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Title: The Bolsheviksâ pet anarchist Author: Dermot Sreenan Date: November 2000 Language: en Topics: Victor Serge, anti-Bolshevism, Russian Revolution, Red & Black Revolution Source: Retrieved on 8th August 2021 from http://struggle.ws/rbr/rbr4_serge.html Notes: This article was originally published in Red & Black Revolution No 4.
Leninists are fond of quoting from the writing of Victor Serge, as a
means of getting a libertarian rubber stamp for the actions of the
Bolsheviks during the October revolution and the subsequent events. In
his keynote article âIn defence of Octoberâ[1] John Rees uses no less
than 8 quotes from Sergeâs writings within the space of 70 pages. Poor
old Lenin only managed to clock up 4 original quotes, while Tony Cliffâs
dubious interpretation of all these events manages to get more quotes in
than one could possibly count. To a certain extent, what the Leninists
of today are trying to tell us is that Serge was a practical man, and he
knew that the only way for the revolution to succeed was to row in
behind the Bolsheviks. So, with this in mind, we take a look at Sergeâsâ
autobiography âMemoirs of a Revolutionaryâ.
Serge was born in 1890 and rapidly became a self educator and socialist
joining the Jeuns-Grades â a Belgium federation of Socialist youth
groups. Serge eventually ended up in Paris, which was the scene of a
huge demonstration (over 500,000 people) when the working class learned
of the execution of Francisco Ferrer[2]. âIt was a time of pot-bellied
peace; the atmosphere was strangely electric, the calm before the storm
of 1914.â[3] Serge was at this time involved in publishing a journal in
Paris. Subsequent to the riots at the time of the demonstrations his
house was raided, the police found weapons there, two of his comrades
were sentenced to death by the guillotine, and he got 5 years in prison.
Nasty times to be living in if the state considered you to be a
revolutionary. But they were about to get worse. While in prison, the
Great War broke out in all its futility, all over Europe sending young
men to their deaths. Most of the mainstream left parties turned towards
fratricidal patriotism causing mass confusion in the movement. The young
imprisoned Serge found the whole situation incomprehensible.
Following his release, Serge ended up in Petrograd at the start of 1919.
He was not the only young revolutionary to be drawn to Mother Russia
during her famous date with destiny. One of the first people he met
while there was Maxim Gorky. Gorky, apart from being famous both at home
and abroad as a major writer, was also a respected political figure in
Russia. Heâd been a champion of change for a long time, and his opinion
was one that was respected by many.
Gorky had witnessed the early days of the revolution and reported that
the Bolsheviks were âdrunk with authorityâ[4]. But, after a brief time,
Serge made his own mind up about the whole matter. âI was neither
against the Bolsheviks nor neutral; I was with them, albeit
independently, without renouncing thought or critical sense. Certainly
on several essential points they were mistaken: in their intolerance, in
their faith in stratification, in their leaning towards centralism and
administrative techniquesâ[5]. In spite of these reservations he threw
himself into working alongside the Bolsheviks. He was invited to be a
Petrograd representative at the founding meeting of the Communist
International (Third International) initiated by Lenin in Moscow.
All this work for the Party brought with it special rations. Such was
the wide sweeping famine in Russia at the time that, even with these
rations, Serge wrote âI would have died of hunger without the sordid
manipulations of the black market, where we traded the petty possessions
we had brought in from France.â[6] The Central Committee, however,
suffered none of these hardships. Living in the Hotel Astoria, they
dined on soup and âdelicious horsemeatâ[7] in comparative warmth,
overlooking the dark public squares. Serge even calls this place the
âhotel of the dictatorsâ.[8]
The Winter of 1919 was a cold and bitter one. Civil War raged, exiled
Russian Aristocrats traded currency with the Tsar still on it, while the
Bolsheviks printed it like it was going out of fashion and used it to
procure arms. Thatâs right, the Bolsheviks printed money with the Tsarâs
image on it. As Serge says âwe used to print them for the poor fools
(Russian Exiles)â[9]. The widespread cloak of hunger hung over the whole
country. In the midst of this mess, the infamous Bolshevik secret
police, the Chekas carried out their dastardly work. The telephone
rapidly became an enemy of any sympathetic official and Serge was no
exception. He writes âAt every hour it brought me voices of
panic-stricken women who spoke of arrests, imminent executions, and
injustice, and begged me to intervene at once, for the love of
God!â[10]. At this stage the custom of arresting and executing hostages
had become âgeneralised and legal.â[11]
The mere existence of a secret police is a rapid insight into the nature
of the Partyâs politics at the time. From 1918 onwards the leadership,
from Lenin downwards, had become increasingly more paranoid and saw
plots and treachery everywhere. The Cheka were formed to counteract this
but as Serge writes he believed it âwas one of the gravest and most
impermissible errors that the Bolshevik leaders committed in 1918.â[12]
He claimed that revolutionary tribunals, letting in defensive evidence
and functioning in the clear light of day rather than the cloak of the
night, would have functioned efficiently with âfar less abuse and
depravity.â[13] When Serge brought up Zinoviev (Leninâs appointed
President of the Third International and member of the Politbureau)
around this time in a conversation with Gorky, Gorky shouted out âDonât
talk to me of that beast ever again â tell him that his torturers are a
disgrace to the human image.â[14]
By early 1920, it appeared that the Civil War was coming to an end, and
the idea of normality returning to Mother Russia was gaining popularity.
