt was confirmed by Lenin himself when he ended war communism and declared the New Economic Policy. But he understands that the Bolsheviks were unable to draw all the consequences of the tardy recognition of their errors and that in 1921 they rejected ‘reconciliation with socialist and libertarian elements ready to base themselves on the Soviet Constitution’ by outlawing them. On the other hand, he recognizes the terrible difficulties faced by the Soviet regime and its will to support the European revolution which, in the long run, was its only hope for survival. Serge maintained that the Bolsheviks, prisoners of their ‘militant idealism,’ were mistaken about the ‘political capacity and energy of the Western working class, especially of the German.’ From that error arose ‘socialism in a single country.’

In contrast with those who mix everything up and maintain that there is a logical continuity that leads fatally from Lenin to Stalin, Serge held that there were two totally separate periods: 1917–27 and 1927–37. In our opinion, the phenomenon is more complex, but let us follow Serge.4 The essential fact, for him, is the sort of coup d’état that occured within the ruling circle during the years 1927–28: ‘the revolutionary Party-State becomes a reactionary, bureaucratic Police-State standing on the social terrain created by the revolution.’ Victor Serge analyses these two periods and emphasizes the struggle of the generation that emerged from the revolution against the Stalinist bureaucracy between 1927 and 1937. Those who during the past few years have been able to consult the Moscow archives have learned that this struggle was at once much more important and much more tragic that has been generally imagined.

Victor Serge was one of the first revolutionary oppositionists, meaning he was one of the very first who struggled in the name of a free socialism against the Stalinist bureaucratic dictatorship responsible for the betrayal and the destruction of Bolshevism. First, he struggled inside the USSR within the Russian Left Opposition, which he himself often explained was broader and less sectarian than the groups outside Russia that acted in its name. Then, in Europe, after his deportation at Orenburg and the international campaign that allowed him to leave the USSR and settle in Brussels. Finally, in exile in Mexico, after the occupation of France by Hitler’s troops, where he remained in close contact with the Spaniards and particularly the militants of the POUM. From 1917 until his death just fifty years ago [in 1947] Victor Serge was a committed, revolutionary writer. At the most difficult times, during this ‘midnight in the century,’ to allude to the title of one of his novels, Serge always lived modestly, with a surprising and moving creative optimism. He ran many risks, and the agents of the GPU did their best to make his life untenable both in Brussels and in Mexico, where he was the object of several physical attacks.

A few years before his death, when the end of the Second World War was in sight and he was thinking of a return to Europe, he wrote these words: ‘Nothing is finished. We are at the beginning of everything. Throughout so many defeats, some of them deserved, some gloriously undeserved, it is clear that reason is more on our side than error. Who can say as much? Tomorrow, only socialism can bring to the gathering revolution a renewed philosophy of democracy, an irreducible affirmation of human rights, a total humanism for all men.’

Wilebaldo Solano

Secretary of the POUM5

Paris, July 1997.

---

* Partido Obrero de Unificacion Marxista (Workers’ Party for Marxist Unification)

Translator’s Introduction

by Peter Sedgwick

The present book is one of the first works produced by Victor Serge following the decision he took in 1928, when he was confined in a Leningrad hospital with a near-mortal illness, to turn his literary talents from the fields of immediate agitation and propaganda (now denied to him as a result of the victory of Stalinism) into more permanent forms of political and artistic testimony. Like the other works produced by Serge for publication abroad during his disgrace as a former Left Oppositionist in the Soviet Union, it was composed according to a peculiar format: ‘in detached fragments which could each be separately completed and sent abroad post-haste and . . . could, if absolutely necessary, be published as they were, incomplete."1

