Victor Serge’s personality and life were typical in an extreme way, almost improbably so. From the middle of the last century onwards the Russian revolutionary movement produced a great many men who spent a considerable part of their lives as exiles abroad, as deportees in Siberia, as prison-inmates. Their ideas and personalities differed in many ways, but one thing they had in common: to be true to themselves was for most of them an obligation. They despised those personal advantages which are gained by accommodation to the existing order.
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Of course, profound historical understanding and real revolutionary activity are impossible within the terms of bureaucratism or romanticism. One of the main hypocrisies of Stalinism was the creation of a system in which bureaucrats posed as revolutionary romantics, and employed romantics, who for their part posed as theorists. (The ideological amalgam of Stalinism combined the vulgarized Marxism of the German Social Democrats with the romanticism of the Russian narodniki.) Serge’s diametrical antiposition to this hypocrisy makes him—in a certain social and anthropological sense—the “anti-stalinist” par excellence. The monstrosity of Stalinism—and at the same time its positive historical significance in a certain period—lay in its formally conservative nature: Stalinist “centrism”—as opposed to Trotskyist “leftism” and Bukharinist “rightism”—was concerned with the conservation of Party and Power; principles and human beings were regarded as of secondary importance. Serge’s outlook was just the opposite. His absolute, emotional opposition to Stalinism produced an understanding which was most remarkable as a corrective (it was certainly not in itself sufficient to provide a historical interpretation).
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How I'm writing my Chechnya essay.
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