Liberties There's nothing Artificial about our Intelligence

Those banished from a church are always its elite. They are ahead of their time. 

ERNEST RENAN 

I

In the eyes of many, Victor Serge, the Belgian-born writer and anti-Stalinist militant, has come to stand for political probity in a time of cowardice and falsehood. The child of exiles from Tsarist Russia, from whom he inherited an admiration for lone fighters against oppression, Serge’s political evolution saw him travel large distances: a young socialist, then a fervent individualist anarchist, then a revolutionary syndicalist, and then, with the Russian Revolution, an orthodox Bolshevik. With Lenin’s death, Serge sided with Trotsky against Stalin, before ending his days in exile in Mexico City as an independent socialist of an eccentric type. His ideological shifts were not a demonstration of political fickleness, but rather of his recognition that no fixed ideology can meet changing circumstances, that it is necessary for ideas and people to evolve politically as the world situation itself evolves. He paid dearly for the transformations of his beliefs, living in almost constant exile and statelessness. He was imprisoned twice in France and twice in the Soviet Union, before being expelled from the latter in 1936 after spending three years in forced internal exile. He faced political isolation and poverty, and at the end of his life, in his final exile in Mexico, his poverty was so bleak that when, in 1947, he died in the back seat of a taxi in Mexico City, the soles of his shoes were found to be worn through. 

Writing on the margins of politics and history, a citizen only of what he called “the invisible international,” Serge’s independence and foresight have earned him the recognition that he lacked in his lifetime. After languishing in oblivion in the English-speaking world, he was rescued by the scholar Richard Greeman, who translated most of his novels and over the course of half a century campaigned tirelessly to ensure that all of Serge’s essential works were published. In 2004 Serge’s consecration was complete, when Susan Sontag wrote an impressive overview of his career, saying of him that “I can’t think of anyone who has written about the revolutionary movement in this century with Serge’s combination of moral insight and intellectual richness.” He has been deservedly rescued from the margins. We may even need his example. But who, exactly, was he?

He was born Victor-Napoléon Kibalchich in Brussels in 1890, and always believed that he was related to Nikolai Kibalchich, one of the assassins of Tsar Alexander II in 1882, who died on the gallows with his fellow assassins. The heroism and the self-abnegation of the members of Narodnya Volya, or the People’s Will, the socialist revolutionary organization whose members included the assassins of the Tsar, served as Serge’s inspiration, which he invoked throughout his life. His family relationship with one of the heroes of the movement to free Russia made this identification an essential part of his being. But alas, Richard Greeman’s research into Serge’s family history revealed that there was no family tie between Serge and his hero. Serge was also certain that his father had been involved in the Russian Narodnik movement, but the evidence for this, too, is weak. 

Victor grew up in an impoverished and dysfunctional family, though “grew up” is not quite accurate: he left home when he was twelve and supported himself from that time on. This claim, made in his memoirs, may sound improbable, but it is confirmed by residency records in the files of the Brussels police. With a group of friends, some of whom would play a crucial and tragic role in his later life, the young Kibalchich joined the youth organization of the Belgian Worker’s Party, which he and his friends soon quit, frustrated by its tepid politics. Anarchism called him — a form of anarchism that reflected his youthful disgust with the world. In his Memoirs of a Revolutionary, which was published posthumously in France in 1951, Serge recalls his years as an anarchist, saying that “anarchism swept us away completely because it both demanded everything of us and offered us everything.” 

And yet he downplays his actual beliefs and writings in those same memoirs. The days of bomb-throwing anarchists were gone when Serge became an anarchist around 1907, but he adopted a form of individualist anarchism that in many ways grew from that violent phase of anarchist history. At eighteen he wrote in the newspaper published by his circle of friends and comrades in Belgium an essay in praise of Emile Henry, who was notorious for throwing a bomb into the Café Terminus in Paris in 1894, and for declaring at his trial that he regretted only that he had not killed more than one person. Serge, under his pen name of Le Rétif, spoke of Henry’s heroism; and of his death on the guillotine he rhapsodized, “It was a death whose memory will live on. A death that free men will later remember with gratitude. For alongside the people of our century, the arrivistes, crushers, deceivers of all kinds; the immense mass of imbecilic followers and serfs, this young man marching towards death when everything in him wanted to live, this young man dying for the ideal is truly a luminous figure.” 

In 1908 Serge moved to Paris, the capital of this school of anarchism, where he wrote and edited the newspaper l’anarchie, whose founder, uncannily named Albert Libertad, published it entirely in lower case so that all of the letters would be equal. Serge’s articles for l’anarchie expressed a consistent worldview, one that scorned the working class as a herd of sheep interested only in getting drunk. He was a revolutionary who dismissed the utility of mass revolutions and upheld a firm belief in the power of the individual, writing that “the evil illusion is that of waiting for the revolt of the crowd, of the organized, disciplined, regimented masses. In fact, the only fertile acts are those committed by individuals knowing clearly what they want and advancing without let or hindrance, needing neither leaders nor discipline. In fact, the only good rebellions are the immediate rebellions of individuals refusing to wait any longer and deciding to immediately grab their portion of joy.”

