Anarchists Never Surrender: Essays, Polemics, and Correspondence on Anarchism, 1908–1938

258 Pages·2015·1.66 MB·English

by  Victor Serge

Anarchists Never Surrender: Essays, Polemics, and Correspondence on Anarchism, 1908–1938
Victor Serge. Edited and Translated by Mitchell Abidor.
Foreword by Richard Greeman This edition copyright © 2015 PM Press All rights reserved. No part of this
book may be transmitted by any means without permission in writing from the publisher.
This book has been made possible in part by a generous donation from the Anarchist Archives Project
ISBN: 978-1-62963-031-1
Library of Congress Control Number: 2014908074
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Contents
FOREWORD Meditation on a Maverick
by Richard Greeman
INTRODUCTION The Old Mole of Individual Freedom
by Mitchell Abidor
1908 The Illegalists
Émile Henry
Apropos of the Congo
Anarchists!
1909 Anarchists—Bandits
The Athletic Aberration
Hatred
The Festival of Lies and Weakness
1910 Our Antisyndicalism
The Revolutionary Illusion
The Religious or the Secular?
A Good Example
I Deny!
A Head Will Fall
Religiosity and Individualism
By Being Bold
Two Russians
1911 The Individualist and Society
A Revolutionary Experience
Impressions of the Holidays
The Mona Lisa Was Stolen
Against Hunger
Demagogy and Anarchist Action
Revolutionaries? Yes, but in What Way?
1912 The Bandits
Expedients
The Real Criminals
Anarchists and Criminals
Two Lectures
The Communards
1913 Letter to Émile Armand on the Bonnot Trial
Egoism
1917 Letters to Émile Armand
Individualism, a Factor of Progress
A Critical Essay on Nietzsche
1918 Letter from a Man behind Walls
1919 Bakunin’s Confession
1920 The Anarchists in Russia
1921 Letter from Russia
New Tendencies in Russian Anarchism
1936 Call for an Alliance with the Anarchists in Spain
1938 Once More: Kronstadt
Kronstadt 1921: Trotsky’s Defense, Response to Trotsky
Anarchist Thought
SERGE IN ENGLISH
THE LIFE OF VICTOR SERGE
BIOGRAPHIES
Meditation on a Maverick
by Richard Greeman
“ANARCHISTS NEVER SURRENDER!” WHAT AN APT TITLE MITCH ABIDOR HAS chosen for
his beautifully translated anthology of the anarchist writings of Victor Lvovitch
Kibalchich, aka Victor Serge (1890–1947), who up to the age of twenty-eight
wrote and agitated under the pseudonym Le Rétif (“Maverick”).
The phrase “Anarchists Never Surrender!” comes from a 1909 Maverick
article, written at the age of eighteen, and the anarchists in question, like
Kibalchich himself, were Russian exiles, resolute bandits who fought to the death
against a whole squad of London policemen. Maverick’s dramatic declaration
foreshadowed his own and his comrades’ doom in the ‘Tragic Bandits’ affair a
few years later in Paris. Indeed, Victor Kibalchich may be said to have inherited
that fate, as he bore the famous name of N.I. Kibalchich, a distant relative, the
People’s Will terrorist whose bombs blew up the Czar, executed in 1881 and
considered a martyr-hero by Victor’s parents.
