Meditation on a Maverick by Richard Greeman

“ANARCHISTS NEVER SURRENDER!” WHAT AN APT TITLE MITCH ABIDOR HAS chosen for his beautifully translated anthology of the anarchist writings of Victor Lvovitch Kibalchich, aka Victor Serge (1890–1947), who up to the age of twenty-eight wrote and agitated under the pseudonym Le Rétif (“Maverick”).

The phrase “Anarchists Never Surrender!” comes from a 1909 Maverick article, written at the age of eighteen, and the anarchists in question, like Kibalchich himself, were Russian exiles, resolute bandits who fought to the death against a whole squad of London policemen. Maverick’s dramatic declaration foreshadowed his own and his comrades’ doom in the ‘Tragic Bandits’ affair a few years later in Paris. Indeed, Victor Kibalchich may be said to have inherited that fate, as he bore the famous name of N.I. Kibalchich, a distant relative, the People’s Will terrorist whose bombs blew up the Czar, executed in 1881 and considered a martyr-hero by Victor’s parents.

Victor’s whole life was to be one of constant rebellion and constant persecution, and he already had a head start at birth. He spent more than ten of his fifty-seven years in various forms of captivity, generally harsh. He did five years’ straight time (1912–17) in a French penitentiary (“anarchist bandit”); survived nearly two years (1917–18) in World War I concentration camp (“Bolshevik suspect”); suffered three months’ grueling interrogation in Moscow’s notorious GPU Lubianka prison (“Trotskyite spy”); and endured three years’ deportation to Central Asia for his declared opposition to Stalin’s policies and for refusing to confess to trumped-up espionage charges (1933–36). Small wonder his first novel (written in French) bore the title Men in Prison.[1]

Born of Russian exile parents camped out in Brussels, Victor was a stateless, undocumented alien from birth, destined to be expelled from nearly every country he ever lived in. He was thus vaccinated against the plague of nationalism and remained immune to the patriotic fever that swept away many socialists and anarchists at the outbreak of World War I in 1914. Young Kibalchich inherited the revolutionary ethos of the Russian intelligentsia, and little else from his penniless parents when they split up, leaving him on his own in Brussels at the age of fifteen. There, he bonded with a gang of teenagers, idealistic underpaid apprentices like himself, “closer than brothers.” The Brussels brothers started out as Socialist Young Guards but soon grew impatient with reformism and gravitated to anarchism, impressed with the free life at a short-lived anarchist Commune just outside of Brussels. There they learned the printing trades and eventually put out their own little sheet, The Rebel, where Victor first cut his teeth as a writer and adopted the name “Maverick,” symbolizing his distance from the tradition of his Russian parents and his embrace of an angry new anarchist identity in the slum streets of Brussels. “Maverick” was the signature on the articles in the first part of this anthology, starting in 1908 and continuing throughout Victor’s young manhood to 1917, the year of the Russian Revolution, when Kibalchich started signing “Victor Serge” and decided to go to Russia.

Meanwhile, as “Maverick” he moved to Paris in 1909 and eventually became the editor of the weekly organ of French anarcho-individualism, l’anarchie, which preached, among other things, the right of individuals to reappropriate property from the bourgeois bandits who had, after all, stolen it in the first place (Proudhon: property = theft). A perfect theory, until Victor’s band of brothers, in total revolt against society and unwilling to be either “masters” or “slaves,” began to put it into practice in 1912 through a bloody series of “expropriations” (holdups) in which they pioneered the use of stolen automobiles as getaway cars (the police had only bicycles). Victor/Maverick, although appalled by the bloodshed, defended these “Tragic Bandits of Anarchy” in the pages of l’anarchie, declaring, “I am with the wolves!” He was soon arrested. Like the Russian anarchists in London, Maverick’s home-boys fought it out to the last, holding off small armies of police, troops, and armed civilians. In 1913, the survivors of what was known as the “Bonnot Gang” were put on trial. Victor’s oldest friend got the guillotine, and Maverick was sentenced to five years in solitary in the pen. He managed to survive, and years later wrote a great novel about the experience, Men in Prison.[2] That is the context of the early (1908–1913) articles in this collection.

Released in the middle of World War I and expelled from France, Victor ended up in Barcelona, Spain. There he got involved with the local anarcho-syndicalists and participated in the preparation of an insurrectionary general strike in July 1917, itself inspired by the February 1917 Revolution in Russia which seemed to beckon to Victor from across wartorn Europe. He laid to rest his individualist identity of “The Maverick,” and began signing himself “Victor Serge,” the identity that he would retain for the rest of his life. The Parisian individualist who scorned revolutions as ‘illusions,’ had now experienced a revolutionary movement in Spain and felt himself drawn to the Russian Revolution as to a flame. Yet we can see in the two articles from 1917 that he was still settling his scores with anarcho-individualism in his mind. And indeed, as “Serge” he retained the essence of his anarchism—the belief in the primacy of the individual, in human freedom—to his dying day.