Serge also expressed an understanding of — and even some support for — a rising trend among anarchist individualists: illegalism, or the view that crime is a revolutionary act. In later years he would deny advocating such a doctrine, but this is simply not true. He wrote in his newspaper that laws are “aimed at garroting the weakest, at sanctioning their enslavement by brute force. The honesty they proclaim I know to be falsehood, hiding the worst turpitudes, permitting — even honoring — theft, fraud, and deception when they are committed in the shade of the criminal code. The so-called ‘respect for human life’ that they never fail to mention a propos of every murder I know to be ignobly hypocritical, since meanwhile they kill in its name by hunger, work, subjection, and incarceration. I am on the other side, and I am not afraid to admit it. I am with the bandits. I find their role to be noble. Sometimes I see in them men, whereas elsewhere I see only fools and puppets.” 

Serge and his then-partner Rirette Maitrejean (whose husband was an illegalist imprisoned for counterfeiting) lived at the offices of l’anarchie with several members of what became known as the Bonnot Gang, anarchists all, some of whom had been Serge’s friends in Brussels, who robbed banks and killed those who got in their way. Serge was not involved in their crimes, but he was arrested along with the gang members who had not been killed by the police. At their trial Serge was found guilty of possession of a stolen weapon. He was sentenced to five years in prison and served every day of it. The depredations of the Bonnot Gang had led him to rethink his individualism, and the five years in prison gave him ample time to decide that he needed to follow a different road. 

Released from La Santé Prison in 1917, he was expelled from France and banned from returning. He left for Barcelona, where he assumed the pen name of Victor Serge and became involved for the first time in mass revolutionary activity, in the company of the city’s anarcho-syndicalists, who believed that the working class should seize control of the economy through revolutionary unionism (exemplified in the United States by the Industrial Workers of the World and their slogan “One Big Union”). He was in Barcelona when the Russian Revolution occurred, and was determined to find a way to his ancestral homeland and participate in the momentous events. He returned to France, violating his banishment order, hoping to find a route to Russia, either by enlisting in the French army or the Foreign Legion. Instead he was arrested and held in a prison camp until 1919, when he was exchanged for French officers held by the Russians. On the ship taking him to Soviet Russia he met the Roussakov family, headed by Alexander Roussakov, a Jewish anarchist. The Roussakovs became his first real family, and he married one of its daughters, Liuba, in 1920. 

Serge worked for the Communist International (Comintern) alongside Alexander Zinoviev and joined the Communist Party. He wrote regularly for official Comintern journals and, though his background was not that of an orthodox Bolshevik, he served the new regime faithfully. Most notably, he wrote several articles for Comintern journals aimed at anarchists, in an effort to get them to support Soviet Russia, which he claimed was fulfilling the anarchist dream. At least this is what he wrote at the time.

In fact, Serge soon realized that things were not what he had hoped they would be. A good Communist careful not to provide grist for the anti-Soviet mill, he knowingly lied for the good of the cause — but as the years passed he came to believe, as he wrote in a later essay, that things went off the rails for the Bolshevik Revolution when the Cheka — the secret police — was granted the right to execute suspects in 1918, before he had even arrived in Soviet Russia. In 1918! He was the most premature anti-Communist of all. If Serge hid his true opinions when he wrote for the Communist press, he was honest in conversations with former fellow-anarchists who visited him in Russia. Publicly, he supported the crushing of the Kronstadt rebellion of 1921, an uprising of sailors who had played a key role in the victory of the Bolsheviks in 1917 and who were now rebelling in an effort to restore some form of democratic freedom. They were brutally crushed. (“Kronstadt” became the euphemism for one’s moment of disillusion with Soviet communism. There were those who did not have their “Kronstadt moment” until 1956.) Serge defended the Soviet crackdown when it occurred, citing the dangers of counter-revolution and dismissing the sailors as imbued with a peasant and petty-bourgeois ideology. And yet contemporary accounts by anarchist visitors report him remarking that “the Kronstadt Affair was a revolt of the masses against the dictatorship of the leaders,” and that the party’s actions there “were the last straw.” He explained his public silence about his disillusion to Emma Goldman and Alexander Berkman, who had implored him to tell the truth about the rebellion: “I can’t do it. I’m known in the party as an anarchist. If I did anything I’d be arrested.” It was only in the 1930s that he would openly repent this position.

After spending a couple of years on assignment in Germany and Vienna for the Comintern, overseeing its French publications to which he frequently contributed, Serge returned to the Soviet Union in 1926 and joined the battle over the succession to Lenin, who had died in 1923. Serge sided with Trotsky against Stalin, which earned him a spell in prison in 1928 for his oppositional activities. During this prison stay, realizing that any form of political activity against Stalin was doomed, he determined to spend all his time on literary endeavors. 