Victor’s whole life was to be one of constant rebellion and constant
persecution, and he already had a head start at birth. He spent more than ten of
his fifty-seven years in various forms of captivity, generally harsh. He did five
years’ straight time (1912–17) in a French penitentiary (“anarchist bandit”);
survived nearly two years (1917–18) in World War I concentration camp
(“Bolshevik suspect”); suffered three months’ grueling interrogation in Moscow’s
notorious GPU Lubianka prison (“Trotskyite spy”); and endured three years’
deportation to Central Asia for his declared opposition to Stalin’s policies and for
refusing to confess to trumped-up espionage charges (1933–36). Small wonder
his first novel (written in French) bore the title Men in Prison.1
Born of Russian exile parents camped out in Brussels, Victor was a stateless,
undocumented alien from birth, destined to be expelled from nearly every
country he ever lived in. He was thus vaccinated against the plague of
nationalism and remained immune to the patriotic fever that swept away many
socialists and anarchists at the outbreak of World War I in 1914. Young
Kibalchich inherited the revolutionary ethos of the Russian intelligentsia, and
little else from his penniless parents when they split up, leaving him on his own
in Brussels at the age of fifteen. There, he bonded with a gang of teenagers,
idealistic underpaid apprentices like himself, “closer than brothers.” The Brussels
brothers started out as Socialist Young Guards but soon grew impatient with
reformism and gravitated to anarchism, impressed with the free life at a short-
lived anarchist Commune just outside of Brussels. There they learned the
printing trades and eventually put out their own little sheet, The Rebel, where
Victor first cut his teeth as a writer and adopted the name “Maverick,”
symbolizing his distance from the tradition of his Russian parents and his
embrace of an angry new anarchist identity in the slum streets of Brussels.
“Maverick” was the signature on the articles in the first part of this anthology,
starting in 1908 and continuing throughout Victor’s young manhood to 1917,
the year of the Russian Revolution, when Kibalchich started signing “Victor
Serge” and decided to go to Russia.
Meanwhile, as “Maverick” he moved to Paris in 1909 and eventually became
the editor of the weekly organ of French anarcho-individualism, l’anarchie,
which preached, among other things, the right of individuals to reappropriate
property from the bourgeois bandits who had, after all, stolen it in the first place
(Proudhon: property = theft). A perfect theory, until Victor’s band of brothers, in
total revolt against society and unwilling to be either “masters” or “slaves,” began
to put it into practice in 1912 through a bloody series of “expropriations”
(holdups) in which they pioneered the use of stolen automobiles as getaway cars
(the police had only bicycles). Victor/Maverick, although appalled by the
bloodshed, defended these “Tragic Bandits of Anarchy” in the pages of
l’anarchie, declaring, “I am with the wolves!” He was soon arrested. Like the
Russian anarchists in London, Maverick’s home-boys fought it out to the last,
holding off small armies of police, troops, and armed civilians. In 1913, the
survivors of what was known as the “Bonnot Gang” were put on trial. Victor’s
oldest friend got the guillotine, and Maverick was sentenced to five years in
solitary in the pen. He managed to survive, and years later wrote a great novel
about the experience, Men in Prison.2 That is the context of the early (1908–
1913) articles in this collection.
Released in the middle of World War I and expelled from France, Victor
ended up in Barcelona, Spain. There he got involved with the local anarcho-
syndicalists and participated in the preparation of an insurrectionary general
strike in July 1917, itself inspired by the February 1917 Revolution in Russia
which seemed to beckon to Victor from across wartorn Europe. He laid to rest
his individualist identity of “The Maverick,” and began signing himself “Victor
Serge,” the identity that he would retain for the rest of his life. The Parisian
individualist who scorned revolutions as ‘illusions,’ had now experienced a
revolutionary movement in Spain and felt himself drawn to the Russian
Revolution as to a flame. Yet we can see in the two articles from 1917 that he was
still settling his scores with anarcho-individualism in his mind. And indeed, as
“Serge” he retained the essence of his anarchism—the belief in the primacy of the
individual, in human freedom—to his dying day.
Arriving in Petrograd,3 the frozen, starving, besieged capital of Red Russia,
Serge made the rounds of the anarchists and socialists before deciding to work
with the Bolsheviks as the only practical way to serve the living revolution while
hoping to influence it in a libertarian direction once victory was won. The newly
founded Communist International immediately put to use Serge’s talents as a
writer, translator, and printer, and at a crucial moment in the Civil War, when all
seemed lost, he joined the Communist Party, the better to serve the cause. In this,
he had much in common with other ‘Soviet’ anarchists, including the Americans
Bill Chatov and Big Bill Haywood.
