Birth of Our Power

Victor Serge

• Publisher: PM Press
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781629630526
• Topic: Littérature
• Subtopic: Fiction historique

Birth of Our Power is an epic novel set in Spain, France, and Russia during the heady revolutionary years 1917–1919. Serge's tale begins in the spring of 1917, the third year of mass slaughter in the blood-and-rain-soaked trenches of World War I. When the flames of revolution suddenly erupt in Russia and Spain, Europe is "burning at both ends." Although the Spanish uprising eventually fizzles, in Russia the workers, peasants, and common soldiers are able to take power and hold it.

Serge's "tale of two cities" is constructed from the opposition between Barcelona, the city "we" could not take, and Petrograd, the starving, beleaguered capital of the Russian Revolution besieged by counter-revolutionary Whites. Between the romanticism of radicalized workers awakening to their own power in a sun-drenched Spanish metropolis to the grim reality of workers clinging to power in Russia's dark, frozen revolutionary outpost. From "victory in defeat" to "defeat in victory."

The novel was composed a decade after the revolution in Leningrad, where Serge was living in semicaptivity because of his declared opposition to Stalin's dictatorship over the revolution.

Introduction

by Richard Greeman

Birth of Our Power is an epic novel set in Spain, France, and Russia during the heady revolutionary years 1917–1919. It was composed a decade later in Leningrad by a remarkable witness-participant, the Franco-Russian writer and revolutionary Victor Serge (1890–1947).¹ Serge’s tale begins in the spring of 1917, in the third year of insane mass slaughter in the blood- and rain-soaked trenches of World War I, when the flames of revolution suddenly erupt in Russia and Spain. Europe is “burning at both ends.” In February, the Russian people overthrow the Czar, while in neutral Spain militant anarcho-syndicalist workers allied with middle-class Catalan nationalists rise up in mass strikes aimed at taking power. Although the Spanish uprising eventually fizzles, in Russia the workers, peasants, and common soldiers are able to take power and hold it. Birth of Our Power chronicles that double movement.

Serge’s novel follows an anonymous narrator’s odyssey from Barcelona to Petrograd,² from one red city to the other, from the romanticism of radicalized workers awakening to their own power in a sun-drenched Spanish metropolis to the grim reality of workers clinging to power in Russia’s dark, frozen revolutionary outpost. Where Dickens constructed his Tale of Two Cities around the opposition between conservative London (‘white’) and revolutionary Paris (‘red’) Serge’s novel is based on the opposition of two cites, both red: Barcelona, the city ‘we’ could not take, and Petrograd—the starving capital of the Russian Revolution, besieged by counterrevolutionary whites.

Like Homer’s Odysseus and Virgil’s Aeneas, Serge’s nameless narrator is fated to pass through the Underworld on his two-year odyssey from the defeated revolution to the victorious one. He spends over a year in French World War I concentration camps for subversives. The novel ends in Petrograd with something of an anti-climax: The city of victorious revolution, the city where ‘we’ have taken power, is revealed not as a vast tumultuous forum, but as a grim, half-empty metropolis, “not at all dead, but savagely turned in on itself, in the terrible cold, the silence, the hate, the will to live, the will to conquer.”

Whereas the defeat in Barcelona is partially transformed into a victory by the heroic exaltation of the masses newly awakened to a sense of their own power, in Petrograd, the original question of “Can we take power?” is superseded by an even more difficult one: “Can we survive and learn to use that power?” The novel thus plays on the ironic themes of ‘victory-in-defeat’ (Barcelona) and ‘defeat-in-victory’ (Petrograd).

Autobiography into Fiction

Serge lived it all. The novel follows its author’s own two-year itinerary across war-torn Europe from an aborted revolt in Spain to the promise of a victorious revolution in Russia, but strange to say, the novel is not really autobiographical. Serge’s anonymous narrator is little more than a ‘camera eye’ giving multiple perspectives on the action. He has no personal life. He never gets to speak a line, only to observe and narrate. Indeed, the pronoun ‘I’ appears only once or twice per chapter. The fraternal ‘we,’ the first-person plural, is Serge’s preferred part of speech, beginning with the very first sentence, indeed with the title.

I feel an aversion to using “I” as a vain affirmation of the self, containing a good dose of illusion and another of vanity or arrogance. Whenever possible, that is to say whenever I am not feeling isolated, when my experience highlights in some way or other that of people with whom I feel linked, I prefer to employ the pronoun “we,” which is truer and more general. We never live only by our own efforts, we never live only for ourselves; our most intimate, our most personal thinking is connected by a thousand links with that of the world.”³

Serge’s novel presents these events in a kaleidoscoping series of tableaux studded with ‘epiphanies’—realistic incidents that unveil transcendent social truths. Given Birth of Our Power’s somewhat disjointed, cinematographic style—no doubt influenced by such modernist masterpieces as Andrei Biely’s St. Petersburg, Boris Pilnyak’s Naked Year, and John Dos Passos’s USA—readers are often at a loss as to how to contextualize the novel’s rapid succession of impressionistic scenes in terms of real-world politics and history.