Though bearing the mark of an oppositionist, Serge managed to avoid the roundups that swept up his comrades — until 1933, when he was sent to an “isolator” in Orenburg in the Urals. By this time he was a well-known writer in France, and a campaign was mounted to attain his release. Those seeking his release included figures on the left such as Henri Barbusse, Romain Rolland, and André Gide (who was then passing through his brief pro-Communist phase). Articles decrying Serge’s imprisonment appeared in both anti-Stalinist left-wing periodicals and the mainstream press. A minor scandal occurred when, in 1935, at a congress of anti-fascist writers in Paris whose main aim was the defense of writers suffering under Hitler and Mussolini, Serge’s supporters (who included Simone Weil) insisted that the congress call for his liberation and presented a “request for information” about Serge’s condition to the Soviet delegation. A Communist paper reported that “put formally on the spot by this handful of militants, the Soviet delegation could only reply by pointing to the beauties of the Five Year Plan and admitting its ignorance of the charges brought against Victor Serge.” Thanks to the intervention of Romain Rolland and Maxim Gorky, Stalin agreed to release Serge, and in 1936 he was granted a residency visa for Belgium thanks to Emil Vandervelde, a leader of the Belgian Worker’s Party that Serge had once condemned when he was a young socialist.

Serge’s disillusionment with his former beliefs grew, and it is at this point that he became a figure of real significance. Even after arriving in Belgium he described himself proudly as a Communist, but seeing the West again shook him. In the very first article that he wrote, in June 1936, for the Liege-based newspaper La Wallonie, in whose pages he would appear until 1940, he described the positive impression made on him by the West. Even as he expressed a hope for socialism in Western Europe, he was struck by the civilization that he was rediscovering, beginning in Poland, and how that border between the USSR and the West made itself felt not just geographically but “in everything, in every face, in the quality of clothing, in tile instead of thatched roofs, in the meticulous cleanliness of towns; one feels it in the more gentle and nuanced inflections of voices.” All of daily life was different, was better, and the Western economies were thriving. For the moment he saw in this “the maturity of these countries for socialism,” but doubts would set in about this view, too — as would doubts about the validity of the Soviet example, and more profoundly, of Marxism as commonly understood. It was not long before he found himself in the realm of heresy.

The clearest evidence of Serge’s straying from the Marxist straight and narrow was his exasperation with Trotsky, the man he admired more than any in the world. His differences with the founder of the Red Army, known to his admirers as the Old Man, were made clear almost immediately after Serge settled in Belgium. In May 1936, just weeks after his arrival, the election of a Popular Front government in France led to a popular explosion, with workers occupying factories across the country. Trotsky immediately proclaimed that “the French Revolution has begun.” Serge was not convinced that this was the case, writing to Trotsky to correct him: “Not at all. It’s only the recovery of the French working class that’s begun.” Serge differed with Trotsky on a variety of issues, from the Spanish Civil War to the foundation of a new International to replace the Stalinist Third International, a possibility that Serge, to Trotsky’s dismay, dismissed as futile. 

Their relationship hit its nadir when Serge translated Trotsky’s essay “Their Morals and Ours.” Serge disapproved of the work, a vitriolic exploration of revolutionary ethics, and wrote an attack on it in 1940 in an essay that was never published. This critical essay is a central document in tracking Serge’s shift away from the Bolshevism that he publicly espoused for twenty years. In it he expressed grave doubts about nothing less than the moral, political, and human underpinnings of the Russian Revolution. For Serge, Trotsky’s pamphlet was an expression of “the Bolshevism of its great years,” but also of its “decadence.” Though Serge admits that “the modern world owes [Trotsky and the Bolsheviks of the October Revolution] a great deal [and] the future will owe them even more,” he warns against the impulse to “blindly imitate them.”

Serge insisted that Trotsky’s “tone” was significant because it was “domineering,” a tone that was common to Bolsheviks of the time and to Marx before them. A typical example of Trotsky’s vicious tone was his comparison of Bolsheviks and social-democrats: “Compared to revolutionary Marxists, the social-democrats and centrists appear like morons, or a quack beside a physician: they do not think one problem through to the end, believe in the power of conjuration and cravenly avoid every difficulty, hoping for a miracle. Opportunists are peaceful shop-keepers in socialist ideas while Bolsheviks are its inveterate warriors.” Serge perhaps never wrote anything truer than when he said of this tone that it “is something of great importance, for this tone is essentially one of intolerance.” Trotsky’s attitude, he boldly continued, “implies the claim to the monopoly of truth, or to speak more accurately, the sentiment of possessing the truth.” 

Serge’s later disputes with his comrades in Mexico, the development of his ideas on society and social struggle in a way that radically revised and even in some ways jettisoned Marxism, was already present in germ in this essay, for example in this brave and splendid observation: “The truth is never fixed, it is constantly in the process of becoming and no absolute border sets it apart from error. The assurance of those Marxists who fail to see this is quickly transformed into smugness. The feeling of possessing the truth goes hand in hand with a certain contempt for man, of the other man … This sentiment implies a denial of freedom, freedom being, on the intellectual level, the right of others to think differently, the right to be wrong. The germ of an entire totalitarian mentality can be found in this intolerance.” For Serge, respect for the human person, and the acceptance of other opinions as legitimate, must be the guiding principles of a reborn democratic socialist movement.

In this he was in the direct line of many anti-Stalinist revolutionaries. But increasingly a new concern became essential to Serge. It was no longer enough to defend the revolution from its enemies within and without, which he called his “double duty.” From the late 1930s on, a new phrase enters his lexicon, one that he would use and reuse as a leitmotiv in his final years. What was important for Serge was “the defense of the human person.” The phrase sounds fairly unexceptionable, another expression of his discontent with the dictatorship in the land of the revolution, but nothing could be further from the truth. The “defense of the human person” was not an empty slogan that he threw around lightly. Those five words were an epitome of the philosophy that Serge adopted as a supplement to Marxism, which in his view needed to be totally revised.