In these early years of Stalin’s hegemony, the mere act of dispatching a manuscript to a Western publisher was not regarded by Soviet officialdom, as it is today, as in itself tantamount to an act of treason. During the 1920s it had been relatively common for Soviet writers to bring out their work abroad, in order to establish copyright, before it appeared in Russia. This relative freedom was not to last very long: in 1929, for example, Boris Pilnyak was savagely attacked in the Russian press for his publication of the novel Mahogany in Berlin, and was removed from his post in the All-Russian Writers’ Union for this supposedly ‘anti Soviet’ action. Thus by 1930 when Year One of the Russian Revolution appeared from the presses of a Paris publishing house, Serge must have had grounds for fearing that an historical work which challenged, implicitly but still definitely, the Stalinist re-writing of party history might bring unpleasant consequences upon its author. Only a year later, in a novel devoted to the civil war period, he felt it necessary to omit the names of Lenin and Trotsky in a scene which clearly described the two leaders together in close conversation;2 and in 1936, when Victor Serge was allowed to leave the Soviet Union after three years of deportation in central Asia, the GPU censorship took care to seize all his manuscripts, including Year Two of the Russian Revolution, the sequel to the present work. This book then, like Victor Serge himself, is a specimen of uncompromising heresy which survived the risks of Stalinist repression through a combination of skilful timing and historical good luck.

In contrast with Serge’s other works of political history, Year One of the Russian Revolution contains no autobiographical element: it is in no sense an eye-witness account, since its narrative breaks off precisely at the point in January 1919 when Serge was beginning his own personal experience of the Bolshevik Revolution, setting foot on Russian soil for the first time in his life as the returned son of exiled Narodnik parents. Serge’s initiation into the stern realities of Red Petrograd at the end of Bolshevism’s Year One dealt him (as he tells us in his memoirs)3 a considerable shock: despite the recent promise of a Soviet democracy based on mass participation, here was a revolution at death’s door, its freedom checked and controlled by a rigorous party monopoly which maintained the ‘Proletarian Dictatorship’ in the face of a starving, embittered and depopulated proletariat. Even with this restricted basis of legitimacy, the Soviet regime could still exert a powerful claim of fealty upon socialists and internationalists; Serge was not at this point prepared to declare (as he did, in confidence, in 1921 to an anarchist visitor to Moscow) that ‘the Communist party no longer exercises a dictatorship of the proletariat but over the proletariat.’4 The bond between the ruling party and the class it represented could still be renewed from time to time, in periodic feats of mass heroism in the war against White restoration or in the pioneering work of construction within new institutions and a new culture. Serge is too honest not to see that the ideals of ‘Soviet Democracy,’ which had fired the hearts of millions in Russia and throughout the world in 1917, have given way to the authoritarian monopoly (‘the dictatorship of the centre,’ as he puts it) of the Bolshevik leadership. The purpose of Year One of the Russian Revolution is essentially one of reconstructing the chain of events, in the Russia of revolution and counter-revolution, which has led from the ‘Commune-State’ of 1917 to the party dictatorship of late 1918. The terms of the narrative are fixed by Serge’s basic convictions, firstly, that the October Revolution of 1917 was a genuine expression of mass feeling by workers and peasants in their overwhelming majority, and secondly that the revolutionary wave had very quickly exhausted itself, or rather bled itself dry, through the military depredation and economic ruin which wrought havoc in an already enfeebled Russia during the early months following the Bolshevik seizure of power.

