Memoirs of a Revolutionary (New York Review Books Classics) by Victor Serge (PDF)

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A New York Review Books Original Victor Serge is one of the great men of the 20th century —and one of its great writers too. He was an anarchist, an agitator, a revolutionary, an exile, a historian of his times, as well as a brilliant novelist, and in Memoirs of a Revolutionary he devotes all his passion and genius to describing this extraordinary—and exemplary—career. Serge tells of his upbringing among exiles and conspirators, of his involvement with the notorious Bonnot Gang and his years in prison, of his role in the Russian Revolution, and of the Revolution’s collapse into despotism and terror. Expelled from the Soviet Union, Serge went to Paris, where he evaded the KGB and the Nazis before fleeing to Mexico. Memoirs of a Revolutionary recounts a thrilling life on the front lines of history and includes vivid portraits not only of Trotsky, Lenin, and Stalin but of countless other figures who struggled to remake the world. Peter Sedgwick’s fine translation of Memoirs of a Revolutionary was abridged when first published in 1963. This is the first edition in English to present the entirety of Serge’s book.

User’s Reviews

Editorial Reviews: Review “The Memoirs tells a harrowing story — Serge spent most of his adult life in prison and/or exile and saw the Russian Revolution, which for him was the pinnacle of his life in radical activism, lead to one of the most brutal dictatorships in human memory. But it also is a forward-looking book, committed to recording the history of an era in the obvious hope that others will learn from it. It is both realist and idealist, an attitude that is essential to any functional left-wing, or even liberal, movement.” —Los Angeles Review of Books”Memoirs is a document that is essential, above all, as a denouncement of oppression, an eye-witness account, written in heat and at speed, but with the talent of the true writer, of what it was like to be at the heart of the machine – and to stand up to it. This is the most complete edition yet published in English (Sedgwick’s first, abridged translation appeared nearly 50 years ago). How it has taken so long to appear is one of those unfathomable mysteries…. Anyway, here it is at last, and anyone who cares about justice and freedom of speech should have a copy.”— Nicholas Lezard, The Guardian“This book is a fiery testament to political conscience and revolutionary hope.” —Mike Davis, author of City of Quartz“I can’t think of anyone who has written about the revolutionary movement in [the 20th century] with Serge’s combination of moral insight and intellectual richness.” — Dwight Macdonald“Serge is one of the most compelling of twentieth- century ethical and literary heroes.” — Susan Sontag”The tight links among Serge’s traits—his intellectual seriousness, the drive to literary expression, an intransigent radicalism not quite separable from restiveness in the face of routine corruption and dishonesty—are especially evident in Memoirs of a Revolutionary, now available for the first time in a complete English translation…Serge can recognize the range of experience and responses that make up the texture of life in even the most nightmarishly repressive system.” –Scott McLemee, Bookforum About the Author Victor Serge (1890–1947) was born Victor Lvovich Kibalchich to Russian anti-Tsarist exiles, impoverished intellectuals living “by chance” in Brussels. A precocious anarchist firebrand, young Victor was sentenced to five years in a French penitentiary in 1912. Expelled to Spain in 1917, he participated in an anarcho-syndicalist uprising before leaving to join the Revolution in Russia. Detained for more than a year in a French concentration camp, Serge arrived in St.Petersburg early in 1919 and joined the Bolsheviks, serving in the press services of the Communist International. An outspoken critic of Stalin, Serge was expelled from the Party and arrested in 1929. Nonetheless, he managed to complete three novels (Men in Prison, Birth of Our Power, and Conquered City) and a history (Year One of the Russian Revolution), published in Paris. Arrested again in Russia and deported to Central Asia in 1933, he was allowed to leave theUSSR in 1936 after international protests by militants and prominent writers like André Gide and Romain Rolland. Using his insider’s knowledge, Serge published a stream of impassioned, documented exposés of Stalin’s Moscow show trials and of machinations in Spain, which went largely unheeded. Stateless, penniless, hounded by Stalinist agents, Serge lived in precarious exile in Brussels, Paris, Vichy France, and Mexico City, where he died in 1947. His classic Memoirs of a Revolutionary and his great last novels, Unforgiving Years and The Case of Comrade Tulayev (both available as NYRB Classics), were written “for the desk drawer” and published posthumously.Peter Sedgwick (1934–1983) translated and wrote the introductions for Victor Serge’s Memoirs and Year One of the Russian Revolution. A lifelong activist and a founding member of the New Left in Britain, he wrote seminal essays on Serge. In addition to his journalism and political writings, he is the author of a book, Psycho-Politics.Adam Hochschild has written for The New Yorker, Harper’s Magazine, The New York Review of Books, and The Nation. His books include King Leopold’s Ghost and, most recently, To End All Wars. He teaches at the Graduate School of Journalism at the University of California, Berkeley.George Paizis is the author of Marcel Martinet: Poet of the Revolution, Love and the Novel: The Poetics and Politics of Romantic Fiction, and, with Andrew N. Leak, The Holocaust and the Text: Speaking the Unspeakable. He is a longstanding member of the Socialist Workers Party and until recently was Senior Lecturer in the French Department at University College London.Richard Greeman has translated and written the introductions for five of Serge’s novels (including Unforgiving Years and Conquered City, both available as NYRB Classics). A veteran Socialist and co-founder of the Praxis Center and Victor Serge Library in Moscow, Russia (www.praxiscenter.ru), Greeman is author of Beware Of “Vegetarian” Sharks: Radical Rants And Internationalist Essays.