II

Serge’s final years, and the culminating heroism of his intellectual career, can only be understood within the context of his adoption of the philosophy known as personalism. The phrase der Personalismus was first used by Schleiermacher in his influential book On Religion in 1799, and in America it was introduced by Walt Whitman in 1868, who wrote an essay by that name on “the single solitary soul.” The twentieth-century version of personalism was largely the work of Emmanuel Mounier, a French Catholic intellectual and the founder and editor of the review Esprit. Mounier was born in Grenoble in 1905 and studied philosophy at the university in his hometown. As described by the French historian Michel Winock in his fine study of Esprit, “the young Emmanuel burned with an uncommon faith in God.” Mounier also burned with a hatred for what he appositely called “the established disorder.” He and a group of young people who shared his ideas established Esprit in 1932. In their pre-war incarnation, Esprit and Mounier were opponents of both the bourgeoisie and Marxism, though finding some good in the latter and none in the former; but in the post-war years, as we will see, Mounier’s relationship with Communism become entirely positive. 

In the October 1936 issue of Esprit, Mounier published his “Manifesto in Service to Personalism,” in which he summarized the essential points of his philosophy. It began with a definition: “We call Personalist every doctrine, every civilization, that affirms the primacy of the human person over material necessities and the collective apparatuses that sustain their development.” The anti-materialism alone was a great affront to Marxism. And Mounier’s personalism was not a contemplative doctrine, but a philosophy of action. He insisted that “we be judged by our acts.” Mounier sought to refine the notions of action and act: “Not every action is an act. An action is only of value and effective if in the first instance it has taken the measure of the truth that gives it its meaning, and of the historical situation which gives it its scope and its conditions for realization.” Personalism was politically optimistic, for “there is no doubt that we can already considerably renew the visage of most lives by freeing man from all the servitudes that weigh on his vocation as a man.” Moreover, “personalism does not announce the constituting of a school, the opening of a chapel, or the invention of a closed system. It testifies to a convergence of wills and puts itself at their service without impinging upon their diversity, so as to assist them in their search for the means to effectively weigh on history.” 

There was no necessary contradiction, then, between personalism and Serge’s existing ideas. When he discovered personalism, it was mainly a form of anti-bourgeois non-conformism, which suited Serge’s temperament. Freshly released from the univers concentrationnaire of the Soviet Union, he could not help adhering to a doctrine that sought to define, as Mounier wrote, “all the forms of mutual consent capable of establishing a civilization devoted to the human person.” Serge had learned the hard way that Communism was a doctrine sorely lacking a focus on the individual. It was all of humankind, instead, that was to be transformed. Personalism, by contrast, represented a refutation of such lethal abstraction. Esprit had supported Serge’s cause while he was in Orenburg, and Serge frequently appeared in its pages. He maintained an important correspondence with Mounier up until his death. 

That Serge was a personalist is not a matter of speculation: his “adherence” to the doctrine, as he phrased it, was something that he hid in plain sight. It is only because of our unfamiliarity with this vital school of modern thought that we miss the signs of his having adopted its philosophy. The most obvious and incontrovertible proof of Serge’s personalism can be found in the least obscure of locations, his autobiography. In Memoirs of a Revolutionary, he remarks that “I do not think of myself as at all an individualist: rather as a ‘personalist,’ in that I view human personality as a supreme value, but integrated in society and in history.” (That “integration” could become a problem, a threat of totalization.) In his book Serge recalled Mounier as a “genuine Christian of fine, honest intellect,” and he had this to say about the Esprit group: “They sensed sharply that they were living at the end of an era; they loathed all lying, especially if it formed an excuse for murder, and they said so outright. In their simple teaching of ‘reverence for the human person’ I felt immediately at one with them.”

Serge most explicitly avowed his personalism in several letters. In an unpublished letter in 1938 to Maurice Wullens, a longtime comrade, Serge defended Mounier and his journal against an attack by Wullens in his magazine Les Humbles, protesting that Esprit “carries out with honesty and tenacity an excellent work too little known by our comrades.” He goes on to speak in the highest terms of Mounier and personalism: “His doctrine, postulating above all respect for the human person a priori deserves the respect of the worker’s movement, whose militants are, except for the Stalinist totalitarians, ‘personalists’ without being aware of it.” He praised Esprit, explaining that “the openness of its views, the sincere desire to see clearly, and its intellectual probity are truly remarkable.” 

Serge had more to say on this topic to Wullens. In an unpublished and undated letter from 1938 (which might have been a draft of the previous one, or vice versa), Serge declared to Wullens that “I am above all unreservedly with the personalist movement when it affirms above all else respect for the human person.” Serge then makes an important admission, pre-dating his adoption of personalism by several years: “I defined my personalism long ago, before knowing the word, in a message you perhaps know, where I notably wrote this (February 1, 1933): ‘Defense of man, respect for man. He must be given his rights, security, value. Without this there is no socialism; without this everything is false, a failure, polluted. Man, whatever he may be, if he is the worst of men, a ‘class enemy,’ the son or grandson of a great bourgeois, I don’t care. We must never forget that a human being is a human being. This is forgotten every day right in front of, everywhere. It’s the most revolting and anti-socialist thing there is.” Those sentences have been called Serge’s “profession of faith.” Mounier himself could not have better expressed the humanistic essence of his doctrine. 

