Marxists’ Internet Archive
Victor Serge
1890-1947
“It is often said that ‘the germ of all Stalinism was in Bolshevism at its beginning’. Well, I have no objection. Only, Bolshevism also contained many other germs, a mass of other germs, and those who lived through the enthusiasm of the first years of the first victorious socialist revolution ought not to forget it. To judge the living man by the death germs which the autopsy reveals in the corpse – and which he may have carried in him since his birth – is that very sensible?” – From Lenin to Stalin, 1937.
Victor Lvovich Kibalchich (better known as Victor Serge) was born in 1890 in Brussels, the son of anti-Czarist Russian exiles. Originally an anarchist, jailed for five years in France, he joined the Russian Revolution on arriving in Petrograd in January 1919 and worked for the newly founded Communist International as a journalist, editor and translator, and joined the Party during the siege of Petrograd. As a Comintern representative in Germany he helped prepare the aborted insurrection in the autumn of 1923, then fled to Vienna.
In 1925 he returned to Russia and joined the Left Opposition. He was expelled from the party in 1928 and briefly imprisoned. At this time he turned to writing fiction, which was published mainly in France. In 1933 he was arrested and deported to Central Asia. After an international campaign he was eventually allowed to leave Russia in April 1936 on the eve of the Moscow Show Trials.
Upon arrival in the West he renewed contact with Trotsky but later political differences developed and a bitter controversy developed between the two remaining veterans of the pre-Stalinist Russian Communist Party. Escaping from Paris in 1940 just ahead of the invading Nazi troops he found refuge in Mexico. During his last years Serge fought for ‘Socialism and Freedom,’ was isolated and physically attacked by the Stalinists, and wrote is greatest works ‘for the desk drawer.’ He died penniless shortly after the 30th anniversary of the Bolshevik revolution in November 1947, which he defended in one of his last writings.
MIA is saddened to hear of the death of Vladimir Kibalchich (1920-2005), Victor Serge’s son, revolutionary artist and friend of the MIA, as well as that of his sister, Jeannine Kibalchich-Vidal (1935-2012).
See Appreciation by Susan Weissman
See A Subscription in Support of Victor Serge, Par delà la Mêlée, 1917
Works
The Illegals, June 1908
Anarchists – Bandits, February 1909
Our Anti-Syndicalism, February 1910
The Revolutionary Illusion, April 1910
The Individualist and society, June 1911
An Honest Gentleman, June 1911
The Bandits, January 1912
Expedients, January 1912
On the Bonnot Affair, February 1912
On the Bonnot Affair, January 1912
Two Lectures, April 1912
Egoism, January 1913
Letter to Emile Armand, March 1917
Frame of mind of the French proletariat, May 1919
Machine Gun (poem), July 1919
Flame on the Snow (prose), 1920/21
Observations in Germany, 1923
Five Years’ Struggle, April 1923
Lenin in 1917, Mar/Apr 1924
What everyone should know about repression, 1926
New Aspects of the Problem of War, Aug 1926
Bolshevism and Asia, Feb. 1927
The Class Struggle in the Chinese Revolution (5 letters), 1927/28:
First Letter: The Class Struggle in the Chinese Revolution
Second Letter: The Communist Task
Third Letter: The Strength of the Agrarian Revolution – The Red Spears
Fourth Letter: The Outcome of an Experience of Class Collaboration
Fifth Letter
Canton, December 1927 (as Paul Sizoff), Early 1928
Year One of the Russian Revolution, 1926-1929
(Alternative translation of extracts)
Conquered City (novel), 1932
Notes on Russia, 1935
Open Letter to André Gide, 1936
Letter to Trotsky, 10 August 1936
Letter to Andres Nin, 13 August 1936
Letter to Trotsky, 14 August 1936
The Death of Ivan Nikitich Smirnov, 29 August 1936
Farewell to Andres Nin, 13 August 1937
Portraying the men and events of our times, December 1937
Marxism in Our Time, 1938
Secrecy and Revolution, 1938
Twice Met, 1938
Obituary: Leon Sedov, February 1938
Once More: Kronstadt, 28 April 1938
Kronstadt: Trotsky’s Defense. Response to Trotsky, October 1938
A Letter and Some Notes, 1939
Excerpts from the “Notebooks”, 1938-44
A New International, 1944
Planned Economies and Democracy, 1944/45
In a time of duplicity, 1945
Recollections of Maxim Gorki, July 1945
On the French Anarchists, 1945
On Second Congress of Comintern, 1945
Kronstadt ’21, 1945
On Third Congress of Comintern, 1945
Letter to René Lefeuvre, undated
Appendix
The document below was not written by Victor Serge, but was ascribed to him by Trotsky in his polemic against Serge in the essay Moralists and Sychpohants Against Marxism. The text was included in a promotional leaflet for Trotsky’s book Their Morals and Ours, which Serge had translated into French. In his book The Serge-Trotsky Papers, David Cotterill points to suspicions that it may actually have been written by or under the influence of Marc Zborowski (known as Comrade Etienne), who was effectively running the Fourth International in Paris at that time, but was in reality an agent of the NKVD. Whatever the case may be, this document effectively destroyed the relationship between the last two surviving members of the Russian Left Opposition of the 1920s. For this reason we include it here in this archive.
On Their Morals and Ours, September 1938