This was the period when Lenin was wooing the “best elements” among the
anarchists and anarcho-syndicalists of Europe to the Communist International,
and Serge’s reports, published in France, were part of that Soviet propaganda
campaign. For example Serge’s 1920 “The Anarchists and the Russian
Revolution,”4 (like the “Letter from Russia” in this volume) is a passionately
argued apology for the Bolshevik monopoly of power, necessitated by the Civil
War, and the repression of Russian anarchists, an armed group whose
disorganization and irresponsibility spelled a threat to the revolution. Serge
concludes by calling upon his fellow anarchists to join with the Communists and
to “strive to preserve the spirit of liberty.”
They will be the enemies of the ambitious, of budding political careerists and commissars, of
formalists, party dogmatists and intriguers, in other words to fight the illusions of power, to foresee
and forestall the crystallization of the workers’ state as it has emerged from war and revolution,
everywhere and always to encourage the initiative of individuals and of the masses, to recall to those
who might forget that the dictatorship is a weapon, a means, an expedient, a necessary evil—but
never an aim or a final goal.
Thus, on the one hand Serge proved his commitment as a loyal, disciplined,
unambitious rank-and-file militant, content to serve the Soviets with all his
energy and talent. On the other, he openly maintained his personal criticisms of
the regime’s abuses and used whatever influence he could muster to correct
them. This often included intervening personally with high officials of the Cheka
secret police in order to free innocent arrestees, including anarchists and other
dissidents, at the risk of his being considered their “confederate” and shot at any
moment.
And so, in 1919 Serge chose to steer a precarious course between the Scylla of
conformist revolutionary careerism and the Charybdis of impotent isolation
among the revolution’s embittered critics. Serge struggled to maintain this
attitude as long as loyal opposition was tolerated in Russia and even afterward,
when he was treated as a pariah. For Serge, as for many others, the crisis came in
1921 with the anarchist-supported revolt of the revolutionary sailors’ Soviet at
the Kronstadt naval base and its bloody repression by the Soviet government.
Serge was involved with the mediation efforts of the American anarchists Emma
Goldman and Alexander Berkman but was appalled by the Party’s unwillingness
to negotiate and by the lies it told about the sailors. Demoralized, he withdrew
from politics and joined a short-lived French anarchist agricultural commune
near Petrograd, before deciding to accept a Comintern job in Berlin, where he
hoped to help bring about a German revolution that would liberate Russia from
the constraints of isolation and backwardness.
Two of the articles from Russia in this collection are dated 1921, that is to say
after the repression of Kronstadt, generally seen as a watershed. The article “New
Tendencies in Russian Anarchism” is a catalogue of libertarian groups which,
however divided among themselves, all supported the revolutionary dictatorship,
while remaining outside of the Party. Only in passing does it mention those
anarchists who did not support the dictatorship and who thus had no legal
publications to analyze, including a vast anarchist-inspired movement under
Makhno in Ukraine. And although Serge cites the American anarchists who did
join the Communists, he fails to mention Goldman and Berkman, who were, like
him, disillusioned by Kronstadt. Sins of omission, to be sure. To my knowledge
Serge never fabricates, and his Soviet apologetics, like the highly convincing
“Letter from Russia” included here, are not dull propaganda but sharply
observed realities presented in passionate argument.
We have not yet come to the end of the litany of arrests, expulsions, and
persecutions that punctuated the saga of Serge’s life as an irreducible
revolutionary maverick. In the hope that a European revolution could relieve the
pressure strangling the revolution in Russia, Serge next moved to Berlin as a
Communist journalist-cum-secret-agent. During the 1923 crisis, Serge and his
family were obliged to flee Germany for their lives after a failed Red coup. In