Serge made matters even clearer in a letter to Mounier. On September 10, 1945, only a few months after the end of the war, Serge wrote to his friend: “The respect for man, for all men, and consequently of the democratic institutions that are to be renewed, purified, and recreated in a Europe [now] in a state of gestation, is for me an absolute; and that this respect be at the very base of socialism as of any forward-looking movement. In this sense, I definitively maintain my implicit and clear adherence to personalism and I feel, in so doing, that I am in the great socialist tradition.” Serge’s correspondence with Mounier had been interrupted by the war, and his final note to Mounier before its interruption was written while he was en route to Mexico in 1941. He again referred to the philosophy that he shared with Mounier: “My dear friend, I remain a faithful friend of Esprit and will strive to remain in contact with you. I will be happy to be of use to you (without currently being fully in agreement with you [a reference, no doubt, to Mounier’s suspected support for the Revolution Nationale in Vichy France]. But I believe that our agreement on personalism is much deeper than any circumstantial disagreements.” 

Four years later, however, the circumstantial disagreements would become fundamental disagreements. When they were able to pick up their correspondence at war’s end, Mounier provided Serge with his view of the post-war situation, and though his hopes chimed with those of Serge, his analysis was radically different. Despairing of the dream of a renewed France, Mounier asserted that, owing to the strength of the right and to the weakness of a Socialist Party that was lacking in “men, energy, and historical imagination” and which had an “increasingly slim working-class base …,it is necessary to speak a truth will be hard for you to hear: apart from the Communists there is nothing.” Like so many left-wing intellectuals in France, most famously the circle around Jean-Paul Sartre at Les Temps modernes, Mounier and Esprit had made a choice that Serge abhorred. Mounier explained to Serge in a letter that “outside of a small Trotskyist minority there is only one way to explain the situation: the workers are Communist. As a result, the problem is a tragic one. One must both bear witness for everything that is dear to us, while not setting ourselves apart from the only remaining revolutionary force in France.” 

Serge’s disagreement with Mounier’s stance could not have been stronger, and he expressed it from the personalist standpoint that he felt Mounier had abandoned: “Our era of grief is also that of the decline of all values, since the primordial values, human life and the truth, hardly count anymore.” Responding to Mounier’s observation that there is nothing outside the Communists, Serge castigated his friend that he and those like him had “committed an enormous error in seeking to delude themselves about the latest totalitarian peril, which is immense. It would have been necessary, it is necessary, to remain firm by delineating the differences between even disguised totalitarianism and freedom, maintaining the right to speak the truth on the most inhuman regime in the world.” 

Serge was moved to write angrily to Mounier in January 1946 after reading his article in the November, 1945 issue of Esprit, in which Mounier made an unambiguous case for support of the Soviet Union and the Communists, writing that “without the vast infusion of humanity that could come from the East, the West will continue to die its little death. Without the decisive lessons the USSR offers us, the European revolution will be bogged down in the social democratic swamp.” Serge was enraged. Serge did not mince words: “I think you are wrong, just as my executed friends and I were wrong for more than a decade, and for the same reasons: a profound confidence in man. The civilized individuals that we are refuse to believe the worst. You demand ‘more precise knowledge… of the contemporary reality of the Soviet Union.’ You certainly cannot be expecting it from official sources. Other information slips through, but they form a picture so horrifying that whoever would publish them in France (where I believe this would be practically impossible) would immediately be accused by the PCF [French Communist Party] and men of good will of infamy à la Goebbels.” Serge then cites numbers taken from The New Leader, which was increasingly his favorite American publication. (The New Leader, which lasted in print until 2006 and for four more years online, was founded as a socialist weekly in 1924, and between 1936 and 1960, when it was edited by the remarkable Sol Levitas, it was an uncompromising liberal anti-Communist journal that went to great pains to report accurately on conditions in the Communist world.) Serge informed Mounier that there were five million deportees in concentration camps in Siberia, and that one and a half million of them were sent there between 1937 and 1940. 

As far as Serge was concerned, Mounier would never be able to get at the truth with his current attitude. 

Unless totalitarianism is denounced, honest information is impossible. And if we renounce this, we have no choice but to say that this totalitarianism has become strong enough to silence conscience and impose a general complicity with its official lies. My conviction, based on too much experience, is that no compromise is possible with this totalitarianism without abandoning Christian, humanist, and socialist values and without inevitably disastrous consequences. 

