The Unhappy Elitist: Victor Serge's Early Bolshevism

Abstract

In his debates with Trotsky during the Thirties, and in the frequent retrospects over Soviet history which he conducted until his death in 1947, Victor Serge constantly counterposes the authoritarian record of Bolshevism (in great measure seen as due to Trotsky's own responsibility) against the rival, more libertarian currents of the Revolution: i.e., those stemming from anarchism or the oppositions within the Party preceding that of the 1923 Left Opposition. The Kronstadt incident of 1921 is rightly taken by Serge as a cardinal point in the development of this case: while Serge never accepted the full anarchist glorification of Kronstadt as a radical mass rising, uncomplicated by any danger of counter-revolution, he insisted against Trotsky that it constituted a legitimate expression of the sailors' and workers' discontent with a repressive system, focusing widespread aspirations for a democratic Soviet republic freed from Party monopoly. His posthumouslypublished Memoirs of a Revolutionary: 1901-1941 are celebrated for their unmistakeable sympathies with the outraged Russian masses in the bureaucratic epoch of War Communism; for their constant identifications with humanistic and dissident elements both in the Russian party and in the Communist International; for their biting criticism of the rationalizations and evasions whereby the incumbents of bureaucratic State power seek to justify their brutality and mystify their usurpation of Socialist ideals. For those who know Victor Serge from his maturer writings as the chivalrous knight-errant of freedom within revolutionary Socialism, it would be a natural conclusion that these attractive, insightful positions of his, rare indeed in the