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Title: Victor Serge & the Bolsheviks Author: Andrew Flood Date: 1998 Language: en Topics: Victor Serge, Russian Revolution, Bolshevik Party, Workers Solidarity Source: Retrieved on 2nd August 2020 from http://struggle.ws/russia/serge.html
From the Summer of 1918 the Bolshevik government undertook the
destruction of the Russian Revolution, the destroyed all the gains the
workers had won in October over the next four years. Any anarchist who
has argued this with Leninists today will know the name of Victor Serge.
The material Serge wrote in his first years in Russia consists of crude
apologies for the Bolshevik dictatorship. It is not surprising that this
is the most popular material among today’s Leninists. But in his later
writings the Bolsheviks pet anarchist turns to bite his master. With the
illusion of the ‘success’ of the Russian Revolution fading in the late
1930’s Serge rediscovered the brutality of the Bolshevik regime.
Serge was not at the time of the revolution an anarchist. He had been an
anarchist in the years before the first world war but joined the
Bolsheviks on his arrival in Russia in 1919. Like the Bolsheviks he
argued for the party dictatorship saying “The Party lived in the certain
knowledge that the slightest relaxation of its authority would give the
day to reaction”
Even when the Party lied to its own members and massacred the sailors of
Kronstadt he stuck with the Party, despite being only too aware of its
lies. He describes how he was initially fooled into believing that
Kronstadt was a White rising but how “The truth seeped through little by
little, past the smoke screen put out by the Party press, which was
positively bezerk with lies...it lied systematically”
In later years when Trotsky lied about the reason for the suppression
Serge answered that “It is untrue that the sailors of Kronstadt demanded
privileges..”. When Trotsky claimed they sought the restoration of
capitalism, Serge pointed out “The economic program of Kronstadt was so
legitimate, so far in reality from being counter-revolutionary, and so
easy to grant, that in the very hours when the last of the mutineers
were being shot, Lenin implement the same demands by getting the New
Economic Policy adopted”. When Trotsky denied the massacres carried out
after the rebellion Serge wrote “By hundreds, if not by thousands the
sailors were shot on the spot. Three months later they were still being
taken out by night..in small batches, to be executed in the cellars or
the exercise yards”
Serge described what Kronstadt actually stood for as follows “Pamphlets
distributed in the working class districts (of Petrograd) put out the
demands of the Kronstadt Soviet. It was a programme for the renewal of
the revolution. I will summarise it: re-election of the Soviets by
secret ballot; freedom of the spoken and printed word for all
revolutionary parties and groupings; the release of revolutionary
political prisoners; abolition of official propaganda; an end to
requisitioning in the countryside; freedom for the artisan class;
immediate suppression of the barrier squads that were stopping the
people getting their food as they pleased”
He also describes how these demands were received by the Bolsheviks
“from the first moment, at a time when it was easy to migate the
conflict the Bolshevik leaders had no intention of using anything but
forcible methods. Later, we discovered that the whole of the delegation
sent by Kronstadt to explain the issues to the Petrograd Soviet and
people was in the prisons of the Cheka”
While Leninists today like the SWP try to label the Kronstadt’s rising
as anti-Semitic, Serge shows us the real motivation of the rebellion
when he describes its final moments “The final assault was unleashed on
17 March....Some of the rebels managed to reach Finland. Others put up a
furious resistance, fort to fort and street to street; they stood and
were shot crying ‘Long live the world revolution!’ There were some of
them who died shouting ‘Long live the Communist International!”
These descriptions by Serge, a Bolshevik, confirm the accounts given by
all the anarchists . Of course Serge had fallen for the Russian myth,
that this repression would somehow preserve the revolution. Today we see
it led to 70 years of a monstrous police state that completly
discredited the idea of communism . So when Serge asks “Given the
dictatorship of the proletariat, exercised by the Communist Party, was
it right for us to use forcible repression against the protests,
demands, propositions and demonstrations of workers stricken by
famine?...Was it right to repress movements whose underlying origins
were in working class democracy” our answer should be a very loud NO!