Victor Serge was the pseudonym of a Belgian-Russian writer and militant (Victor Lvovich Kibalchich, 1890–1947) whose career spanned three continents and whose literary legacy sheds much light on the world of Marxist politics from 1918 to the end of the Second World War. Writing in French, he is best known for his masterly Memoirs of a Revolutionary (first published 1963), but thanks to his tireless translator Richard Greeman all of his major novels (The Case of Comrade Tulayev, Conquered City, and Midnight in the Century) are available from New York Review Books. In his newly published Notebooks, we witness the raw material that was eventually recycled into fiction, but also are treated to a good deal of information on the world of revolutionary or near-revolutionary intellectuals in both Europe and Mexico. It is a dense volume in which elegant literary reflections alternate with informed political gossip. There are cameo appearances by, inter alia, André Gide, Andrés Nin, André Breton, Claude Lévi-Strauss, Natalya Sedova (Madame Trotsky veuve), Diego Rivera, Gustave Regler, and Anna Seghers.

Serge is sometimes compared to George Orwell or Arthur Koestler in the sense that his oeuvre reflects a kind of disillusionment with Marxist totalitarianism, but unlike them he never abandoned his fundamental commitment to radical revolutionary reconstruction. Born to a family of exiled Russians in Brussels, he went to Russia in 1918, joined the Bolsheviks, and served in the Comintern before announcing his support for Trotsky’s Left Opposition. This earned him a stay in prison, from which he was released and allowed to leave the Soviet Union in 1936 thanks to pressure from Gide and other French intellectuals.

To call Serge a Trotskyist requires some qualification. His relationship with the Master (or the Old Man, as he was called by his followers) was largely epistolary. As early as 1921, he had condemned Trotsky’s repression of rebellious sailors at the Kronstadt naval base outside St. Petersburg, and he broke with him formally prior to his arrival in Mexico in 1941, by which time, of course, Trotsky had been assassinated by a Stalinist operative. Even so, he seems to have maintained a friendly relationship with Madame Trotsky, but not, it seems, with the large group of European leftist expatriates who found themselves marooned in Mexico during the Second World War and immediately thereafter.

“What matters most to me,” he explained shamefacedly, “is that our cultural work continues.”

This book is revealing about the political and intellectual scene in Mexico, which was deeply influenced by the Spanish Civil War, the Moscow show trials, and the general mood of philo-Sovietism which pervaded the country at the time, and which, in fact (and I speak from personal experience), persisted almost to the end of the Cold War. At the time of Serge’s residence there, the president was General Lázaro Cárdenas, who imagined himself something of a revolutionary and who—facing down fierce resistance from many of his allies and associates—had offered asylum to Trotsky in 1937 after he was refused residence in every country (including the United States) to which he applied. By the time Trotsky succumbed to an assassin’s hand four years later, he had already survived a dramatic assault on his fortress-like house in Coyoacán, a suburb of Mexico City, led by no less a personality than David Alfaro Siqueiros, an accomplished painter (who was allowed quietly to leave the country for a diplomatic post in Chile, later returning to be lionized by high society). Meanwhile, Trotsky’s successful assassin, a Spaniard (identified here as “Jackson” but who in fact was Ramón Mercader), led an almost idyllic life in Mexican confinement.

Much of what Serge found in Mexico was due to the heavy influence of the local Communist Party and covert Soviet agents on the ground who spread much jam about. Another factor shaping Mexican society at the time was a deliberate selection process by which Mexico accepted Spanish Republican refugees. Here a major role was played by the Chilean consul in Barcelona: the poet, ardent Stalinist, and later Nobel laureate Pablo Neruda, working from lists given to him by the Soviet mission. Liberals and democratic socialists—leave aside anyone with a whiff of Trotskyism—were carefully screened out. “Stalinist penetration here is so great,” records Serge, “that they have agents in every newspaper, even those of the right.” In September 1944, he writes that “since the end of 1941 not a single book has been published in this country that simply tells the truth about the internal regime in the ussr. On the other hand, pro-Stalinist literature floods the bookstores.” José Mancisdor, the President of the Friends of the ussr, denounced Serge, along with Julián Gorkin and Léon Blum, the latter then in a German concentration camp, as “leaders of Goebbels’s Fifth Column.”

This made it extraordinarily difficult for Serge to make a living by writing, which was really his only marketable skill. The editor of the prestigious journal Cuadernos Americanos refused an article on the grounds that it might displease the Mexican cultural ministry, from which the magazine received crucial financial support. “What matters most to me,” he explained shamefacedly, “is that our cultural work continues.” Another publication (El Popular) even published death threats against him. Living a hand-to-mouth existence, he collapsed in a taxi in 1947 and was dead by the time the vehicle arrived at a hospital. What is remarkable is the vast literary legacy he nonetheless managed to leave. These notebooks depict vividly the personal drama that lay behind his work.

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This article originally appeared in The New Criterion, Volume 38 Number 7, on page 73
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