Arriving in Petrograd,[3] the frozen, starving, besieged capital of Red Russia, Serge made the rounds of the anarchists and socialists before deciding to work with the Bolsheviks as the only practical way to serve the living revolution while hoping to influence it in a libertarian direction once victory was won. The newly founded Communist International immediately put to use Serge’s talents as a writer, translator, and printer, and at a crucial moment in the Civil War, when all seemed lost, he joined the Communist Party, the better to serve the cause. In this, he had much in common with other ‘Soviet’ anarchists, including the Americans Bill Chatov and Big Bill Haywood.

This was the period when Lenin was wooing the “best elements” among the anarchists and anarcho-syndicalists of Europe to the Communist International, and Serge’s reports, published in France, were part of that Soviet propaganda campaign. For example Serge’s 1920 “The Anarchists and the Russian Revolution,”[4] (like the “Letter from Russia” in this volume) is a passionately argued apology for the Bolshevik monopoly of power, necessitated by the Civil War, and the repression of Russian anarchists, an armed group whose disorganization and irresponsibility spelled a threat to the revolution. Serge concludes by calling upon his fellow anarchists to join with the Communists and to “strive to preserve the spirit of liberty.”

They will be the enemies of the ambitious, of budding political careerists and commissars, of formalists, party dogmatists and intriguers, in other words to fight the illusions of power, to foresee and forestall the crystallization of the workers’ state as it has emerged from war and revolution, everywhere and always to encourage the initiative of individuals and of the masses, to recall to those who might forget that the dictatorship is a weapon, a means, an expedient, a necessary evil—but never an aim or a final goal.

Thus, on the one hand Serge proved his commitment as a loyal, disciplined, unambitious rank-and-file militant, content to serve the Soviets with all his energy and talent. On the other, he openly maintained his personal criticisms of the regime’s abuses and used whatever influence he could muster to correct them. This often included intervening personally with high officials of the Cheka secret police in order to free innocent arrestees, including anarchists and other dissidents, at the risk of his being considered their “confederate” and shot at any moment.

And so, in 1919 Serge chose to steer a precarious course between the Scylla of conformist revolutionary careerism and the Charybdis of impotent isolation among the revolution’s embittered critics. Serge struggled to maintain this attitude as long as loyal opposition was tolerated in Russia and even afterwards, when he was treated as a pariah. For Serge, as for many others, the crisis came in 1921 with the anarchist-supported revolt of the revolutionary sailors’ Soviet at the Kronstadt naval base and its bloody repression by the Soviet government. Serge was involved with the mediation efforts of the American anarchists Emma Goldman and Alexander Berkman but was appalled by the Party’s unwillingness to negotiate and by the lies it told about the sailors. Demoralized, he withdrew from politics and joined a short-lived French anarchist agricultural commune near Petrograd, before deciding to accept a Comintern job in Berlin, where he hoped to help bring about a German revolution that would liberate Russia from the constraints of isolation and backwardness.

Two of the articles from Russia in this collection are dated 1921, that is to say after the repression of Kronstadt, generally seen as a watershed. The article “New Tendencies in Russian Anarchism” is a catalog of libertarian groups which, however divided among themselves, all supported the revolutionary dictatorship, while remaining outside of the Party. Only in passing does it mention those anarchists who did not support the dictatorship and who thus had no legal publications to analyze, including a vast anarchist-inspired movement under Makhno in Ukraine. And although Serge cites the American anarchists who did join the Communists, he fails to mention Goldman and Berkman, who were, like him, disillusioned by Kronstadt. Sins of omission, to be sure. To my knowledge Serge never fabricates, and his Soviet apologetics, like the highly convincing “Letter from Russia” included here, are not dull propaganda but sharply observed realities presented in passionate argument.

We have not yet come to the end of the litany of arrests, expulsions, and persecutions that punctuated the saga of Serge’s life as an irreducible revolutionary maverick. In the hope that a European revolution could relieve the pressure strangling the revolution in Russia, Serge next moved to Berlin as a Communist journalist-cum-secret-agent. During the 1923 crisis, Serge and his family were obliged to flee Germany for their lives after a failed Red coup. In 1925, he returned to Russia to fight Stalin as a member of the Left Opposition. In 1928 he was expelled from the Party and arrested, but then freed thanks to reactions in France, where his revolutionary writings were well known. Arrested again in 1933, he refused to ‘confess’ after months of pressure and was deported to detention on the Ural.

