Last word
'Victory
Geoffrey Wheatcroft
Conquered City is, as I wrote last week, 1he last book of Victor Serge's trilogy. The tponymous city is Petrograd (formerly St 1'etersburg, latterly Leningrad) in 1919-20, conquered by the Soviets but threatened by Counter-revolution and by the Allied armies of intervention. The 40vel ends before the conclusion of the Civil war, Trotsky's great victory.
As Richard Greeman, Serge's translittor, says if the theme of the first two books is victory in defeat, then the theme ti the last is defeat in victory. The men in Prison and the vanquished Barcelona tebels preserve their hope and their dig41tY despite outward disaster. The Soviet tevolutionaries win, but in the course of their triumph hope the hope of humane ktialists like Serge is destroyed. To hard the Revolution, they have to use 4apons which make it not worth preserv ilig.
Revolutionary terror is the motto runIng through the book. Several of its lead characters work for the 'Special ComIlission for the Suppression of Counter;evolution and Sabotage', better-known iFthrl its Russian acronym, Cheka. The °11y of this institution's title is not lost on "erge. It was to be a 'special:, that is temrt.)rary, force for a short-term crisis. In 'Ithet, as we know, it was institutionalised as 4'1,e secret police and is with Russia still /ler various changes of name: OGPU, KGB. title Cheka's counter-counter:olutionary bloodshed mounts through1114 Conquered City. At first: `Arrest the thist ten hostages on the list . '; then a 4.stly episode when the four members of illiddle-class family, including a 19't4r-old girl, whom we know to be innolit even of the flimsy charges brought (Pinst them are condemned to death ass enemies through every fibre of beings'); a new placard goes up: LANED — Under pain of death — will tv shot without friar; 'Death crept into ttY dwelling': 'Death penalty for specualio n. Death for spies. Death for traitors. tts8ath for deserters . . . Death for spreadn. Of false reports. Death... ';`They just ;''sted a list of 17 men who were shot. I 4‘‘' A . Aaron Mironovich's name on it', ...
summary executions to set an exam , 11 this leads up to the terrible penulti ilt,te chapter. Most novelists long for a logt denouement, some deus ex machine raP up the plot. Few have found one (1:onclusive as Serge's. A fly-poster goes k Among the 34 'CounterlOutionaires, spies and criminals shot' four of the principal characters. One of them is White adventurer, another is a member of the Cheka; none is 'guilty': all have got unlucky in one way or another.
It should not be thought from this account that Serge is an anti-revolutionary or 'anti-Communise writer. It is indecent for the neo-conservative Right to appropriate writers like Serge and Orwell who never renounced Left socialism. Serge continued to serve socialism, according to his lights, for the rest of his life. He helped organise the Comintern (during the years of the novel, when he was in Petrograd), took Trotsky's part in the struggle with Stalin, was proscribed and eventually deported to Central Asia. Only the fact that he was well-known in the West and admired by Stalin's 'useful fools' kept him from disappearing into the maw of purges and Gulag. He was expelled to France and then Mexico where he died in poverty in 1947, an anti-Stalinist but still a revolutionary.
The three books which I have been discussing are less than complete masterpieces. That is partly, no doubt, the result of the circumstances in which they were written. Like Condorcet 140 years earlier, Serge was writing as 'un proscrit', under harassment by the political police (what had it changed in name to by 1930? I forget), smuggling the manuscripts out to France. But for all the imperfections he is a better novelist, qua novelist, than Orwell:• the elemental non-political themes of love and death are treated in a way which makes one think that in happier times Serge might have been something like a great writer, not merely a noble and moving one.
He is too good a writer to point a didactic conclusion, but the message of his trilogy is there all the same.On the face of it Men in Prison says that punishment is a form of cruelty like the crime whose obverse it is (not a new discovery); Birth of Our Power says that revolution is doomed to failure, especially if it observes bourgeois moral scruples (which the bourgeoise will not); Conquered City says that it is doomed anyway, for if it wins it must be corrupted. The 'conquest' of the title is as ironical as Conrad's Victory the revolutionaries have won power, but power itself has defeated them.
As I say, it would be improper to put a reactionary gloss on Serge's novels but in a sense (and to use a good Marxist adverb) they are objectively anti-Marxist.
Among the fallacies of Marxism nothing is more patently absurd than the belief that proletarians are better men than others, and that when the proletariat seizes power it will redeem human society from oppression and alienation. It took an oldfashioned Liberal to see through this: power always corrupts. And as Acton said elsewhere in a less celebrated passage, it is not a question of whether the working class is fit to rule: no class is fit to rule. Though he might never have admitted it in as many words, that is what Victor Serge teaches in these admirable novels.
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