The opening pages of Birth of Our Power are steeped in symbolism and poetic beauty, but they may prove exasperating for the reader who does not share the author’s intimacy with Spanish revolutionary history. Indeed, Serge never refers to Barcelona by name, only as ‘this city.’ And it is only through passing references to the War in Europe that we are able to place the events there historically.

For most readers, the phrase ‘Spanish Revolution’ brings to mind the 1936–39 Civil War. But in fact the Spanish revolutionary tradition, with all its passion and brutality, goes back much further, to Napoleonic times (think of Goya’s Disasters of War). Throughout the nineteenth century, repeated attempts to establish liberal government in Spain resulted only in bloody fusillades and paper reforms. Spain entered the twentieth century, after its stunning defeat by the United States in 1898, as a backward, corrupt, priest-and-soldier-ridden monarchy. The anarchism of the Russian Bakunin caught the imagination of the peasants and of the workers in the new industrial centers like Barcelona, and their revolt took the form of jacqueries and individual terrorism—a situation similar to that in even more backward Czarist Russia.

The monarchy’s response to social unrest was the establishment of a new Inquisition responsible for wholesale arrests and executions and for the brutal torture of anyone even remotely connected with the revolutionary movement. The judicial murder at Montjuich, the craggy mountain fortress that overlooks the city in Serge’s opening pages, of Francisco Ferrer, the progressive educationalist, blamed for the 1909 general strike, raised a worldwide storm of protest, including street battles in Paris, in which nineteen-year-old Serge took part. In Birth of Our Power, the citadel of Montjuich, where many rebels had been tortured and shot, becomes the symbol both of the revolutionary past and the oppressive power of the present.

The immediate cause of the uprisings of the summer of 1917 in Barcelona was the increased confidence of both the bourgeoisie and the working class of Catalonia during the World War I industrial boom. Neutral Spain was making money hand over fist selling to both sides. The bourgeois nationalists of the Lliga Regionalista were in the forefront of the fight against the autocracy, and for them the fight was for increased regional autonomy and a democracy. The Lliga fixed the date of July 19, 1917, for the calling of an assembly. The anarcho-syndicalists of the CNT (National Labor Confederation) criticized this movement as a nationalist diversion by the bourgeoisie in order to sidetrack the imminent and inevitable worker’s revolution, but supported it nonetheless. The workers hoped that Catalan bourgeoisie would assist them in carrying out a Spanish version of Russia’s February Revolution. Serge’s Memoirs recount that “three months after the news of the Russian Revolution, the Comité Obrero began to prepare a revolutionary general strike, entered negotiations for a political alliance with the Catalan liberal bourgeoisie, and calmly planned the overthrow of the monarchy.”⁴ What is remarkable in these forgotten pages of history is the extent to which the Spanish workers were inspired by the February Revolution in distant Russia. According to Serge, “the demands of the Workers’ Committee, established in June 1917 and published by Solidaridad Obrero (‘Workers’ Solidarity’) anticipated the accomplishments of Soviet Russia.” On the basis of this historical coincidence, Serge’s novel develops his theme of power in complex counterpoint.

Serge arrived in Barcelona in February 1917, fresh out of a French penitentiary⁵—expelled to Spain after serving five years straight time for his implication in the notorious 1913 trial of the Tragic Bandits of French anarchism. It was in Barcelona, in April 1917, that Victor Kibalchich, heretofore best known by his anarcho-individualist nom de guerre ‘The Maverick’ (Le Rétif), first began signing his articles ‘Victor Serge.’ Significantly, the subject was the fall of the Czar, and the name-change symbolized Victor’s simultaneous political rebirth and return to his Russian roots.⁶

Victor soon found a job working as a printer at the firm of Auber i Pla, earning poverty wages of four pesetas (about eighty American cents) for a nearly twelve-hour working day and joined the small, thirty-member printers’ union there. Within a few weeks, he and his workmates were swept up in the growing wave of social unrest. Soon accepted by the local revolutionaries, Victor became an intimate of their outstanding leader, Salvador Seguí, affectionately known as Nay del Sucre (‘Sugarplum’), the inspiration for the character of Dario in Birth of Our Power. Here is how Serge recalled Seguí in his Memoirs, where he is introduced as “Barcelona’s hero of the hour, the quickening spirit, the uncrowned leader, the fearless man of politics who distrusted politicians.”