Serge escaped from the clutches of Stalin’s gulag thanks to the protests of his comrades abroad—a “miracle of solidarity” he called it. In April 1936, just before the Great Purges, Stalin finally allowed Serge and his family to leave Russia after his imprisonment had become a cause célèbre in Paris, thus saving Serge’s life. But Russia then canceled his passport and deprived him of his Soviet nationality—the only one he ever had. Fleeing the Nazis in 1940–41, again stateless and undocumented, Serge was briefly interned in Marseille as a suspect. After escaping by freighter to Mexico, he was locked up by the Vichy authorities in Martinique, expelled from the Dominican Republic and Haiti, and then jailed by the Cubans.

Thanks to an “invisible international” of comrades, he found asylum in Mexico in 1941, soon after the assassination of Trotsky, but the Communists, on orders from Moscow, prevented him from publishing and physically attacked him when he tried to speak at a public memorial protest for the Italo-American anarchist Carlo Tresca in Mexico.

Exhausted by years of struggle and imprisonment, he died at the age of fifty-seven with three unpublished masterpieces in his desk drawer. Since the Mexican authorities would not admit corpses lacking a nationality into the cemetery, his friends buried him as a citizen of the Spanish Republic—which had ceased to exist upon Franco’s victory in 1939.

All the Right Enemies

Victor the Maverick was indeed one of those anarchists who “never surrender.” He lived and died an internationalist, an individualist, and an enemy of the state. And although as “Victor Serge” he collaborated with the Bolsheviks from 1919 to 1927, he never surrendered his identity as an anarchist, fighting as best as he could—inside and then outside of the only legal party—for the rights of the individual. As the list of the governments that locked him up or kicked him out indicates, Serge had ‘all the right enemies’—both on the Right and the Left.[5] This made his books more or less unpublishable, and his last novels and Memoirs only appeared posthumously. As he wrote shortly before his death, “In every publishing house there are three conservatives and at least one Stalinist.”

Attacks from the ‘Left’ began as soon as he arrived in Europe in 1936. The Communist press in France took up the old (1913) bourgeois accusation of ‘anarchist bandit’ in an attempt to discredit Serge’s exposés of the Moscow frame-up trials in Stalin’s Russia. Yet he remained under suspicion, and former GPU agents Elsa Reiss and Walter Krivitsky imagined Serge’s release from the gulag was a probably a GPU ploy to insinuate an agent-provocateur into the European Trotskyist movement. In fact the real Stalinist agent-provocateur (“Etienne” aka Marc Borovsky, Trotsky’s trusted Paris correspondent) was busy inculcating the Old Man with distrust of Serge, which probably contributed to their eventual break.[6]

Attacks by the Stalinists didn’t prevent certain anarchists from chafing Serge for his earlier support of Lenin and Trotsky. But when Serge, who in 1937 was still Trotsky’s faithful admirer and French translator, dared raise the issues of Bolshevism’s responsibility in the 1918 creation of the Cheka secret police and the suppression of the 1921 Kronstadt sailors’ rebellion, Trotsky excoriated Serge as a “sycophant,” “moralist,” a dilettante,” and a renegade. (See “Once More over Kronstadt” in this collection, 196.)

Back in 1936, Serge, fresh from Stalin’s gulag, had joined up with Trotsky’s Fourth International and urged them to reach out to the anarchists in Spain, where along with the POUM, they were spearheading the revolution from below and the war against Franco’s Fascists (see “Call for an Alliance with the Anarchists in Spain,” in this collection, 194). Trotsky was sympathetic to the idea but was then arrested, and his European followers soon turned on Serge for his softness on the POUM. Seventy years later, some Trotskyist epigones still denigrate Serge for not being revolutionary enough, most recently with the unanswerable but specious argument that if he were alive today he “would have become” a neocon.[7] With friends like these, who needs enemies?

Trotsky and his followers also accused Serge—for once with some justice—of attempting to synthesize anarchism and Marxism. Serge, who described his evolution from anarchism to Marxism as “slow and painful,” never broke with his anarchist past and, on the contrary, maintained friendly relations with his old anarchist comrades and remained engaged with anarchist ideas throughout his life. Thus, this volume concludes with Serge’s very informative 1938 popular study of “Anarchist Thought” and a manuscript essay, “Anarchism,” which was found among his posthumous papers in Mexico.[8]

As a novelist too, he was always conscious of the preciousness of the individual, of individual consciousness within the mass. Above all, he saw both Marxism and anarchism as branches of a big, broadly socialist revolutionary movement running through history and attempted to place them both, with their success and failures within that history.