By January of 1920 Dzerzhinsky (Peopleâs Commissar for the Interior),
with the backing of Lenin and Trotsky, recommended the abolition of the
death sentence â except in areas where there were still military
operations being carried out. Hope sprang up immediately amongst the
thousands of suspects in the crammed prisons as the decree was passed by
the Government and signed by Lenin. But the executioners of the Cheka
were busy that night, as 200 people were driven outside of Petrograd and
shot. Over 300 in Moscow. Relatives scraped at the mass burial grounds
looking for relics of their dead loved ones. Serge actually met one of
the grim reapers who worked in the Petrograd Cheka, who said of that
time âWe thought that if the Peopleâs Commissars were getting converted
to Humanitarianism, that was their business. Our business was to crush
the counter-revolution for ever, and they could shoot us afterwards if
they like!â[15] The work of the Cheka, although well recognised, was
never spoken of. No one was disciplined for this slaughter, implying
that their dirty work met with the approval of the Bolsheviks.
By 1920 opinions were rampant and divided about the Soviets. The
Mensheviks were outright opponents, the Left Social-Revolutionaries
first boycotted them and then collaborated with them. The anarchists
were divided into pro-soviet and anti-soviet. Serge called all the
people outside the party view of the time âdissidents of the revolutionâ
who were âright on many pointsâ.[16] But the dissidents had a
fundamental point which had to be admitted, which was above all the
right of the people of Russia âfor freedom of expression and the
restoration of liberty in the soviets.â[17] The Soviets of 1917 had been
the workersâ councils which had been composed of the workers and
soldiersâ delegates who wished to disband the bad old society and bring
about the dawn of a new age of freedom for mankind. But with the
suppression of all opposition to the viewpoints of the Bolsheviks, Serge
writes âIn practice they (the soviets) represented nothing but the local
Party Committees.â[18] The Party at this time had been practically
invaded, according to Serge, by careerists, mercenary elements who came
over in swarms to the side with power. Bureaucratisation was rampant. It
comes as no surprise that the Party that would bring about the
âdictatorship of the proletariatâ was now full of little dictators who
âpossessed no initiativeâ.[19] After all, the nature of their politics
was to have a small number of people making decisions for the majority.
The search for the enemies within was growing, mainly driven from the
top (secretaries) downwards through the Party and exercised by the
Cheka. Of the many anarchists in prison at this time, Lenin said they
âwere not true anarchists nor idealists â just banditsâ and anyway âThe
State is a machine for which we are answerable and we cannot allow its
operation to be frustrated.â[20] By this stage, the Bolsheviks were
determined that this revolution was theirs alone and anyone who held an
alternative opinion was labeled against the party â and therefore
against the revolution. Any opposition to the will of the party was seen
as a threat as the Bolsheviks wrestled for a grip on the monopoly of
power. They were hanging onto it by their fingertips and any threat was
dealt with in a severe manner. As one party member wrote in an official
trade union journal at the time âProfessionalâny Vestnikâ âthe
destruction of newspapers, the annihilation of freedom of agitation for
the socialist and democratic parties is inadmissable. The.....violence
against strikers, etc. irritated open wounds. There has been too much of
this type of memory of the Russian toiling masses and this can lead to
an analogy deadly to the Soviet power.â[21] The Bolsheviks were holding
onto State power irrespective of costs, ideals or lives.