If there were a real hope for a useful meeting between Russia and America, I would be with you — despite what I am saying here. But I don’t see any sign of such a hope. If totalitarianism sustains itself, which is possible, there will be no democratic renewal (by which I mean one ensuring the rights of man and truth) in the West; a permanent state of crisis exploited by the Communist Parties and, in the end, a Third World War. … If, as is also possible, the USSR changes its appearance and once again becomes even an imperfect socialist democracy, all hopes are permitted for it and for Europe, and the nightmare of a Third World War is avoided. But I see no third possibility, if not stalling for time. In a word, your position seems to me utopian. I think that at bottom it is that of the best minds of France, and I understand the psychological motivation for it. And yet, as concerns you it disappoints me, because your starting point is the healthiest of doctrines, the one most capable of rallying all those who are honest, the one least compatible with the camouflaging of reality.

Serge’s disappointment with Esprit and Mounier would only grow, and he bluntly summed up his objections in a letter to Mounier in March 1946, about the most recent issues of the journal: “I must say to you, with all the rigor that it seems to me that we, as men of good will, owe each other, how disappointed and distressed I am to see the review take the wrong road, and so badly deviate from the will to defend man and truth as to enter into contradiction with itself and to engender its own negation. Esprit leaves the clear impression of being a pro-totalitarian, pro-communist publication that wants to ignore the crushing of man and the annihilation of the truth by an essentially inhuman regime.” The correspondence with Mounier ended in July 1947, and in the same disappointed and agitated spirit: “I remain in profound disagreement with Esprit concerning the very singular pro-Stalinism of the journal, which I consider the gravest of intellectual errors — and a moral failure. When will the journal decide to finally to take account of the colossal and irrefutable documentation published on the concentration camps in the USSR and on their ten or fifteen million pariahs?”

III

It was not only in his writings to Mounier that Serge expressed a fervent anti-Communism. His anti-Communism has been denied by many of those who have helped raise Serge to prominence. (Sontag was an exception.) It is a commonplace in writings about Serge to say that he never became a Cold War anti-communist; he is presented instead as holding a firm revolutionary anti-Stalinism, combined with the hope of a revival of the Soviet enterprise, whose Leninist purity had been perverted by Stalin. But such a view is false. As we have seen, even before the semi-official declaration of the Cold War by Churchill in Fulton, Missouri in 1947, Serge was calling for the banning of Communists — or “totalitarians,” as he called them – from any new socialist movements that would spring up in the post-war world. Serge was advocating for blacklisting Communists from the left, while already placing them outside the pale of acceptable political life. 

The New Leader in New York published many articles by Serge in the final years of his life. Almost every article that he submitted to the magazine included a personal note to Levitas in which he disclosed behind-the-scenes information about European politics. These are among the most anti-Communist writings in Serge’s oeuvre. His involvement with The New Leader very much displeased his most consistent American supporter, Dwight Macdonald, who provided Serge with a forum in his own magazine, politics. But as Serge’s politics began to take on an increasingly intense anti-Stalinist and then anti-Communist tinge, Macdonald felt the need to pull his friend’s coattails. In a letter dated February 27, 1945, Macdonald wrote that “our political views seem to be diverging rapidly.” He gave Serge his unvarnished opinion of both The New Leader and Serge’s new political line: “The New Leader has no political ideas or principles except anti-Stalinism. The only reason I can see for someone like yourself, with your past record and your fine moral and intellectual sensitivity to the real needs and interests of the masses, to accept such a political milieu is that anti-Stalinism is becoming your own basic political principle.” 

The extent to which Serge had swung to a deep anti-Communism was revealed in a letter written to Macdonald in Mexico on April 21, 1945. In that month’s issue of politics, Macdonald had dismissed what he considered the error of “regardin[ing] Stalinism as an all-powerful Principle of Evil that operates independently of concrete historical circumstances. I cannot believe that any man-made organization can be so perfectly effective, whether for good or for evil.” Serge responded to this with barely contained anger, similar to his tone toward Mounier in the same period. “Comm-totalitarianism,” he thundered, “is, in fact, a principle destructive of human values that are essential for us, a principle, to be sure, that is not ‘all powerful,’ but at this time extremely powerful because it is acting in favorable historic circumstances.” Those words are underlined in original.

Against Macdonald, Serge believed that totalitarianism — which, in a sign of his adoption of Cold War rhetoric, and long before it became philosophically and politically uncontroversial to lump them together, included both fascism and communism — had in fact “achieved a degree of perfection and effectiveness (have been ‘perfectly effective’ [in English in the original]) sufficiently to, in Russia, exterminate entire generations of elite men, in Central Europe to exterminate millions of Jews. The GPU and Majdenek demonstrate the perfect efficacy of the man-destroying totalitarian organization.” Positing an equivalence between Communism and Nazism, Serge wrote Macdonald that it is a mistake “to forget that the Communist Parties are to the same extent as the GPU [the Soviet secret police] a part of totalitarian machinery, and that for the past while the camp at Majdenek has been used by the GPU.” It is worth noting that similar sentiments were expressed in 1933 by Simone Weil in her article “Are We Headed to Proletarian Revolution?” a scathing attack on Stalinist totalitarianism. Like Serge a decade later, Weil paired Hitler and Stalin. Coincidentally, Weil’s article appeared in Serge’s preferred French outlet, La Révolution prolétarienne, in an issue that also included selections from Serge’s correspondence of 1929 recounting his own persecution by the Stalinist regime. Weil, who was also attracted to personalism and wrote essays about it, described the goal of socialism in terms that Serge could fully accept: “We should assign the highest value to the individual, not the collective… In the subordination of society to the individual lies the definition of democracy, and that of socialism as well.” 

