THE CASE OF COMRADE SERGE
The news this morning is filled with the death of Alexander Solzhenitsyn. We are told that it was he who blew the gaff on the horrors of the Soviet System, the camps, the terror, the insanity of an ideology gone mad.
Now I am an admirer of Solzhenitsyn’s courage, if not his reactionary politics, he was at the end of his life after all a very narrow Russian nationalist. Though given his life experience and what he suffered I am in truth no position to make a judgement.
However the idea that he was the ‘first’ to expose the hideous lie that was Stalinism is itself untrue. There were others.
Out of the writing that emerged from the moral abyss of Stalin’s Soviet Union several books stand out, Vasily Grossman’s ‘Life and Fate,’ Anotoli Rybakov’s ‘Children of the Arbat,’ and an extraordinary insightful book ‘The Case of Comrade Tulayev,’ by Victor Serge.
Serge’s life story almost exactly parallels that of the European Left from 1900 to 1945. (Only perhaps Arthur Koestler shares a remotely similar path, and ‘Darkness at Noon’ and his own two volume autobiography ‘Arrow in The Blue’ and ‘Invisible Writing’ comes close to Serge’s experience). For Serge was not only an exceptionally talented writer he was also a participant, a revolutionary anarchist, a supporter of the early Bolshevik revolution and was acquainted with Lenin, Trotsky and Stalin. Indeed he fell out with Trotsky over Kronstadt; his ‘Kronstadt moment’ was Kronstadt itself.
You can certainly make sense of the twentieth century without reading Serge’s Memoirs of a Revolutionary, but reading it will make your task so much easier.
So on a day when quite rightly we salute Alexander Solzhenitsyn we should also hold in our minds others who sought to speak truth to power, though whose critique came not from the right but from the left.
Now I am an admirer of Solzhenitsyn’s courage, if not his reactionary politics, he was at the end of his life after all a very narrow Russian nationalist. Though given his life experience and what he suffered I am in truth no position to make a judgement.
However the idea that he was the ‘first’ to expose the hideous lie that was Stalinism is itself untrue. There were others.
Out of the writing that emerged from the moral abyss of Stalin’s Soviet Union several books stand out, Vasily Grossman’s ‘Life and Fate,’ Anotoli Rybakov’s ‘Children of the Arbat,’ and an extraordinary insightful book ‘The Case of Comrade Tulayev,’ by Victor Serge.
Serge’s life story almost exactly parallels that of the European Left from 1900 to 1945. (Only perhaps Arthur Koestler shares a remotely similar path, and ‘Darkness at Noon’ and his own two volume autobiography ‘Arrow in The Blue’ and ‘Invisible Writing’ comes close to Serge’s experience). For Serge was not only an exceptionally talented writer he was also a participant, a revolutionary anarchist, a supporter of the early Bolshevik revolution and was acquainted with Lenin, Trotsky and Stalin. Indeed he fell out with Trotsky over Kronstadt; his ‘Kronstadt moment’ was Kronstadt itself.
You can certainly make sense of the twentieth century without reading Serge’s Memoirs of a Revolutionary, but reading it will make your task so much easier.
So on a day when quite rightly we salute Alexander Solzhenitsyn we should also hold in our minds others who sought to speak truth to power, though whose critique came not from the right but from the left.
