Utopian Crisis Literature
Victor Serge Against Populism
By John Foster
Victor Serge died from heart failure in the back of a taxi cab in Mexico City.
It was 17 November 1947. He was penniless and living in exile.
It sounds like a sad end, but it was a lot better than it might have been.
Serge was the nom de guerre of Victor Kibalchich. Born in Brussels in 1890, he was the son of Russian revolutionaries fleeing Czarist repression.
As a teenager, he went to Paris, where he was involved in anarchist circles and worked as a typesetter and a journalist.
Through his first wife, Rirette Maîtrejean, he became closely enough associated with the infamous Bonnot Gang, a group of anarchist bank robbers that he was sentenced to five years in prison for refusing to testify against them. Several of them were executed.
Serge was released in 1917, and two years later, at the age of 24, he made his way to Russia to support the Bolshevik revolution.
Although he was to the left of the Bolsheviks, Serge viewed the Russian Revolution as the best chance for fundamental change in Europe’s economic and political order.
Serge participated in government in what became the Soviet Union, although he was also associated with the left opposition. He was one of the few associated with the group to survive Lenin’s policy of infinite compulsion and Stalin’s purges afterwards.
In 1922, Serge and his wife and child were sent to work for the Comintern in Berlin and Vienna. In 1926, he was caught up in the fall of Trotsky and the left opposition.
Expelled from the Communist Party, he spent several years in internal exile in Leningrad. During these years, he wrote his first three novels. Serge would eventually publish eight, as well as several nonfiction works and collections of essays.
Serge was eventually exiled to Orenburg near the border with Kazakhstan.
There, he lived a marginal existence among others in the process of being tossed aside (which generally meant eliminated) by the lethal paranoia of Stalinism. Execution seemed likely.
After a letter-writing campaign by André Gide and other French leftist intellectuals, Serge and his family were expelled from the Soviet Union and had their citizenships revoked.
They were sent to the relative safety of Brussels, but this was by no means the end of Serge’s tribulations.
Victor Serge was an insightful chronicler of the revolutionary movements in which he participated and the complex, often brutal politics to which they gave rise.
Perhaps his best-known work is The Case of Comrade Tulayev, a novel about the murder of a Soviet bureaucrat and the waves of purges that follow, sweeping up and extinguishing people who had nothing to do with the crime.
The novel reads like a bill of indictment, somewhat like Koestler’s Darkness at Noon, but as if that text had been written by someone who still believed that communism could be redeemed.
Serge’s work languished in obscurity after his death. By the late 1940s, the political environment had changed.
The idealism that had drawn so many to communism in the decades after 1917 mainly had been extinguished by Stalin’s policies of mass extermination of political enemies and vast numbers of others, almost all of whom were completely innocent.
Having had to flee France during the Nazi invasion, Serge and his family had ended up in Mexico. By this time, he was even more of an outsider.
Serge had broken with Trotsky over (among other things) his support for the POUM (Partido Obrero de Unificación Marxista) in the Spanish Civil War.
Although Trotsky was dead, the break put Serge in the wrong place with those who revered his memory. He tried to continue his journalism work, but falling out with Trotsky cut him off from the émigré left.
Still, Serge remained a prolific writer. While in Mexico, he completed The Case of Comrade Tulayev, Unforgiving Years (a novel about leftists struggling to survive the war years), and also wrote a memoir.
Serge wrote his last novel, Last Times, at this time. Fast-paced and written to appeal to a popular audience, the book tells the story of the fall of France in a series of overlapping narratives about people fleeing from Paris to Marseille, many hoping to go further.
As is often the case with Serge’s writing, much of Last Times is drawn from the author’s personal experiences.
In 1940, Serge and his young son Vlady fled Paris for Marseilles, hiding in the suburbs with André Breton. Eventually, Serge, Vlady, Breton, and Claude Levi-Strauss secured passage on a boat that would take them to Mexico City after stops in half a dozen other Caribbean ports.
Serge’s story is told through a series of overlapping narratives whose subjects are representative figures from the French society he knew. There are no heroes, only people coping more or less effectively with a situation they can’t control and whose future course they can’t predict.
Last Times shares some of the same territory as Anna Seghers’ novel Transit. However, Serge is more concerned with studying various types and their environments. It’s a bit like what you might expect if Transit had been composed by Balzac’s Human Comedy.
The fundamental question confronting everyone in Last Times is whether to flee and how. Each must confront what kind of threat the Germans will pose, what they will risk by staying, and what they will lose by departing.
The leitmotiv of all the stories is the breakdown of established order and relationships and the uncertainty about what sort of order is to follow.
Serge’s primary interest is the antifascists, who know they must depart and witness the transition from the old Republican order to the collaborationism of Vichy being born as they leave.
The new edition of Last Times, issued two years ago with a new title (the original translation came out in 1946 as The Long Dusk), is particularly timely.
The hegemonic era of liberal democracy established after the end of the Second World War seems very much in decline.
Although the results of the elections in the UK and France have offered a brief respite, the prospect of another Trump presidency in the United States casts a pall over Europe.
The choices confronted by Serge’s protagonists are increasingly those faced today by those of us inclined to speak out and militate against the rising tide of national populism.
The liberal democratic order now in decline was never as noble as its boosters made it out to be. But the order that is emerging seems far worse by any reasonable measure.
Serge was a true believer until the very end. He never lost his faith in the struggle for a more just order, and he had seen things deteriorate to the point of no return on more than one occasion.
While much of Last Times is dark and depressing, the underlying theme is that the antifascists have to live to fight another day.
Victor Serge’s writings show that despite such difficulties, struggle is the only option to survive.
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Photograph courtesy of Joel Schalit. All rights reserved.