The Serge Trotsky Papers

Correspondence and Other Writings Between Victor Serge and Leon Trotsky

David Cotterill

• Publisher: Pluto Press
• Year: 1994
• Print ISBN: 9780745305165
• eBook ISBN: 9781783719488
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Historical Theory & Criticism
• Index: History

Leon Trotsky and Victor Serge represent the great and tragic oppositional figures to Stalin's dictatorial grip on the Soviet Union in the late 1920s and 1930s. Written during this period, the letters exchanged between these two friends, published here in translation for the first time together with other material from both the Trotsky Archive at Harvard and the Serge Archive in Mexico, present a unique first-hand account of the alternatives and arguments of the Trotskyist opposition in exile. The correspondence chronicles Trotsky's attempts to found a new Fourth International and casts new light on the trajectory of the Russian revolution from Lenin to Stalin and the long term effects of Stalinism for the revolutionary movements in the West. A remarkable insight into the lives of two prominent thinkers of the twentieth century, these letters also help us to understand an important relationship during a critical period in European politics. Each section is prefaced by a clear introduction that contextualises and clarifyies the documents.

1 Victor Serge and Bolshevism

Introduction by Philip Spencer

For Victor Serge, as for many of his contemporaries, the Russian Revolution marked a turning point in his political life. It forced upon him a major shift in his political allegiances, a break with previous affiliations and the adoption of a new political theory and practice, revolutionary Marxism, to which he had hitherto been deeply hostile. This new commitment was not lightly undertaken nor was it in its essentials ever to be abandoned. It was the result of a number of experiences and choices which were common to many on the left in those years but which were faced, and articulated, by Serge in his own unique way. Cumulatively, these choices led him to adopt a particular form of Bolshevism with a distinctive political accent: what might be called, following Marcel Liebman, a ‘libertarian Leninism’, whose inspiration lay in the dynamic of the Russian Revolution of 1917 and the particular role that Serge perceived the Bolshevik Party to play within it.¹ This new political creed was never to be abandoned by Serge, despite the enormous pressures brought to bear upon him both personally and politically in subsequent years. It gave him a coherent frame of reference within which to work and think and write in the decades that followed. In all the major phases of his political life henceforth there was to be a consistency of vision and unity of purpose which sustained him through the darkest hours.

Prewar Anarchism

The path taken by Serge in arriving at this position was not an easy one. As with many others on the left before the First World War, Serge’s loyalties were structured by the seemingly fundamental divide between anarchism on the one hand and Socialists (in whose ranks the Bolsheviks figured only as a fairly small if vocally radical section) on the other. This division had its roots in the classic dispute between Marx and Bakhunin at the time of the First International of 1864, over the role of politics and the state in revolution. In the era of the Second International, formed in 1889, these divisions had hardened considerably.² Anarchists were contemptuous of the whole world of Socialist politics, with its bureaucratically organised labour movements and mass political parties increasingly preoccupied with parliamentary politics and legalised trade unionism. Within anarchist circles, Serge was mostly associated with the individualistic wing, where contempt for what was seen as the reformist collusion of the organised left led some to acts of individual revolt and protest. It was his loyalty to these associates that landed him his first jail sentence in France for refusing to cooperate with the state’s prosecution of the infamous Bonnot Gang, a terrorist anarchist group of uncertain politics and provenance.³

War

Serge thus found himself in prison when the First World War broke out. There he had time and space (he was originally in solitary confinement) to meditate on the limitations of these primitive rebellions against society. Much as he admired ‘the exacting idealism of uncomplicated men [who,] conscious of their frustration, battled like madmen’, he could not help but reflect pessimistically on the vicious cycle of protest and repression within which they had been locked:

In those times, the world was an integrated structure, so stable in its appearance that no possibility of substantial change was visible within it […] Above the heads of the masses, wealth accumulated, insolent and proud. The consequences of this situation arose inexorably: crime, class struggles and their trail of bloody strikes, and the frenzied battles of One against All.

But none of these struggles held out much hope of success. In the end, even anarchism as an ideology of change and resistance had collapsed in the bourgeois jungle.⁴

The war shattered the stability of capitalist Europe and, for all its savage destructiveness, opened up new possibilities:

This storm interpreted the world for us. For me, it heralded another purifying tempest […] Revolutionaries knew quite well that this autocratic Europe, with its hangmen, its pogroms, its finery, its famines, its Siberian jails and ancient iniquity, could never survive the war.⁵