Serge’s outline of the early development of Bolshevism is therefore likely to dissatisfy at least three classes of historians and commentators upon Communism. There are those who reject the first cornerstone of Serge’s narrative, arguing that the Bolshevik revolution of 1917, far from being an expression or representation of popular desires, was a mere coup d’état or conspiracy: on this argument a detailed account of the revolution’s fortunes over the year 1917–18 would possess little historical relevance in explaining the frustration of the Communist ideal, since the regime from the outset would be a minority dictatorship masquerading behind the banner of the Soviets. There are many, too, on the Left who would gladly endorse Serge’s characterization of Bolshevism’s initial victory, as the advent to power of authentically revolutionary mass institutions, and yet would reject his chronology of the movement’s speedy decline. 1918 has indeed been offered but rarely as a significant date by Left-wing interpreters of Russian Communist history; most accounts of the trajectory of Stalinism are sprinkled with references to such salient years as 1937–8 (the great purge), 1929–30 (collectivization and famine), 1927 (defeat of Left Opposition, expulsion of Trotsky), or—if a critic is sufficiently bold—1921, the year of the suppression of the Kronstadt rebellion and the banning of factions inside the Bolshevik party. There are very few interpretations which both proclaim the 1917 October Revolution as a valid and genuine proletarian insurrection and go on (as Serge does) to date the erosion of mass involvement in the revolution within a matter of months. Quite recently, however, a third group of critics of Bolshevik history has attracted public attention. These would share Serge’s chronological focus, in concentrating on developments in Soviet Russia during the immediate aftermath of the Bolshevik assumption of authority, but would offer a radically distinct explanation for the tendencies towards political repression, centralization and monopoly that are evident in the practice of Lenin’s party as early as 1918. Such writers as Noam Chomsky, the Cohn-Bendit brothers and Paul Cardan are inclined to ascribe the Bolshevik expropriation of the Soviets not to the sheer pressure of historical events (though it is conceded that these may have played their part) but to specific ideological drives towards the centralization of authority at the expense of the workers; these conceptual deformities within Bolshevism are seen as pre-dating the October Revolution and are variously traced back to Lenin’s centralizing politics in the 1902–3 split with the Mensheviks, or to a residue of orthodox social democracy still latent within Russian Bolshevism, or to elements in the philosophy of the Proletarian State as developed by Marx himself in the old controversy with anarchism.5

It might be thought that a work such as the present one, composed under conditions by no means propitious for mature historical research, and expressing the political outlook of a revolutionary tendency defeated by history, would have very little chance of withstanding the criticism that might be directed upon it from any of these rival currents of explanation, based as these are on several more decades both of detailed scholarship and of international revolutionary experience. However, when due exception is made of a number of biases and inadequacies which are evident in certain points of Serge’s narrative (none of them crucial to his case), the book’s general schema of the Russian revolution’s ‘Year One’ makes extremely good sense when contrasted with alternative explanations of what happened. It is unlikely, perhaps, that any one interpretation of so complex and significant an event as the Bolshevik revolution will ever be accepted as definitive, especially in a world still rent by political divisions stemming in large part from that very revolution; still, it is possible to point to particular features in the march of events during 1917–18 which raise certain theoretical or empirical difficulties for the alternative standard views of the Bolshevik triumph.

BOLSHEVISM: COUP OR MASS RISING?

Let us consider first the position, made out by successive waves of opponents of the October Revolution ever since the Bolshevik uprising itself, which sees the transition simply as the outcome of a putsch or military conspiracy, resting on no political mobilization of the Russian masses. History, unfortunately, affords the commentator no ready-made index with which one can compute unambiguously the depth and the quality of a social upheaval. Every modern revolution, from 1789 onwards if not further back, has had a question-mark placed by some of its critics over its popular character as well as upon its social content. (To take one dramatic example: not merely the depth and the range, but even the very existence of the Spanish workers’ and peasants’ revolution of 1936 went unrecognized for many years after the event by thousands of liberal observers—including even, as he has candidly admitted, so trained an analyst as the present Regius Professor of Modern History at Oxford.)6 The recognition or the denial of the majority character of an insurrection must inevitably, by comparison (say) with the registering of a majority in a parliamentary election, proceed from the exercise of a fairly complex political and historical judgement. The position is further complicated, in the case of the Russian revolution, by at least two other factors. In the first place, there is an evident tendency among writers on Russian affairs to characterize the October rising of the Bolsheviks as the decisive founding act of one of the world’s modern industrial super-States—a judgement which concedes the world significance and even the historical necessity of October without evaluating it within the mass revolutionary politics of its own day. And secondly, there is so much in the actual conduct of the insurrection in Petrograd during the closing days of October 1917 which lends colour to a purely conspiratorial view of the events. Trotsky himself admits almost as much in the final pages of his great history:

Where is the insurrection? There is no picture of the insurrection . . . a series of small operations, calculated and prepared in advance, remain separated one from another both in space and time . . . there is no action of great masses. There are no dramatic encounters with the troops, there is nothing of all that which imaginations brought up on the facts of history associate with the idea of insurrection.7

Trotsky, it is true, goes on to present the absence of the masses from the rising as a positive proof of the movement’s coherence and popular support:

The workers had no need to come out into the public square in order to fuse together: they were already politically and morally one single whole without that . . . These invisible masses were marching more than ever before in step with the events.8

The pro-Bolshevik temper of the masses in the cities during late 1917 is, however, attested by evidence of a far less ‘invisible’ nature. ‘In August, September and October’—i.e., when the Bolsheviks were once again issuing the call for the replacement of the Provisional Government by Soviet power—‘manifold indications,’ as a recent historian puts it, ‘disclosed the growing popularity of Bolshevism.’9 The congress of Soviets of the northern region, whose delegates were drawn from Petrograd, Kronstadt, Moscow, Helsinki and Reval, unanimously passed Trotsky’s resolution for the transfer of the central government to the Soviets. A similar swing towards the Bolshevik line—often, it is true, in terms which left open the possibility of a peaceful transfer of power—was seen in the resolutions passed by many regional and local Soviet assemblies in this period, for example, at Kiev and Minsk, in Siberia and the Urals. On 19 October the All-Russian Conference of factory and shop committees, with a Bolshevik majority among its 167 voting delegates lining up with the twenty-­four SR delegates against an opposition consisting of seven Mensheviks and thirteen anarcho-syndicalists, came out for the immediate passing of power to the Soviets: this, as Trotsky put it, was indeed ‘the most direct and indubitable representation of the proletariat in the· whole country.’10 For the situation following the successful Petrograd rising, the results of the All-Russian Constituent Assembly elections, often cited as an indication of the relative unpopularity of the Bolsheviks, in fact show a continuance of the Bolshevik landslide in the key industrial centres and the nearby garrisons.11 By the time the elections were held, eighteen days after the ousting of the Provisional Government and the installation of the Bolshevik government by the Second Congress of Soviets, none could have doubted the definitely insurrectionary character of the slogan ‘all power to the Soviets’ as proclaimed by Lenin and Trotsky. Yet the Bolsheviks’ main rivals for the allegiance of popular masses, the Menshevik and SR opponents of the insurrection, were decisively beaten in the main cities of Russia: the wave of pro-Bolshevik extremism which had already ousted the Mensheviks from their leading positions in the urban Soviets rolled forward still to reduce the total Menshevik vote for the empire to 1,700,000 (nearly half of this drawn from Jordania’s nationalist, non-proletarian stronghold of Georgia); while in the sole industrial centre which had been under SR control during 1917, Moscow itself, the sensational swing towards the Bolsheviks manifested in the city’s two municipal elections earlier in the year was sealed by the SR party’s crushing defeat in the ballot for the Assembly, by an electorate now polarized between a Red plurality and a Kadet counter-revolution.12

The sweep of popular Bolshevism in late 1917 extended far into the countryside of Russia, as the radicalized soldiers returned to the villages, drawing masses of rural toilers into their mood. The formal constitutional majority (both of votes and of actual seats) enjoyed by the SR party in the Constituent Assembly elections provides no indication of the real scope and power of the radical movement among the peasantry. Not only had the selection of candidates for the election by the SR party machine been consciously operated so as to under-represent the party’s Left fraction (forty Left deputies out of the total SR delegation of 339 were elected) and even the ‘centre’ fraction of Victor Chernov (whose delegation of fifty was grossly under-sized in proportion to the influence of the Chernov group in the Central Committee elections during November).13 For outside the fractions and committees, in the grassroots base of Social Revolutionism, Russia, the SR party was losing ground rapidly, not only to its Left breakaway but even to the Bolsheviks; Radkey’s careful analysis of a number of widely varying peasant regions during late 1917 confirms this trend in detai1.14 The self-proclaimed party of the Russian peasantry proved, as Radkey puts it, to be ‘the chief roadblock in the path of the agrarian revolution’15 that rolled across the empire. The apparently overwhelming SR electoral ‘majority’ in the Constituent Assembly returns was based on a feeble minority among the actual social forces of the Russian nation; it would be futile and sophistical to try to prove, conversely, that the Bolshevik and Left SR vote reflected a conscious majority of the total population of the toilers, except in the key industrial centres, but it was certainly the expression of a half­-conscious mood of ‘popular Bolshevism’ at work in the hearts of millions.