Reviews from Amazon users which were colected at the time this book was published on the website:

⭐This is a great memoir by a man who was both a participant and an observer, and who also possessed a prodigious intellect and will. He was Russian by parentage and later by citizenship and French by “adoption and literary expression.” Altogether he was fluent in five languages. The impression of Victor Serge that I developed while reading this book is that he was a man devoted to the truth as he understood it, yet he was tolerant of the opinions of those with whom he disagreed. He also possessed an acutely analytical mind, and an extraordinary memory. One need not be a leftist to appreciate this book and the man who wrote it. My politics are the opposite of Serge’s, but I have developed a deep sympathy for Victor Serge and a much improved understanding of the ground from which European leftism developed.

⭐You can agree or disagree with Serge, but you shouldn’t ignore him.He was in the midst of the biggest revolutions of the 20th century and managed to escape death multiple times. He’s by no means a perfect human being, even disconsidering our modern bias toward his points of view, but the idealism is very interesting and frankly, sounds a bit romantically naive. That said, this is a treaty on following your radical ideas to the max and is incredibly well written. It’s an autobiography by a master novelist.I just wish there was a kindle version, it would greatly ease the pain of having to go back and forth to the (excellent) reference material in the end.

⭐This is a really brilliant and humane memoir. Serge does for the Bolshevik Revolution what Orwell did for the Spanish Civil War, i.e, participate in an epic historical event and produce an eyewitness acocount that is credible, critical and thought-provoking.

⭐A record of an extraordinary life. Not the type of revolutionary you would think, but rather of one unique in the 20th century

⭐Great history of early period of the Russian Revolution by a participant and observer. I’ve read most of the well known histories, biographies and autobiographies by the leaders. Serge includes profiles of the lesser known participants from the point of view of a “non-Bolshevik.”

⭐remained a communist. Discussed his devotion to revolution despite the Killing.Idealistic to the extreme. Unique inside view of Russian revolution 1917 and on.

⭐I bought this for my brother, a professor. He is delighted with this book!It was new and at a reasonable price.