The impact of the war was felt everywhere, not least on the left. Old lines of division had to be radically redrawn, less on the basis of doctrinal difference (such as had pitted anarchists like Serge against Socialists of all stripes) than on the basis of response to the war. In the belligerent countries the majority, whether anarchist or Socialist, followed their leaders initially in supporting the war, in putting loyalty to (capitalist) nation far above loyalty to class, even to the point of gaily marching off to the front line to slaughter fellow workers.⁶ Only a minority, again either anarchist or Socialist, stood firm to their prewar principles and opposed the war. All across Europe tiny groups gathered, hesitantly at first, to voice opposition to the war – in France, the Vie Ouvrière group around Alfred Rosmer and Pierre Monatte; in Germany, Rosa Luxemburg (jailed for her pains), Karl Liebknecht and a handful of followers. Only in far-off Russia did a significant majority on the left, the Bolsheviks, emerge to take the clearest and most radical position, denouncing the war as an inter-imperialist rivalry and supporters of the war as chauvinist traitors to the working class. Lenin’s call for a radical realignment on the left, for a new international movement based on revolutionary opposition to the war, was to lead to a dramatic recomposition on the left, in which the prewar divisions between anarchists and Socialists were to play little or no role.⁷

In the isolation of prison, Serge may have known little or nothing of this or any other opposition, nor sensed yet its deeper logic. Independendy, however, he had come to a similar judgement. ‘The prospect of victory by either side appalled us […] The two coalitions had practically the same social organisation: republics based on high finance […] the same liberties equally stifled by exploitation.’⁸ The question of how to smash the exploitative social system that created this nightmare now posed itself more urgently than ever.

Spain

Released from jail and expelled from belligerent France, Serge made his way to Spain, where revolution was already in the air, in circumstances not unlike those which, on the other side of the continent, were ultimately to propel the Bolsheviks to power in Russia. Finding work as a linotypist in Barcelona, Serge gravitated, still loosely within an anarchist frame of reference, to the most radical organisation on the Spanish left, the revolutionary syndicalist organisation, the CNT. Here, news of the first of the Russian Revolutions of 1917, the February rising which swept away the Tsar, was greeted with enthusiasm:

Reading the dispatches from Russia, we were transfigured: for the images they conveyed were simple, concrete. A minute clarity was shed over things: the world was no longer impelled along by helpless lunacy […] The Spaniards […] instinctively understood the Petrograd days, since their imagination transposed those events to Madrid and Barcelona.⁹

Imagination was followed by action: the Barcelona uprisings of that year were, to Serge, clear indications that everywhere what he called ‘the same, intensely alive electric current, [was] crossing from the trenches to the factories, the same violent hopes [were] coming to birth’.¹⁰ Even the defeat of the Barcelona uprisings did not diminish Serge’s hopes.¹¹ But increasingly those hopes were vested elsewhere, in Russia – the land of his parents and, more vitally now, the prospective site of a successful revolution, although it transpired that this was to be one led by a political party, the Bolsheviks, which issued in the extreme form from the very Socialist tradition Serge had long opposed.

Serge determined to go to Russia to experience the revolution at first hand, not just as an observer but as a full participant; to put himself, as he said with commendable frankness to the Russian embassy in Barcelona, at the service of the revolution. For Serge, the gravitational pull of the revolution was irresistible. ‘We felt’, he wrote later:

as if we were leaving the void and entering the kingdom of the will […] A land awaited us where life was beginning anew, where conscious will, intelligence and an inexorable love of mankind were in action. Behind us, all Europe was ablaze, having choked almost to death in the fog of its own massacres. Barcelona’s flame smouldered on. Germany was in the thick of revolution, Austro-Hungary was splitting into free nations. Italy was spread with red flags […] This was only the beginning.¹²

The Russian Revolution and Bolshevism

On the long tortuous journey to Russia, beset by obstacles both physical and political, Serge’s political ideas clarified, increasingly focused by the significance of developments in the country itself. By now, of course, the Bolshevik revolution had taken place. Serge’s response was unequivocal. For him the revolution was inevitable; it could not, as he put it ‘stop halfway. The avalanche would carry on rolling right to the end […] the peasants seize the land, and the workers the factories’.¹³ This was of course precisely the Bolshevik programme of 1917: land, peace, bread and all power to the soviets! Despite the chaos and devastation that Serge fully recognised and never hid from himself or others,¹⁴ the basic choice confronting him seemed clear: either to throw in his lot with the Bolsheviks as the party that had led the revolution to victory; or to adopt, passively at best, the camp of counter-revolution. Serge had no doubts. As a revolutionary, whatever his early anarchist criticisms of the Marxist view, he was radically inspired by the achievements of the Russian masses and their Bolshevik leaders. In the revolution Serge saw the realisation of his deepest beliefs and hopes. For the first time, the masses had risen up not simply in destructive defiance but to smash the very structures of oppression which had claimed them, setting up instead a radically new type of organisation, the ‘Commune-State’ as Serge was henceforth always to refer to it.

