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Meanwhile, a pamphlet by Peter Kropotkin spoke to me at that time in a language of unprecedented clarity. I have not looked at it since, and at least thirty years have elapsed since then, but its message remains close to my heart. “What do you want to be?” the anarchist asked young people in the mi…

[...] My father, believing only in science, had given me no religious instruction. Through books, I came across the word “soul”; it was a revelation to me. That lifeless body that had been bundled away in a coffin could not be everything.

Even before I emerged from childhood, I seem to have experienced, deeply at heart, that paradoxical feeling which was to dominate me all through the first part of my life: that of living in a world without any possible escape, in which there was nothing for it but to fight for an impossible escape.…

On the other hand, Serge maintained against Ciliga that the socio­political composition of the non-Party masses at the time of Kron­stadt was very far from progressive. “In 1921, everybody who aspires to Socialism is inside the Party ... It is the non-Party workers o f this epoch, joining the Party…

[...] To read his memoirs is to receive the impression of a strong and consistent personality, of an approach to life and to politics which is complex but unified, of a heart which, however it may be divided, is so because reality tears it asunder, not because its loyalties are confused. When we li…