Unlike many on the anti-Stalinist left, Serge dismissed the possibility that any alternative communism to the Stalinized Communist Parties was possible. He accused Macdonald of “wishful thinking.” The hope for non-Stalinist communism, he believed, defied “all observed facts of over twenty years.” Serge, in this letter to Macdonald, then makes an important observation. The opposition to Stalin in the late 1920s had led only “to political suicide and millions of brave Russians to physical extermination,” proving that any attempt to reform Communist parties was futile and would be “inexorably and easily destroyed.” And the mass destruction of the reformers took place “whether it was a time of social peace or in time of civil war.” His life as an opposition communist, in sum, had been a tragic error. In the end, showing “the least complacency towards communism is the first step to suicide; it can only be resisted by rejecting it out of hand, completely and en bloc, its influence, its maneuvers, its masks and its faces.” Anti-communism cannot be more total than this. He had moved from heresy to apostasy.

In Mexico, where he arrived after a roundabout journey (in which Varian Fry played a part) in 1941, Serge became a member of a circle of anti-Stalinist leftists made up of exiles largely from Spain, France, Austria, and Germany. His friends and comrades believed that, as was the case after World War I, World War II would result in socialist revolution. Serge begged to differ: in his last years he denied this possibility, maintaining that the victory of fascism in Germany and Italy, and the war itself, had completely demoralized the workers. The bulk of them, rather than choosing the revolutionary road, continued to support social democracy. But then, in the 1940s, Serge made his most interesting turn.

Owing to his enthusiasm for personalism, personal freedom and “respect for the human person” became the alpha and omega of his belief system. His insistence on personal freedom and personal dignity intensified his hatred of Stalinism and, more broadly, of Communists. These concerns inevitably led him to view any movement that arose in the post-war world in a way that contradicted the precepts that guided the revolutionary left of which he was a part. In doing so, he abandoned the idea of revolution. The young man who left the reformist socialism of the Belgian Worker’s Party because it was no longer a vehicle of radical change, now, in the last years of his life, made the bold move of repudiating political purity and ideological righteousness in order to ensure a more just, more humane, and more democratic world, and, more specifically, a unified Europe. 

Serge’s insistence on respect for freedom of opinion led him to exclude Communism and Communists from the socialist movement, as they were incompatible with the democratic values that he had come to prize. He even quoted Thomas Jefferson in defense of these values. In 1945, in response to a questionnaire from Britain’s Independent Labour Party on the possibility of a new international socialist grouping, Serge wrote that he sought the unity of all socialists, including in this virtually every tendency save one: “No socialist international can, [without] betraying its mission and dishonoring itself, accept within it totalitarian communists led by secret bureaus provided with secret funds and subject to a discipline that annihilates the critical spirt.” This same exclusion should apply to international labor organizations, since Soviet labor unions are nothing but organs of the totalitarian state. “The notion of socialism is henceforth inseparable from the respect for the human person, from the spirit of freedom, and from truly democratic institutions.”

The distance that Serge had traveled, his disgust with the standard leftist nostrums, can be seen in an incident described in his notebooks. At a meeting in September, 1944 of the Commission of Independent Socialists, a programmatic document was presented that Serge described as “a sort of Communist Manifesto, very rudimentary, recycling all the old phrases of the genre.” He proceeds to indict the document, which he listened to, he said, “with interest and suppressed hostility.” The basis for his opposition to the document was that “every term, every idea must be revised in the face of new realities and launched in the middle of a hurricane,” which the document’s left-traditionalist authors failed to do. 

All of Marxist thought and activity needed to be rethought. Serge’s attack went to the very roots of socialism, asserting that “it is false to write that in a bourgeois democracy the working class has only its chains to lose, [for] it enjoys — in Europe enjoyed — real well-being and real freedoms.” Not content with this heresy of worker satisfaction under capitalism, Serge made the further point that the notion of the state as an instrument of the ruling class, so dear and essential to Marxists, no longer obtained. “The state is no longer the ‘armed band of one class for the domination of another,’ as Engels said. Or rather, it is. But only in one country: the USSR. The state has a positive role now, in fields like education and communications.” Serge described his comrades mercilessly: “idealists hemmed in by the sclerosis of doctrines and circumstances, and dominated by their convictions and their emotional attachments; in short, by fanaticism. Under such conditions the person who disturbs the inner security of the others is a hateful heretic.” 

In an essay from January 1945, called “The Time of Intellectual Courage,” Serge repeats many of these arguments, and continues his relentless critique of Marxist doctrine. 

Returning to the nature of the state, Serge asserts that “the anarchist thesis of the destruction of the state and the Marxist thesis of the withering of the state through the natural functioning of a socialist democracy … have shown themselves to be equally unreal.” The world of 1945 demanded intellectual courage, the ability to revise ideas in keeping with new realities. Despite his disappointment and his pessimism, the essay ends on a note of hope: “All the elements of an action program and an ideology look to be within our grasp at a time when history on the march demands that we have the courage to become conscious of new facts and to recognize that the syntheses and doctrines of the last century no longer suffice. And nothing would be more dangerous for us today than to follow the path of intellectual routine.” The logical end of this was expressed in July 1945: “The ideas of the Revolution are dead. The hammer and sickle have become emblems of despotism and murder.”