To say this much is to leave open very wide areas for serious argument over the strength, the sources and the conscious quality of the revolutionary mass-mobilization that was seized and shaped at the pinnacles of society by the organizational and political actions of Lenin and Trotsky. A final word in the dispute over the ‘minority’ or ‘mass’ character of the October Revolution may perhaps be left with the spokesmen for the defeated and discredited party of Mensheviks. This party, whose leadership had assailed the Bolshevik rising on its morrow as a pure ‘military conspiracy,’ an ‘adventure’ conducted in isolation from the masses, reversed its judgement at its Central Committee meeting of 17–21 October 1918, in a resolution which declared:

The Bolshevik revolution of October 1917 has been historically necessary [and] expressed the endeavour of the toiling masses to steer the course of the revolution wholly in their interest, without which the liberation of Russia from the vice of Allied imperialism, the pursuit of a consistent peace policy, the radical implementation of the agrarian reform and the regulation by the state of the whole economic life in the interests of the masses of the people would have been inconceivable.16

This endorsement of the authentically revolutionary character in terms both of popular base and of historical significance, of the Bolshevik insurrection was, of course, not undertaken without serious criticism of the post-revolutionary conduct of the Communist regime. But these criticisms do not diminish the de jure and de facto recognition of October accorded by the revolution’s old opponents.

THE DECAY OF THE REVOLUTION

In tracing the decline in the active mass support enjoyed by the Bolshevik party, we are at once faced by the loss, over 1918, of such indispensable indicators as the distribution of the vote, between Bolshevik candidates and their rivals, in Soviet and other elections. It should not now be necessary to attribute the early Bolshevik dominance of the Soviets and trade unions exclusively to the effects of dictatorial repression: the pitiful showing made by the non-Bolshevik but ‘Sovietist’ organizations such as the sections of anarchists and SRs loyal to the regime is probably due not simply to police action, but to the phenomenon (very common nowadays in the underdeveloped world) of the ‘funnelling’ of prestige and enthusiasm into the party machine which bears the credit for the foundation of the new regime. The excessive ‘homogeneity’ noted by Serge in the All-Russian Soviet Congress of November 1918 has its parallel in the legislative assemblies of many contemporary states of recent inauguration. Nevertheless, Serge is evidently right to signal ‘the end of the Soviet bloc’ of fraternal but contending parties, soon after mid-1918, as a crucial stage in the replacement of popular Bolshevism by élite party control. In this respect, his analysis (even though formulated during a phase when he was a convinced member of the Trotskyist opposition) differs sharply from that made by Trotsky himself. For Trotsky, writing in late 1937 to refute the theory that Stalinism sprang from Leninism as a direct progression, the monopoly of the party in the Soviets appears to be completely unproblematic. He concedes to the Left-wing critics of Bolshevism the bare facts of their case:

the Bolsheviks . . . replaced the dictatorship of the proletariat with the dictatorship of the party; Stalin replaced the dictatorship of the party with the dictatorship of the bureaucracy. The Bolsheviks destroyed all parties but their own; Stalin strangled the Bolshevik party in the interests of a Bonapartist clique.

Trotsky adds, however, that ‘one can make such comparisons at will. For all their apparent effectiveness they are entirely empty.’ The party monopoly, indeed, is the natural form by which the dictatorship of the proletariat is exercised: ‘The proletariat can take power only through its vanguard . . . The Soviets are only the organized form of the tie between the vanguard and the class. A revolutionary content can be given to this form only by the party.’ Trotsky concludes: ‘The fact that this party subordinates the Soviets politically to its leaders has in itself abolished the Soviet system no more than the domination of the Conservative majority has abolished the British parliamentary system.’17 (To which it might be replied that a Conservative ‘domination’ using the same methods of repression as the Bolsheviks employed against the other parties would certainly abolish the parliamentary system as it has been known in Britain.)