A worker, and usually dressed like a worker coming home from the job, cloth cap squashed down on his skull, shirt collar unbuttoned under his cheap tie; tall, strapping, round-headed, his features rough, his eyes big, shrewd, and sly under heavy lids, of an ordinary degree of ugliness, but intensely charming to meet and with his whole self displaying an energy that was lithe and dogged, practical, intelligent, and without the slightest affectation. To the Spanish working-class movement he brought a new role: that of the superb organizer. He was no anarchist, but rather a libertarian, quick to scoff at resolutions on “harmonious life under the sun of liberty,” “the blossoming of the self,” or “the future society”; he posed instead the immediate problems of wages, organization, rents, and revolutionary power. And that was his tragedy: he could not allow himself to raise aloud this central problem, that of power. I think we were the only ones to discuss it in private…. Together with Seguí, I followed the negotiations between the Catalan liberal bourgeoisie and the Comité Obrero. It was a dubious alliance, in which the partners feared, justifiably mistrusted, and subtly out-maneuvered one another. Seguí summed up the position: “They would like to use us and then do us down. For the moment, we are useful in their game of political blackmail. Without us they can do nothing: we have the streets, the shock troops, the brave hearts among the people. We know this, but we need them. They stand for money, trade, possible legality (at the beginning, anyway), the press, public opinion, etc.”⁷

Serge recalled having been pessimistic about the possibilities of victory in such a poorly prepared fight, allied with a class whose interests the workers didn’t share. “Unless there’s a complete victory, which I don’t believe in, they’re ready to abandon us at the first difficulty. We’re betrayed in advance.” The Workers’ Committee, entirely too Bakuninist, failed to fully analyze the situation and prepare for all eventualities. They were certain of taking Barcelona, but what about Madrid? And the rest of Spain? Would they overthrow the monarchy?

Power. This, Victor saw, was the problem, the only one that counted. And no one in Barcelona seemed to be posing it besides him and Seguí. Once the city was taken, then what? How was it to be governed? “We had no other example before our eyes but that of the Paris Commune of 1871, and seen from up close it wasn’t encouraging: lack of determination, division, needless blather, competition between men lacking in eminence.” What was lacking was a head. “Masses overflowing with energy, impelled by a great, inchoate idealism, many good rank and file militants, and no head.” And all these lacks could be laid at the feet of the anarchists who didn’t want to hear about the seizure of power. “They refused to see that the Workers’ Committee, once victorious, would be Catalonia’s government of tomorrow.”

The February Revolution in Russia was also headless, and as Serge had accurately seen from Barcelona, it was soon co-opted by socialist lawyers who continued to send the poor peasants into the trenches while denying them the land reform for which they had made the revolution. But the Russian Revolution did not remain headless for long, and with the return of exiled revolutionaries like Trotsky and Lenin in April 1917 it found its leaders: organized professional revolutionaries who were not afraid of taking power. Serge’s lifelong admiration for these leaders, despite his reservations and criticisms, is rooted in this fact. On the other hand, political power, even in the hands of the purest revolutionaries, is a double-edged sword, ready to turn against the revolution itself. This irony of ‘defeat in victory’ in Petrograd becomes palpable in the final chapters of Birth of Our Power and is the central theme of Serge’s next novel, the ironically titled Conquered City (1932).

In an imaginary dialogue with Dario, the narrator of Birth of Our Power sums up his feelings about the June 1917 Barcelona uprising and its predictable defeat titled ‘Meditation on Victory’:

Tomorrow is full of greatness. We will not have brought this victory to ripeness in vain. This city will be taken, if not by our hands, at least by others like ours, but stronger. Stronger perhaps for having been better hardened, thanks to our very weakness. If we are beaten, other men, infinitely different from us, infinitely like us, will walk, on a similar evening, in ten years, in twenty years (how long is really without importance) down this rambla, meditating on the same victory. Perhaps they will think about our blood. Even now I think I see them and I am thinking about their blood, which will flow too. But they will take the city.

These lines, penned in Leningrad in 1930, turned out to be prophetic. Five years later, in 1936–1937, the Barcelona workers were ‘in the saddle,’ to use Orwell’s classic expression. By then, Serge’s friend Seguí had been murdered by the bosses’ pistoleros, but a new generation of Barcelona revolutionaries had replaced them. These included Serge’s friends among Spanish workers’ leaders like Angel Pestana the anarcho-syndicalist and Andrés Nin of the independent Marxist POUM, who briefly shared power in Barcelona during the early days of the Spanish Civil War, only to be betrayed and assassinated by the Stalinists. Serge’s 1930 meditation, set on the eve of a doubtful July 1917 insurrection, has thus acquired new layers of historical irony.

Meanwhile, back in July 1917, Victor Kibalchich’s personal Odyssey took a new departure. When the Barcelona uprising fizzled, he heeded the call of Revolutionary Russia, the land of his exiled Russian revolutionary parents, the land where in February the ‘we’ of Birth of Our Power succeeded in overthrowing the Czar and are now contesting for power under the pro-Allied Provisional Government. The road to Russia led through wartime Paris, where, in order to be repatriated to revolutionary Russia, Victor tried t...