⭐From my beautiful perch in one the wealthiest counties in the US can I look back on the 20th century with other than despair. Despite all its heroism Victor Serge’s life was a tragedy, a tragedy partly of his own making. There is no doubt he lived fully, with novels and books that never saw the light of day, with years in prison and a determining role in the elaboration of the Russian Revolution. Were it not that he was imprisoned in France he might have died in the trenches of the Somme. Others must have been released to such a fate. Ten years of his life in prison. Another six or so in exile, another have dozen in internal exile and another maybe 12 as a commissar of some sort. The memoir is certainly that of a novelist. His descriptions of the physical characteristics of the overwhelming number of actors in the drama he describes read like those of fiction. His smoothly written almost philosophic overview of events are the work of a dramatist. Among historians I wonder how his descriptions are taken. Are they confirmed by other historical evidence, are they the only evidence, or are they taken with more than a grain of salt? I must admit I felt inundated by the sheer number of people mentioned and never used the list in the back of the book to keep track of them. A committed revolutionary he never succumbed to the authoritarian bitterness of Trotsky. Yet his conclusion that it was the turn to totalitarianism and violence so marked in Kronstadt which undermined the revolution may be self serving. Although he raised eyebrows at the Cheka’s early mayhem and tried to save individuals, at the time he seemed to think that the rooting out and murder of opponents may have been what “saved” the revolution. And he certainly made little public issue of it. Somewhere I read that Stalin killed more communists than Hitler.The book is a memoir not a history and yet there is little about the movements that must have been all around Serge impelling Stalin into power after Lenin died. Serge was possibly not close enough to power to really observe the inner battles. It was not Stalin himself but a vastly movement within the Soviet Union which catapulted Stalin to the top. Serge’s only comment on this was something about younger ambitious bureaucratic inclined party members.Why Serge survived when so many others, who had equally important European admirers, is a mystery, maybe shear luck. Trotsky was too big to kill at home. And Libby Litvinov somehow slipped under the radar of Maxim’s usefulness. Serge in exile is a survivor whose life was saved by non-communist American lefties, maybe for his literary achievements. It is all so sad but Serge had a spirit that now seems almost unimaginable but which he must have shared with other dissident committed Marxists, like surviving Spanish Republicans. Auden was right, the aftermath of WWI was indeed more than a low dishonest decade. We are again experiencing the enlightenment driven away, the unmentionable odour of death, the habit-forming pain, mismanagement and grief. Hitler stroked the strings of a sick dispirited nation. Stalin created the lie of supposed socialist construction, the US either sunk into its self-denying, parochial narcissistic isolation or fought a “good war” only abandon its ideals in an overborne anti-communism and consolidation of its own world hegemony. As he foresaw the Cold War consolidation of Russian totalitarianism Serge would no doubt see the US Conservatives as simple imperialists and Liberals, for all their good motives, as captives of the same forces.Read the book, but skim the lists of people, unless you are either a historian or devotee of detail. It makes one think about the meaning of the world: conferring prosperity and equality on some, while covering a shrieking Afghani woman in blood, driving a Tibetan monk to immolation, impelling an angry young black man to strike out at a New York city cop, and allowing American liberals to rationalize Palestinian Apartheid and ethnic cleansing. Those to whom evil is done do evil in return and those who haven’t suffered much evil are either reactionary—–I will kill you if you take away my assault rifle —are too self absorbed to care.Charlie Fisher prof. emeritus and author of Dismantling Discontent: Buddha’s Way Through Darwin’s World and the forthcoming Meditation in the Wild: Buddhism’s Origins in the Heart of Nature