Without statistics for the elections to Soviet institutions (and doubtless some useful findings could be gleaned for the period when balloting still went on) it is impossible for us to monitor the process of working-class disillusionment with the Soviet regime. The centralization of Soviet economic institutions, through the creation of ‘the Supreme Council of the National Economy’ with its branches in the different industries in place of the localized, uncoordinated organs of ‘workers’ control,’ did not involve the Soviet government in any collision with the mass of workers.18 Despite the vested interest in local separatism that was characteristic of many factory Soviets, the factory-committee movement collaborated with the transition towards centralism, doubtless for the greater economic security it conferred as well as for the regime’s defence requirements. Pankratova even states that the idea of establishing the Supreme Council of the National Economy

was actually initiated and given shape within the movement of factory-committees itself. The Central Soviet of Factory Committees took a very active part in its formation, gave it its own best workers and offered its apparatus to it. The factory committees of Petrograd, who at their First Conference of May 1917 had proclaimed workers’ control, buried it unanimously at their Sixth Conference.19

It was not, it would seem, any confrontation between the Bolsheviks and the working class over this or, probably, any other single issue that drove a wedge between the regime and its proletariat, so much as the cumulative pressures that bore down relentlessly upon the people throughout Bolshevism’s Year One.

That there was, by the end of 1918, a yawning void filled by apathy at best, and hostile bitterness at worst, between the Soviet regime and the working class appears to be an irresistible conclusion. The portrait sketched by Serge at the end of the present book accords very closely with the summary given in his own reminiscences: ‘it was the metropolis of Cold, of Hunger, of Hatred, and of Endurance. From about a million inhabitants its population had now fallen, in one year, to scarcely 700,000 souls.’ Here was ‘a revolution dying, strangled by blockade, ready to collapse from inside into the chaos of counter-revolution’.20 Within weeks of Serge’s arrival, the huge factories of Petrograd, once the pride and the powerhouse of working-class Bolshevism, would explode in spectacular disturbances involving thousands of workers in action against the regime. These strikes and demonstrations were eagerly observed and, wherever possible, encouraged by the domestic and foreign forces that were working for the overthrow of the Soviet government. Paul Dukes, the head of the British intelligence network then operating clandestinely in Petrograd, recalls the ‘bloody encounters between large bands of workers and the forces of the Cheka,’ and records one workers’ demonstration which paraded a banner with the ironic couplet:

Doloi Lenina s koninoi,

Daitye tsarya s svininoi!

(Down with Lenin and horseflesh,

Give us the Tsar and pork!)

In an intelligence report smuggled back from Russia at the time, Dukes reported on the mass anti-Bolshevik agitation in a factory that a short while ago had been a stronghold of the revolution:

On 10 March a mass meeting was held at the Putilov Works. Ten thousand men were present and the following resolution was passed with only twenty-two dissentients . . .

We, the workers of the Putilov Works, declare before the labouring classes of Russia and the world that the Bolshevist government has betrayed the ideals of the revolution, and thus betrayed and deceived the workers and peasants in Russia; that the Bolshevist government, acting in our names, is not the authority of the proletariat and peasants, but a dictatorship of the Bolshevik party, self-governing with the aid of Cheka and the police . . . We demand the release of workers and their wives who have been arrested; the restoration of a free press, free speech, right of meeting and inviolability of person; transfer of food administration to cooperative societies: and transfer of power to freely elected workers’ and peasants’ Soviets.21

Dukes’s report was promptly published by the British government in the official Collection of Reports on Russia put out in 1919 in the attempt to convince a wavering parliament and public of the horrors of Bolshevism and the necessity for continued support to the White forces.22