This hero of modern honesty died of a heart attack on November 15, 1947, and was buried in a pauper’s grave in the Spanish Republican section of a cemetery in Mexico City. Yet controversy followed Serge into the grave. On January 31, 1948, the Gaullist newspaper Le Rassemblement published a letter that Serge wrote to André Malraux after the victory of the Gaullists in France’s municipal elections in October 1947. The Gaullist wave had crushed the Communists, who in the immediate aftermath of the war had been the largest party in the country. The Gaullists of the Rassemblement Populaire Français (RPF), founded only in April 1947, in which the formerly Communist-leaning Malraux was a prominent figure, won thirty-eight percent of the vote against the Communists’ thirty percent, displacing the Communist mayors of Marseille and Nantes and the Socialist mayors in Paris and Bordeaux. The RPF victory was immense, sweeping also Lille, Strasbourg, and Rennes. 

1947 had been a tumultuous year in France, with massive strikes occurring in major industries. When Serge’s letter was posthumously published in January of the following year, emotions were still running high. Serge’s apparent celebration of de Gaulle’s victory could only be taken as it was intended: as a slap in the face of the Communists. But it was much more. In supporting the conservative de Gaulle, the quintessential man of the left was renouncing the left.

The letter did not cause much of a stir until it was republished in April 1948 in one of Serge’s main outlets, the revolutionary syndicalist magazine La Révolution prolétarienne. “I would like to tell you,” Serge wrote to Malraux, “that I find both brave and probably reasonable the political position that you have adopted. If I were myself in France, I would be among the socialists partisan of collaboration with the movement in which you participate. I consider the electoral victory of your movement a great step toward the salvation of France, which I predicted but whose size surprised me… True, more long-term salvation will depend on how you and many others will be able to accomplish what I call the double duty: that of combating the enemy of a European rebirth and that of mastering the threats we bear within ourselves.”

If the Gaullists celebrated the letter, it caused unsurprising shock and dismay on the left, which continues to this day. In a note accompanying its publication of the letter, the editors of La Révolution prolétarienne wrote of their “surprise,” since “in the many letters that he sent from Mexico to revolutionary friends in France, Victor Serge never spoke, to our knowledge at least, of the sympathy towards the RPF we so sadly find in the letter to M. Malraux.” Along with this expression of shock, the editors of La Révolution prolétarienne added that Serge was wrong in saying there were many more socialists like him who felt as he did, since “that variety of socialist has not yet asserted itself publicly.” Significantly, La Révolution prolétarienne did not dismiss the authenticity of the letter. They were disappointed by it and in disagreement with its contents, but they made no attempt to explain the source of Serge’s alleged error or to deny the letter’s genuineness.

The matter did not rest there. In the following month, Serge’s son Vladimir Kubalchich, who was twenty-eight years old and beginning a successful career as a painter, joined the fray. Expressing his “indignation” at the magazine’s interpretation of the letter, Vlady (as he became universally known) insisted that it was intended as a means of “reestablishing courteous relations,” justified by the active part that Malraux had played in the liberation of Serge in 1936. The new courtesy was necessary because of a stormy conversation between Serge and Malraux in Marseille after the French defeat in 1940, during which Serge had bitterly attacked Malraux for his pro-Stalinist activities, in one version of the story throwing his coffee at the writer. Vlady insisted that his father’s “attitude towards Gaullism was never one of sympathy, and even less of identification.” He admitted that “in observing the events from afar [Serge] might have been led to rejoice at the development of an opposition to Stalinism, but that never signified approval.” But this was his conclusion: “I assure you there was no unfortunate change nor any pro-Gaullist encouragement on the part of Victor Serge. If that had been the case, we would all be there to condemn him. But doing so would mean misunderstanding the profoundly revolutionary spirit of a man who had never ceased to give proof of it.” Several months later, on June 3, 1948, the independent left-wing daily Combat reported that Kibalchich had called the letter “a falsification, the subject of a lawsuit.” If a lawsuit was brought, there is no evidence of it. (An edited version of Serge’s letter appeared in The New York Times on February 14, 1948, in an article by C.L. Sulzberger, datelined Paris and bearing the headline “Europe’s Anti-red Trend Inspiring Strange Tie-Ups.” Sulzberger reported that “the gradual development of anti-Communist fronts in Europe is making for some curious ideological combinations and strange political bedfellows.”)

Serge correctly saw de Gaulle for what he was: the primary countervailing force barring the road to the Communists’ accession to power. Only de Gaulle had the prestige and the record to block the Communists, who presented themselves as the parti des fusillés: the party of the executed, the party of the armed Resistance whose members were murdered in the thousands by the Nazis. The Communists in power meant the implantation of Stalinism in Paris, which meant the fall of Europe. Serge in his final days was an advocate of a united Europe, which he discussed in the final interview that he gave, to the newspaper Combat. Europe, he said, had to be protected against “the new Russian imperialism.” Preventing this was Victor Serge’s final battle.