xxiii
[...] 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 list the varying political trends that entered into Victor Serge’s makeup, we are simply recording his continual sensitivity to certain perennial dilemmas of action. Serge hated violence, but he saw it, at times, as constituting the lesser evil. He believed that necessity in politics might sometimes be frightful, but was necessity nonetheless, only he was not inclined to glorify it into a virtue. He mistrusted the State, but he recognized it as an inevitable form in the progress of society. So general a statement of political predicaments is doubtless banal, but it is in fact rather rare to find a public figure (let alone a revolutionary public figure) who plainly registers both extremes of a dilemma with equal sensitivity, even though his ultimate choice may incline very definitely towards one pole or the other.
[...] 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 list the varying political trends that entered into Victor Serge’s makeup, we are simply recording his continual sensitivity to certain perennial dilemmas of action. Serge hated violence, but he saw it, at times, as constituting the lesser evil. He believed that necessity in politics might sometimes be frightful, but was necessity nonetheless, only he was not inclined to glorify it into a virtue. He mistrusted the State, but he recognized it as an inevitable form in the progress of society. So general a statement of political predicaments is doubtless banal, but it is in fact rather rare to find a public figure (let alone a revolutionary public figure) who plainly registers both extremes of a dilemma with equal sensitivity, even though his ultimate choice may incline very definitely towards one pole or the other.
xxx
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 the number of two million in 1924, upon the death of Lenin, who assure the victory of its bureaucracy.” The conscious revolutionaries in the leadership of the mutiny “constituted an undeniable elite and, duped by their own passion, they opened in spite of themselves the door to a frightful counterrevolution.” Serge’s comment on the general issue in question, could well be taken as a summing-up of his lifelong attitude to the Revolution: “ It is often said that ‘the germ o f 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 revolution ought not to forget it. To judge the living man by the death germs which the autopsy reveals in a corpse— and which he may have carried in him since his birth— is this very sensible?”
on the question of whether stalinism was an inevitabe outcome of bolshevism
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 the number of two million in 1924, upon the death of Lenin, who assure the victory of its bureaucracy.” The conscious revolutionaries in the leadership of the mutiny “constituted an undeniable elite and, duped by their own passion, they opened in spite of themselves the door to a frightful counterrevolution.” Serge’s comment on the general issue in question, could well be taken as a summing-up of his lifelong attitude to the Revolution: “ It is often said that ‘the germ o f 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 revolution ought not to forget it. To judge the living man by the death germs which the autopsy reveals in a corpse— and which he may have carried in him since his birth— is this very sensible?”
on the question of whether stalinism was an inevitabe outcome of bolshevism