Alas, the sixty years since Serge’s death have not softened the resentment of certain French anarchists who cannot pardon the anarcho-individualist who signed his pre-1912 articles “Maverick” for having evolved from individualism to revolutionary syndicalism and thence to Marxism. The year 2011 saw the publication by the anarchist imprint Libertalia of a whole book that attacked Serge not just for betraying anarchism during the period when, like many anarchists eager to fight for the embattled Russian Revolution, he worked with and eventually joined the Bolsheviks, but also portrayed him as fundamentally “duplicitous,” a “hardened liar,” and a perpetual “schizophrenic” for the crime of changing his views in the course of his—and history’s—political evolution. Indeed, the author of Victor Serge, l’homme double even sees Serge’s turn to fiction-writing as another form of ‘lying’ (like Plato, who famously banned art from his Republic, as the incarnation of a ‘lie.’)[9]

Even my old friend Peter Sedgwick—who in 1963 first relaunched Serge with his pioneering translation of Memoirs of a Revolutionary and his seminal essays on Serge—ended up blaming Serge for the “inconsistency and even irresponsibility whereby he was constantly drawn close enough to contending alignments of the Left to earn the opprobrium and suspicion of each camp in turn.” I suppose that’s one way to look at Serge’s brand of courageous critical-minded, antisectarian, yet totally committed revolutionary thinking. Sedgwick, a former psychologist, tries to explain Serge’s “love-hate oscillation in the embraces of the Bolshevik State” as a psychological aberration, a “bizarre inner need for contrary political identifications.”[10]

Yet to me, as to many Serge readers, Serge, whatever his hesitations, uncertainties and inconsistencies, remains an exemplary revolutionary who still provides us with a moral and political compass in times when so many have lost their way. One need not agree with all his political choices; sometimes he steers off course, but never too far or for too long. And that “course” is always “set on hope” as Serge put it in his poem “Constellation of Death Brothers.”[11]

Double Duty

How did Serge keep his moral and political compass pointing more or less in the right direction through the twists and turns of twentieth-century revolution? The moral key to Serge’s behavior is his principle of “double duty,” a concept that helps us understand his ethical choices in each of the crises of his political life. Coming out of the anarchist ethical tradition, Serge felt that revolutionaries had a double duty to defend the revolutionary movement, both against its external enemies (the bourgeoisie, the Whites, etc.) and its internal enemies (authoritarianism, brutality, ego-tripping, corruption, stifling of debate, bureaucratization).

Serge first expounded the double duty principle in the 1930 preface to his history of Year One of the Russian Revolution, written when the author was living in semicaptivity in Leningrad, a political nonperson subject to arrest at any moment. Although couched in somewhat veiled language, it is a bold statement given the context. Serge exhorts his readers in Russia and the revolutionary workers’ movement “to serve the revolution by fighting the [internal] evils which afflict it, by learning to defend it against its own defects, by making every effort toward the ceaseless elaboration and practice of a politics inspired by the higher interests of the world proletariat; externally, to defend the first Workers’ Republic.” In 1932 Serge again advanced his concept of double duty in his book Literature and Revolution as the basis of his critique of conformist, uncritical pro-Soviet writers, but it is implicit in all his writings and essential to understanding his choices.

On the other hand, Serge was also forced to conclude ruefully that “the accomplishment of double duty can place [one] between the hammer and the anvil.” The problem with this balancing of internal and external dangers, of which way to bend the proverbial stick, calls for political judgment, and it is not always clear when the exigencies of the external defense should outweigh the dangers from within. Indeed, Serge’s political evolution is best understood as his successive responses to changing political circumstances, from the defeat of pre-World War I French anarchism through the victory of the Russian Revolution and its subsequent degeneration into Stalinist totalitarianism.

This concept of double duty helps explain what Serge’s critics among both the anarchists and the Trotskyists have called his “inconsistency.” For Serge, the violent individual revolts of French anarchism were attempts to escape from ‘a world without possible escape’ which had ended in absolute defeat: first the Bonnot tragedy and then the overnight conversion of Gustave Hervé and the antimilitarist anarchists into patriots at the outbreak of World War I. In the wake of these defeats, the Russian Revolution offered hope, and as long as he could discern credible hope for serious reform from within he adhered to it—first as a public apologist and private critic, then as an oppositionist, openly attacking bureaucratic tyranny in Russia and counterrevolutionary Comintern policy abroad.