⭐If you’ve read any of Victor Serge’s novels you will know what kind of bloke he was. Fearless, honest, clear-sighted. Yes, he was out there on the extreme Left, and if you’re a conservative, or even a moderate, you’ll probably find his political beliefs unpalatable. However, he had the integrity to recognise the errors and the failings and the impracticalities of many of the causes he championed, especially the Russian Revolution. And he spoke out against injustice, oppression and totalitarianism at great risk to himself. At heart he was a deeply humane man who genuinely wanted the whole world to be better off than it was in his day: more democratic, more free, more fair.These memoirs read like his novels, with the difference that the central character is himself. His parents were anti-Tsarist Russian exiles who were living in Belgium when Victor was born in 1890. His father’s cousin was hanged for making the bomb that killed Alexander II in 1881, so he had revolution in his blood. He talks about his strange behaviour as a young child. For a couple of years, despite being a well-loved child, he did malicious little things like tearing up his father’s notes or putting salt in the milk. He can’t explain why he did this, but he does sketch an impoverished childhood in which his younger brother died of malnutrition. His parents disappear from the story when he was about 15 and suddenly, he is an anarchist, a print-shop worker and a journalist. He skates over a lot of things that affected him personally, such as meeting and loving women, marrying them (he was married three times), being imprisoned. Some of the details are covered in other writings; including, ironically, his novels. Birth of our Power, for example, as a work of fiction, tells us more about Victor’s activities in Barcelona in 1917 and in the French concentration camp thereafter, than we get in these memoirs. The author seems more comfortable talking about the external world than his own internal world, and he does explain why that is towards the end of the book. The explanation is more nuanced than the stereotypical “socialist” idea that individuals don’t matter. For Serge they matter a great deal, not just his family and comrades, but the whole of humanity.One of the many things that makes this book an invaluable contribution to twentieth-century history is the fearless way the author denounces not just Stalinism but the drift towards tyranny that began under Lenin. Two examples of this are Serge’s opposition to the use of capital punishment and his horror at the way other political groups are persecuted by the Bolsheviks. Serge suffered for this. He was expelled from the Communist Party, imprisoned, exiled, had his manuscripts stolen and endured the anguish of seeing his in-laws arrested because of his political activities.Other examples of his political wisdom and his stature as an historian are his account of the betrayal of the Spanish revolution in 1937, the rise of Fascism and the events that led to the Fall of France in June 1940. His escape from Europe with his son is tremendously exciting and he gives full and touching credit to the writers in the US and elsewhere who campaigned on his behalf.The narrative takes us up to 1943, by which time Serge and his wife and son were living in Mexico City, so it ends four years before Serge’s death. Those four years were filled with more revolutionary activity, writing, tireless attempts to get his works published – he was shunned by publishers across the political spectrum because he was out of sync with the compromises and cowardice of his times. In an epilogue written, his son Vlady, who must have been mid-twenties at the time, tells how he went to see his father’s body, which had been taken to a police station after he had died suddenly of a heart attack. Vlady says that when he was shown into the room, he noticed that the soles of his father’s shoes had holes in them. He ended his life as he began it – penniless.This edition has a translator’s introduction by Peter Sedgwick and a comprehensive glossary and notes by Richard Greeman. The glossary is especially useful as it gives useful information about dozens of people mentioned in the text, from leading politicians and activists to obscure figures that you’re unlikely ever to have heard of but who all played their part in the course of events. There is also a foreword by Adam Hochschild. He gives a very vivid explanation for Serge’s writing style in which he says that it comes “from the urgency of being a man on the run. The police are at the door; his friends are being arrested; he must get the news out; every word must tell.” In this book every word does indeed tell and I would recommend it to anyone who wants to know more about this great figure, or who wants to read an alternative but eminently valid account of European history in the first half of the twentieth-century.

⭐Serge writes about a period in history that seems, in hindsight, so much more simple. Good versus evil, black against white or rather red against white, idealism against self interest. Yet dig a little deeper, as he does and it is not so simple. The best of ideals turned into the arguably one of the worst tyrannies. Serge had to make compromises as did the idealists who fought this revolution and it is tragic that so many died at their own hands when they saw what a lifetime of sacrifice had achieved.In the end what is there to say? Serge has to maintain a hope in humanity or else what was his life’s work for? If this is what the very best minds of their generation could achieve it is hard to maintain that hope.

⭐I very much enjoyed reading this complete edition of the Memoirs of Victor Serge; the previous version had been condensed, whereas this version missed nothing out. The transition of the writer from an anarchist in Belgium and Spain to the Bolshevik Party in Russia is fascinating, but even more stunning is the honest critique of the way in which the Bolsheviks came to believe that they were right and everyone else was wrong to such an extent that they began to eliminate all opposition to their ideas.

⭐Another outstanding memoir by Victor Serge

⭐This book was hugely informative and very well written. I gained considerable insight into a turbulent period and learned a lot about how great individuals deal with personal injustice.

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