Victor Serge's "From Lenin to Stalin" - Marxists Internet Archive

116 Pages·2012·8.33 MB·English

Victor Serge
•
FROM LENIN
TO STALIN
•
Tramlated from the French
By RALPH MANHEIM
PIONEER PUBLISHERS NEW YORK
Copyright 1937
PIONEER PUBLISHERS
100 Fifth Avenue
New York, N. Y.
~8S
PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
FROM LENIN TO STALIN

A Note About The Author
Victor Serge (Victor Lvovich Kibalchich) was born in Brussels
on December 30, 1890, of parents who were Russian revolutionary
emigres. His father had been an officer and later a physician, and
was a sympathizer of the Narodnaya Volya (People's Will) party.
One of his relatives, a chemist belonging to this party, was hanged
in 1881 after the assassination of Tsar Alexander II.
Serge's childhood was spent in Belgium and England. One of his
younger brothers died of want. At fifteen he was apprenticed to a
photographer in Brussels. Later he became successively a photog
rapher, a draughtsman, an office worker, a linotype operator-after
he had learned the trade in anarchist print shops-a journalist and a
translator .... At fifteen, he became a member of the socialist Jeune
Garde in Ixelles; then a militant member of the Groupe Revolution
naire in Brussels. He contributed to the Temps Nouveaux, Liber
taire and Gz;erre Sociale. He took part in demonstrations and trials.
He spent some time in company villages in the north of France and
took part in militant activity in Paris. Editor of l'Anarchie in 1910,
during the period of illegality, he was arrested and called on to
denounce the members of the underground group, of whom several
killed themselves and others died on the guillotine. He was convicted
under the infamous laws then in force and condemned to five years
imprisonment. After being freed in 1917, he became a linotypist in
Barcelona, a member of the C.N.T. (Confederacion Nacional de
Trabajo), a contributor to Tierra y Libertad, and took part in the
first revolutionary attempt of July 1917. He then left for Russia,
but was arrested in Paris and interned by the Clemence au govern
ment in a concentration camp. He was exchanged in January 1919,.
as a Bolshevik hostage, for an officer in the French Military Mission,
who was being held in Russia, and finally arrived in Petrograd.
He became a member of the Russian Communist Party and a col
league of Zinoviev on the Executive Committee of the Communist
International during the civil war. He then became a gunner in a
special battalion, a member of the military defense staff, and com-
missar of archives in the secret police under Krassin in 1919. He
participated in the first congresses of the C.r., and became editor of
the Communist International. He spent considerable time in Ger
many (during the preparation of the 1923 uprising) and in Austria.
Since 1923, he has been a member of the Opposition. Returning to
Moscow in 1925, he devoted himself to literary work and the internal
party struggle. Expelled from the party and imprisoned in 1928, he
was imprisoned and deported to Orenburg in 1933. He was banished
from the U.S.S.R. and deprived of Soviet citizenship without legal
grounds in 1936.
Principal works: Translations of the works of Lenin, Trotsky and
Zinoviev; Gladkov's novel Cement. He wrote The Year One of the
RltsSian Revolution; the following essays: The Class Struggle in the
Chinese Revolution; Les Coulisses d'une surete generale (the
Okhrana); Literature and Revolution; and three novels: Les
Hommes dans la prison; Naissance de notre force; Ville conquise.
On current events: The Sixteen Who Were Shot; Translation of
Trotsky's The Revolution Betrayed; Destin d'une Revolution.
Works suppressed by the Soviet censorship: Les Hommes perdus,
a witness' testimony; La Tourmente, a novel; poems.