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Reviews / Comptes Rendus
| Susan Weissman, Victor Serge: The Course is Set on Hope (London and New York: Verso, 2001) |
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THE WORLD of the European working-class left before World War II seems today like ancient history to most people. Weak though social democracy, communism, and dissident radical currents may have been in Canada and the US in comparison to Europe, during the Cold War they contributed to a world view in which the Russian Revolution and its aftermath remained meaningful reference points. This much is evident in many of the contributions to the history of the labour movement and the working class made by scholars who belonged to, or were influenced by, the New Left. In contrast, contemporary activists and academics generally consider the Russian Revolution, Stalinism, the rise of Fascism, the Spanish Civil War, and the rest to be unworthy of attention. What, then, will be the fate in Canada and the US of the history of the internationally-influential European working-class left prior to 1939? Will it become the exclusive property of a few academic specialists and tiny groups of socialists? |
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It is this problem that confronts contemporary studies such as Susan Weissman's book on Victor Serge (1890–1947). Born in Belgium to Russian parents, Victor Kibalchich was known from 1917 as Victor Serge. During his lifetime this remarkable writer and political militant passed from social democracy through anarchism, syndicalism, to Bolshevism and its Left Opposition to libertarian socialism. Since the centenary of his birth, studies of Serge have begun to appear. William J. Marshall's Victor Serge: The Uses of Dissent (1992) has examined Serge's contribution to literature. Weissman has edited a useful collection, The Ideas of Victor Serge: A Life as a Work of Art (1997) (also issued as a double issue of the journal Critique [Glasgow]). Her Victor Serge: The Course is Set on Hope is not intended to be a comprehensive biographical study but a political and intellectual biography that examines Serge "mainly through the prism of his Soviet experience and his wrestling with the vexing questions raised by Soviet development." (7) |
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Weissman shows how Serge's independent thinking, and his principled and critical stance often set him apart throughout a life marked by poverty, isolation, and lengthy periods of imprisonment in several countries. After the bureaucratic dictatorship made further political activity in USSR impossible, he took to writing as a way to understand and truthfully communicate the experience of the Russian Revolution and its degeneration in the face of Stalinism's prodigious output of lies, repression, and murder. In the last two decades of his life he produced a series of memorable novels as well as historical studies, political interventions, poetry, and the notable Memoirs of a Revolutionary, not to mention a considerable number of essays and articles. His often lyrical writing is distinguished by what Weissman calls "a literary-autobiographical-political" style "that transcends the boundaries of conventional literature and traditional social science." (10) Serge was unique as a participant-chronicler in so many movements and events who managed to evade the Stalinist terror: he was the last Left Oppositionist to depart the USSR before the mass executions began. His survival, political integrity, and independence of thought give his work a lasting significance. |
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This book is clearly a labour of love, the fruits of extensive research in sources including files kept on Serge by the state security services of the US and USSR. It carefully documents the political life and thought of a figure who was "always a maverick," (278) a radical whose work conveys "great insight and evocation, and ... hope based on a deep understanding of human history and social processes." (278–9) Unfashionably, but convincingly, it argues that Stalinism represented an anti-socialist social order that, in the absence of social revolution in advanced capitalist Europe, destroyed the isolated revolution in Russia from within. It places Serge in relation to this process within the USSR and the activities of the Stalinist state abroad in a manner that is corrosive of illusions about the former Soviet Union. At the same time, it challenges notions commonly held today that Stalinism was the logical outcome of the revolution of October 1917 or Bolshevism (or even the Enlightenment!), while following Serge in not sparing the Bolsheviks or Leon Trotsky and his followers from criticism. |
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It is no slight to say that while Serge's thought was far in advance of most of the left, he was not in the top rank of Marxist theorists of his time. Weissman argues that in Serge's work there is often "a fundamentally correct perception which is very suggestive, without being sufficiently penetrative" (274) and that he "was often better able to evoke the atmosphere of Soviet society than to systematically and consistently define it theoretically." (203) However, her enthusiasm leads to some insufficiently critical assessments. For instance, during his final years in Mexico following his escape from fascism, Serge grasped the need for socialist renewal. At the same time, he was — like so many others in the 1940s — politically disoriented. Yet Weissman claims that the hundreds of unpublished essays Serge wrote during his Mexican exile are all worthy of publication. (270) |
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In my judgment, the role of disagreements about the Spanish anti-Stalinist socialist POUM in the break between Serge and Trotsky in the late 1930s needs more attention than it receives. The treatment of the history of the USSR would have been strengthened by drawing more on social-historical research and analysis; the same can be said with respect to the German crisis of 1923. Better editing would have eliminated some repetition and other minor flaws. The book includes 27 photographs, of which 12 were missing from the review copy. |
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Weissman's valuable book provides a sound and evocative account of Serge's life and thought and the political history that was its context. As such, it should spark greater interest in this significant and unduly neglected figure. Given the enormous influence of the European working-class left, the Russian Revolution and Stalinism, it is to be hoped that this book will be read far beyond the ranks of specialists in these subjects. |
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David Camfield
York University
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