As we have seen, Serge entered the Russian Revolution as an anarchist. He joined the Bolsheviks—all the while vowing to struggle as he could against their dictatorial tendencies—at the very moment when all seemed lost, with the Whites (backed by Poland, Czechoslovakia, France, Great Britain, and Japan) at the very gates of Petrograd. This was hardly an opportunistic move. The external enemy clearly had priority. “The Bolsheviks were certainly wrong on several essential points: their faith in state ownership, their penchant for centralization and administrative measures,” wrote Serge. “But if you wanted to struggle against their mistakes with a free spirit and with the spirit of freedom, you had to be among them.”

Although appalled by the Cheka secret police and the brutal suppression of the revolt of the sailors at Kronstadt, Serge nonetheless put “the danger from within” on the back burner and continued publicly to write pamphlets for the Reds, all the while privately trying to save political prisoners, anarchists, poets, and intellectuals from the firing squad and warning a few trusted European comrades. As long as he could perceive hope for reform from within and hope for relief abroad, Serge stuck with the Comintern, agitating for revolution in Germany, and writing within the confines of the “line.”

In his first interview with Trotsky in 1926, Serge declared, libertarian style, “We must do away with this bureaucracy.” “No,” replied Trotsky the authoritarian, “we must take it over!”[12] In the words of anarchist historian George Woodcock, “Where Trotsky was always governed in a difficult choice by revolutionary expediency, Serge was moved by a moral insight that preserved the essentially libertarian strain in his thought and nature.”[13] Daniel Guérin, the French Marxist turned anarchist, while critical of Serge’s silences in the 1920s, concluded: “Victor Serge was certainly too clear-minded to have any illusions about the real nature of the central Soviet power. But this power was still haloed with the prestige of the first victorious proletarian revolution; it was loathed by world counterrevolution; and that was one of the reasons—the most honorable—why Serge and many other revolutionaries put a padlock on their tongues.”[14]

Did Serge continue to hope and to hold his tongue too long? In hindsight, perhaps yes. As he himself wrote in 1937 in the introduction to Russia Twenty Years After, his powerful, documented exposé of Stalinism: “The past year shows that all the oppositions which, in the last fourteen years, stood up against the bureaucratic regime, underrated its profoundly counterrevolutionary power and, still more, its inhumanity. The judgments formulated hitherto by the Left Opposition to which I belonged, sinned only in indulgence and optimism, because the Opposition stuck to preserving at all costs the last chances, however feeble, of a political recovery, of a great reform which would have brought the Soviet Union back to the road of socialism.” Yet in the same Introduction, Serge reveals that many of his friends on the French Left pressured him not to publish his testimony.

Serge’s situation reveals that it may be harder to defend the movement against its inner enemies than against its outer ones. Courage to continue fighting the imperialists, capitalists, militarists, reactionaries, and such is rare enough. But such courage wins the praise of one’s peers, bonds us to them, and requires only physical sacrifice. It takes a kind of different courage to think for ourselves, to pay attention to our doubts, to carry them to their logical conclusions, to speak out against the internal flaws of our movement: abuses like conformism, the leadership cult, the stifling of debate, the toleration of male-chauvinism and sexism. Rarer is the courage to be in the minority, to stand alone, to reject the pretense that “we” have a monopoly on the truth, which permits us to indulge in Machiavellian deceptions and manipulations. It takes both kinds of courage to follow the rule of double duty, and if you do follow it, you may very well end up like Serge, making “all the right enemies.”

What his sectarian critics fail to recognize is that Serge, the lifelong practical revolutionary, saw anarchism and Marxism as currents within the broad historical stream of revolutionary socialism and from that perspective he was at once appreciative and critical of both. Summing up at the very end of his life, he noted:

The anarchists … underestimate the necessities of expanding industrial society, the importance of political power in social struggles, the complexity of social development, the impossibility of building a free and equitable society without passing through various transitional phases. Their doctrine is more emotional than scientific. But their denunciation of the role of the State and of coercion, their ceaseless appeal to the creative faculties of man and of the masses constitute important and incontestably fecund contributions to socialist thought.

On the other hand:

From Marx’s day down to our own, the theorists of scientific socialism have often overlooked the significance and importance of anarchism and have at times combated it with a singularly unintelligent partizanship (Plekhanov). From its very beginnings, Bolshevism, the animator of the Russian Revolution never ceased pursuing the suppression of anarchism which it considered as a manifestation of the “backward-looking mentality of the petty bourgeoisie.”[15]

Serge’s ‘position’ was not that we should mechanically make an amalgam of anarchism and Marxism but that revolutionaries coming from the anarchist and Marxist traditions should listen respectfully to each other’s criticisms, debate our historical differences openly and honestly, and work together to create a revolutionary socialist theory and practice to meet the challenges of today.[16]

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