Marxists’ Internet Archive

Victor Serge

1890-1947

“It is often said that ‘the germ of 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 socialist revolution ought not to forget it. To judge the living man by the death germs which the autopsy reveals in the corpse – and which he may have carried in him since his birth – is that very sensible?” – From Lenin to Stalin, 1937.

Biography

Victor Lvovich Khibalchich (better known as Victor Serge) was born in Brussels, the son of Russian Narodnik exiles. Originally an anarchist, he joined the Russian Communist Party on arriving in Petrograd in February 1919 and worked for the newly founded Communist International as a journalist, editor and translator. As a Comintern representative in Germany he helped prepare the aborted insurrection in the autumn of 1923.

In 1923 he also joined the Left Opposition. He was expelled from the party in 1928 and briefly imprisoned. At this time he turned to writing fiction, which was published mainly in France. In 1933 he was arrested and exiled. After an international campaign he was eventually deported from Russia in April 1936 on the eve of the Moscow Show Trials.

Upon arrival in the West he renewed contact with Trotsky but political differences developed and a bitter controversy developed between the two remaining veterans of the pre-Stalinist Russian Communist Party. Escaping from Paris in 1940 just ahead of the invading Nazi troops he found refuge in Mexico. During his last years Serge lived in isolation and died penniless shortly after the 30th anniversary of the Bolshevik revolution in November 1947.

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Appendix

The document below was not written by Victor Serge, but was ascribed to him by Trotsky in his polemic against Serge in the essay Moralists and Sychpohants Against Marxism. The text was included in a promotional leaflet for Trotsky’s book Their Morals and Ours, which Serge had translated into French. In his book The Serge-Trotsky Papers, David Cotterill points to suspicions that it may actually have been written by or under the influence of Marc Zborowski (known as Comrade Etienne), who was effectively running the Fourth International in Paris at that time, but was in reality an agent of the NKVD. Whatever the case may be, this document effectively destroyed the relationship between the last two surviving members of the Russian Left Opposition of the 1920s. For this reason we include it here in this archive.

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