Victor Serge is candid in his own account of this erosion of the regime’s proletarian base. Despite the Soviet government’s unpopularity among the working class, he remained committed to its survival and continued to defend its authenticity as a ‘dictatorship of the proletariat,’ defined as such now not sociological (through the active adhesion of the Russian working class in its majority) but ideologically (through the Marxist perspectives and the revolutionary determination displayed in the thousands of Bolshevik cadres that constituted the new State). It was relatively easy for Serge to make this leap from a mass identification to the hero-worship of a glorious minority, from (one might almost say) the criteria of Marxist politics to those of an aesthetically and psychologically grounded romanticism. For his own adoption of the Marxist class vision was, in 1919, of relatively recent formation; as Jean Maitron has convincingly shown,23 the first political position of the young Victor Lvovich Kibalchich, before he took the name of ‘Victor Serge’, was one of rampant anarchist individualism, glorifying the desperate violence of his close friends in the ‘Bonnot gang’ of bank-robbers and despising the stultified beasts of burden who were the modern proletariat. ‘Je suis avec les bandits!’ Serge had proclaimed in his organ L’Anarchie in 1911, as his friends were shooting out their last battles with the French gendarmerie. The bandits were at least men, bravely defying the corrupt bourgeois society they could not hope to defeat. This elitist revolutionary loyalty was available for Serge to fall back on if the masses failed him, as they did in Petrograd almost as soon as he arrived there. The Bolsheviks, that beleaguered commando of revolutionary fighters, daring to the death, could be accepted on the same grounds as his old bandit comrades. However logically or morally vulnerable this position was, it at least enabled Serge to face reality squarely and admit that the working class was not, in this situation, fulfilling the revolutionary expectations held out for it by the official creed of Marxism. Other Communist publicists, less inclined towards romantic heroics than he was, would through that very fact also tend to cling to the mass criterion for supporting the regime long after the actual behaviour of the masses had made nonsense of their theory. For such as these, ‘Soviet power’ as the exercise of the majority will of the real Russian proletariat would necessarily continue to function, until the strain on theory imposed by the reality grew to breaking-point.

It was not, of course, necessary to be either an Ibsenesque hero­worshipper or a naive pro-Bolshevik in order to rally to the support and defence of the Soviet regime in the Civil War period. The sheer peril of counter-revolution, seconded by the active intervention of the Allies, caused most Socialists and internationalists at this time to solidarize with the Soviet government against even its Left-wing dissidents when the survival of the regime was in question. In a later work (Destiny of a Revolution, published in 1937) Serge explained why, in his view, no revolutionary could support the working-class demonstrations against the government in the Petrograd of early 1919. The very success of the Menshevik and Left SR agitators in rallying the city’s workers testified to the absence of the proletariat’s conscious and revolutionary elements from the factories: for the most dedicated and idealist workers had volunteered in thousands for the civil war front. Those that remained, although a majority, were the proletariat’s ‘backward elements, the least conscious and most selfish, those least inclined to sacrifices demanded by the general interest . . . discouraged rearguards who are ready unconsciously to second a counter-revolution.’ To attempt ‘a general strike in famished Petrograd, threatened from two sides by the Whites, in the factories which all the revolutionists have left’ was simply ‘suicide for the revolution’.24 It should be remembered that in the spring of 1919 General Yudenich was grouping the forces of his White army in Estonia for the offensive which in May would win substantial territory from the Baltic coast down to Pskov and which, when renewed more vigorously later in the year, would take his troops into the very suburbs of Petrograd. In March 1919 also, an intervention by Finland to capture the city for the counter-revolution was already being lobbied in Allied circles. This was an epoch when ‘counter-revolutionary peril’ was far more than a bureaucratic excuse to justify the repression of dissidence: even though it might be expressed formally in the same terms used during later repressions, the logic of Communist violence in 1918 proceeds from real and distinctive pressures which are not those of 1968, or 1956, or 1937 or (even, be it said) 1921.

THE IDEOLOGICAL ALTERNATIVE

The whole blame for the evolution of the Commune-State into the Party-State is therefore laid by Victor Serge to the account of the counter-revolutionary peril. It was the opening of the civil war by the Whites, regularly and lavishly funded by the Allies, that dissipated and destroyed the active forces of the Russian working class in a literal haemorrhage of the revolution’s social basis. It is to the activity of the counter-revolution, in the repeated plots, assassinations and uprisings conducted by the anti-Bolshevik parties of both Right and Left, that we must look for the explanation of the Communist party’s monopoly of power and terror. Here Serge parts company with all those critics of Bolshevism who have predominantly emphasized the ideological factor of ‘Jacobinism’ or ‘Leninism’ (detected as residing within the intellectual marrow