Anarchists were arrested en mass by the Cheka in November 1920, as they
prepared for their congress. Serge speaks, at this time, of being
horrified at witnessing the rigging of elections so that Leninâs and
Zinovievâs âmajorityâ opinion would win. Lenin said the trade unions
should organise autonomously from the state (an improvement from
Trotskyâs position which said they should be merged) but they must be
subordinate to the Party. âAll power to the Partyâ would have been a
much more accurate slogan at this time. Incidents happened all the time
in factories. The Party was becoming less and less popular, and strikes
were on the increase. This was in the November and December of 1920. The
atmosphere was building towards a confrontation between the Party and
those who were pro-revolution, but not pro the Bolshevik version they
were being served. That confrontation would burst into the open at
Kronstadt and Serge was one of the witnesses.
Kropotkin, the best known anarchist in Russia and worldwide at the time,
died. The anarchists, including a number who were temporarily released
from Bolshevik jails in order to attend, turned his funeral into a
massive show of strength and a âdenunciation of all tyrannyâ[22]. Behind
the coffin marched thousands of mourners hand in hand, carrying the
black flags of anarchism. The Chekaâs presence at the funeral added to
the atmosphere of tension. Many anarchists were arrested straight after
the burial of the old man, only to disappear to prisons from which they
would never re-emerge. Just as the old man lay in the ground, many were
to join him and with them went the hopes for socialism and freedom.
18 days later, Serge was awoken in the Astoria Hotel with the news that
âKronstadt is in the hands of the Whites.â[23] Later on the next day
other comrades told him âthe sailors have mutiniedâ[24] and that what
heâd heard previously was nothing but an atrocious lie. Serge writes âWe
were paralysed by official falsehoods. It had never happened before that
our Party should lie to us like this.â[25] It was in fact a naval
revolt, led by the local Soviet.
The battle lines were drawn, this was a battle for power. Who was really
in charge of the Soviets, the people themselves or a Party already
rampant with bureaucrats and careerists? Lenin had written in 1918 that
âThe irrefutable experience of history has shown that.....the
dictatorship of individual persons was very often the vehicle, the
channel of the dictatorship of the revolutionary classes.â[26] What this
meant in reality was that the make-up of the Soviets had to change and
was changed from the freely elected delegates to submissive party hacks
who rubber stamped the decisions made further up the hierarchy. The
battle at Kronstadt was fought to either bring the revolution back
towards the people or to wave good-bye to it all.
Serge wrote of the demands of the Kronstadt rebels. âPamphlets
distributed in the working class areas ... It was a programme for the
renewal of the Revolution ... re-election of the Soviets by secret
ballot; freedom of the spoken and printed word for all revolutionary
parties and groupings; freedom for the trade unions; 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 from getting their food as they pleased.â[27] The crews of the
First and Second Naval Squadrons, along with the garrison and the Soviet
in Kronstadt, were fighting for the triumph of the above demands.
A delegation from Kronstadt which was dispatched to Petrograd to explain
the uprising ended up in the hands of the Cheka. Most of those who
mediated on the sailorsâ behalf ended up being arrested. Serge justifies
the whole incident and his own siding with the Party in this way
âKronstadt had right on its side. Kronstadt was the beginning of a fresh
liberating revolution for popular democracy ... However, the country was
absolutely exhausted, and production practically at a standstill; there
were no reserves of any kind, not even reserves of stamina in the hearts
of the masses....Soviet democracy lacked leadership, institutions and
inspiration; at its back there were only masses of starving and
desperate men.â[28] That was his reason. He saw no hope for the people
to take the de-railed revolution and put it back on track. Serge puts it
more bluntly in his propaganda of the time when he wrote âDespite its
mistakes and abuses the Bolshevik Party is at present the supremely
organised, intelligent and stable force which deserves our confidence.
The Revolution has no other mainstay, and is no longer capable of any
thorough going regeneration.â[29] It was with these words that Serge
kissed the idea of freedom good-bye, and held up his arms in a shrug
which said there was nothing better.
