The Urban Revolution in Victor Serge

Abstract

The Russian Revolution was an example of what one of its participant-witnesses, John Reed, called “intensified history.” At the same time as Ten Days That Shook the World was published, another of the Russian Revolution's witness-chroniclers was documenting the transformations of space in Red Petrograd under the name of Victor Serge (1890–1947). By analyzing the space of the city and the condition of urban revolution in the writings of Victor Serge, we can explore the historical–geographical restructuring of spaces of state power within conditions of revolution and counterrevolution. With a specific focus on Conquered City (Serge [1932] 2011a) in the context of Red Petrograd and The Case of Comrade Tulayev (Serge [1948] 2004), set during the Great Terror in Moscow and Soviet Russia, my focus highlights the struggle between revolution and counterrevolution reflected in these works that both address in different and connected ways the struggle for space, the spatial logistics of the state, and how the modern state organizes space relevant to geographical studies. In Conquered City and The Case of Comrade Tulayev, such spatial awareness is intensely present, including a focus on the logic of repressive space, to reveal how the state separates, disperses, forces, and constrains the historical geographies of space.