Libertarian Leninism

The use of this term (drawn directly from Lenin’s State and Revolution, itself written in the middle of 1917) to describe the Russian Revolution signifies something of the ideological distance Serge had now travelled. His adherence to the Bolshevik party was more than conjunctural. In his enthusiasm for the revolution, Serge put all hesitations behind him and became a revolutionary Marxist, a Leninist in both theory and practice. At the same time, there was a deep continuity with his most basic political identifications. For there was no real defection here on Serge’s part, no forswearing of his deepest commitments. Rather, Serge recognised in Bolshevism a means of realising those commitments most effectively, of translating dream and idea into reality. On this henceforth he was to be emphatic. It was the role of the Bolsheviks in leading the revolution, the Bolsheviks as the vanguard party of the revolution which commanded his adherence.

The revolution itself was for Serge a fundamentally libertarian phenomenon, radically democratic in both form and content at every level – focused by the destruction of the repressive apparatus of army and police, workers’ control of the factories, and above all soviets as direct, revokable forms of government. The Bolshevik dispersal of the Constituent Assembly as an inferior bourgeois political form in favour of a new soviet form of government and representation, an act which has outraged liberal democrats for decades, met with Serge’s clear approval. Following Lenin, Serge saw the soviets as an altogether more representative and more accountable form of democracy. Representation through universal suffrage was seen as inferior, insensitive to shifts in opinion, incapable of registering the revolutionary dynamic of workers wanting to take power directly into their own hands. The radicalisation of the masses in 1917 and their corresponding shift towards the Bolsheviks themselves had taken place at the level of mandated, revokable delegates in the soviet.¹⁵

The Vanguard Party

In the heat of revolution the Bolshevik Party which drove this radical political process forward appeared in a new light to Serge the exanarchist. Strategically he was in full agreement with a Marxist party which, embracing the programme of permanent revolution, cast aside the narrow shackles of orthodox Marxism with its historical schema dictating to workers what was and was not permissible in this period. But it was the evidence of how the Bolshevik Party translated this strategy into action which made the most impact on him. This had both a negative and a positive side. On the one hand, Serge was forced to witness the practical failure of the anarchism whose ideological weakness he had already acknowledged in prison.¹⁶ On the other, the Bolsheviks had filled this vacuum magnificently, had in fact acted as he had always believed that anarchists should have done; ‘taken up’, as he put it, ‘the responsibilities that the anarchists were incapable of assuming’.¹⁷

But it was more than a question of simple replacement. Serge followed the logic of the argument through to its conclusions. He now recognised and argued the need for a party in a way that would have been impossible for him before the war. In the 1922 article written for the French revolutionary-syndicalist journal La Vie ouvrière, Serge traced this logic quite specifically, arguing that readers of that political persuasion (which until recently had been his too) should recognise as he had done that the ‘very logic of the facts’ dictated the need for a party like the Bolsheviks. Here Serge articulated the classically Leninist themes of uneven levels of consciousness among the masses and the consequent need for a vanguard to combat the regressive tug of reactionary ideas. But, characteristically, he identified the leadership qualities of such a party in principle, and the Bolsheviks as a model in practice, in a particular way.

For Serge, the vanguard character of the party had to be proven –earned, if you will – in practice. This for him had been the signal achievement of the Bolsheviks in the revolution itself. The Bolsheviks came to power because they gained respect, because their solutions, their programme, their strategy made sense, pointed a way forwards.¹⁸ But this leadership was not a simple, mechanical one-way process. In Serge’s view, there was a profound interplay between the party and the masses in 1917 in which each learned from and shaped the other. The masses ‘also create’, as he put it; they were not inert or pliable or passive. Much of Serge’s writing about the Russian working class in revolution lays great stress on its creativity, its capacity to invent solutions for problems, its moral qualities developed in the heat of struggle. The party’s role was to turn these qualities to best advantage, to give clearer shape to the masses’ ‘confused aspirations shot through with flashes of intelligence’.¹⁹

Organisation

The Bolshevik Party was able to play this role, according to Serge, not only because it had a programme which made sense of these aspirations and pointed a way forward, but because of the way in which it was organised, because of the kind of political party it had become. Here again Serge felt impelled to draw radical conclusions from the evidence of ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Dedication
• Preface
• Acknowlwdgements
• Glossary of organisations
• Chronology
• Introduction by D.J. Cotterill
• 1 Victor Serge and Bolshevism
• 2 The Correspondence
• 3 Serge, Trotsky, and The Spanish Revolution
• 4 Kronstadt and the Fourth International
• 5 Victor Serge and the Left Opposition
• Notes and References
• Bibliography
• Index