The anarchists and the Menshevik Social Democrats were outlawed, along
with anybody else who didnât give absolute loyalty to Leninâs
dictatorship. Charged with all sorts of âodious termsâ[30], Serge
himself writes âThe Cheka is mad!â[31] In Moscow at the same time Lenin
was proclaiming the âNew Economic Policyâ. Lenin, in his own written
words, described this: âSocialism is merely the next step forward from
State capitalist monopoly. Or in other words, socialism is merely state
capitalist monopoly which is made to serve the interests of the whole
people and has to that extent ceased to be capitalist monopoly.â[32] At
the same congress, a party faction known as the Workersâ Opposition was
outlawed and denounced as âanarcho-syndicalistâ because they wished
management of production to be handed over to the trade unions. This
history of events displays that the Bolsheviks could not accept any
threat to their monoploy of power. The threat at that time was on the
cold winds of change blowing from the port of Kronstadt.
Serge has been championed for a long time by various Trotskyists and
Leninists as the former Libertarian who saw the Bolshevik example and
followed it. He was a practical man, theyâll say, an example of an
anarchist who saw sense in that time of revolt. Read his book and listen
to his story. He was a man who was courageous and strong and fought for
what he believed. But at one point a light was extinguished in him, and
he just kept on pushing for the programme being put forth by the party.
That light that went out was his belief that you could win freedom, he
thought that what the working class had to do was trust in and obey the
ârevolutionary partyâ. Unfortunately, when they did that they were left
in a position of hoping the party would deliver that freedom. Too late
did they realise that the emancipation of the working class is the job
of the working class itself, the party isnât going to deliver it.
This battle was lost in Kronstadt, and thatâs why anarchists throughout
the world celebrated when we saw those joyous faces on the other side as
the Berlin wall was smacked over. Then the Party had won the battle and
formed in its wake a viciously authoritarian state â where the will of
the people was crushed beneath the wheels of interest of the Bolsheviks.
So we did not mourn the passing of the Bolshevik dictatorship,
socialismâs chance in Russia passed when the blood of the sailors was
spilled by the Red Army on the ice of Kronstadt. Serge wrote his Memoirs
of a Revolutionary â and in it he displays how the means determine the
end. Leninists have failed to make a revolution based on freedom and
equality because it cannot be built on suppression. Bakunin wrote with a
clarity that Serge only found out though experience âOnly the practice
of social revolution, great new historical experiences, the logic of
events can bring them around, sooner or later, to a common solution: and
strong in our belief in the validity of our principle......the
workers...., not their leaders, will then end by joining with us to tear
down these prisons called States and to condemn politics, which is in
fact nothing more than the art of dominating and fleecing the
masses.â[33] Itâs imperative that a social revolution is built on
freedom, as any anarchist will tell you. When it is, that revolution
will not fail, and that is a truth that we are here to build for.
[1] In âInternational Socialism No. 52â a journal published by the
Socialist Workers Party in Britain
[2] Memoirs of a Revolutionary by Victor Serge
[3] An anarcho-syndicalist and educational reformer. In Barcelona he
translated French Syndicalist material and founded the journal
Solidaridad Obrera. He was vilified and hated by the Catholic Church and
the right because he established libertarian schools for the education
of working class children. His respect within the working class was such
that his death in Spain brought half a million people out to demonstrate
on the streets of Paris.
[4] Memoirs of a Revolutionary, page 73, Quote attributed to Maxim Gorky
[5] ibid page 76
[6] ibid page 79
[7] ibid page 79
[8] ibid page 79
[9] ibid page 86
[10] ibid page 80
[11] ibid page 80
[12] ibid page 80â81
[13] ibid page 81
[14] ibid page 82
[15] ibid page 99, Quote attributed to a man called Leonidov â his real
name was never written by Serge â a man who took part in the execution
of hundreds of people outside Petrograd.
[16] ibid page 118
[17] ibid page 119
[18] ibid page 118
[19] ibid page 118
[20] Anarchists behind bars (Summer 1921) â Lenin quoted when asked
about imprisoned anarchists like Voline
[21] The Bolsheviks & Workers Control, page 28, Quote from Party member
Lovosky
[22] Memoirs of a Revolutionary, ibid page 121
[23] ibid page 124
[24] ibid page 125
[25] ibid page 125
[26] Leninâs article âThe immediate Tasks of the Soviet Governmentâ
published in Isvestiya
[27] Memoirs of a Revolutionary, ibid page 126
[28] ibid page 128
[29] ibid page 129
[30] ibid page 129
[31] ibid page 129
[32] Lenin, Collected Works, Vol 25, page 358
[33] No Gods, No Masters: Vol. 2, ed Daniel Guerin, page 161 â Bakunin
letter to La Liberte Oct 5^(th) 1872