Memoirs of a Revolutionary, 1901-1941:

SERGE, Victor

History

Oxford University Press

1919–1920: St. Petersburg, city of the czars, has fallen to the Revolution. Camped out in the splendid palaces of the former regime, the city’s new masters seek to cement their control, even as the counterrevolutionary White Army regroups. Conquered City, Victor Serge’s most unrelenting narrative, is structured like a detective story, one in which the new political regime tracks down and eliminates its enemies—the spies, speculators, and traitors hidden among the mass of common people.  Conquered City is about terror: the Red Terror and the White Terror. But mainly about the Red, the Communists who have dared to pick up the weapons of power—police, guns, jails, spies, treachery—in the doomed gamble that by wielding them righteously, they can put an end to the need for terror, perhaps forever. Conquered City is their tragedy and testament.

Conquered city: A novel

DOUBLEDAY

Birth of Our Power is an epic novel set in Spain, France, and Russia during the heady revolutionary years 1917–1919. Serge’s tale begins in the spring of 1917, the third year of mass slaughter in the blood-and-rain-soaked trenches of World War I, when the flames of revolution suddenly erupt in Russia and Spain. Although the Spanish uprising eventually fizzles, in Russia the workers, peasants, and common soldiers are able to take power and hold it. Serge’s “tale of two cities” is constructed from the opposition between Barcelona, the city “we” could not take, and Petrograd, the starving, beleaguered capital of the Russian Revolution besieged by counter-revolutionary Whites. Between the romanticism of radicalized workers awakening to their own power in a sun-drenched Spanish metropolis to the grim reality of workers clinging to power in Russia’s dark, frozen revolutionary outpost. The novel was composed a decade after the revolution in Leningrad, where Serge was living in semicaptivity because of his declared opposition to Stalin’s dictatorship over the revolution.

Birth of our power: Naissance de notre force;

Gollancz

Literature & Fiction

The life and death of Leon Trotsky

Sedova-Trotsky, Natalia

Pomerans, Arnold J. (Trans)

Wildwood House

<p>"It is often said" wrote Victor Serge, "that the germ of all Stalinism was in Bolshevism at its beginning". Bolshevism also contained many other germs and this book, an eye-witness account, shows the many germs, the many new possibilities, that were present as a result of the workers' revolution of 1917. While Serge reveals the forces that were to produce the Stalinist dictatorship, he also shows how this was far from inevitable. For in the first year of the Russian revolution, the tremendous energy, enthusiasm and creativity of the working class was the motive force behind the first attempt to organize a socialist society.</p>

Year one of the Russian Revolution

Russia

HOLT. RINEHART AND WINSTON

'[A] masterpiece of reportorial thoroughness, painstaking research, and serious reflection.' Edward Said

Year One of the Russian Revolution

Politics & Social Sciences

Politics & Government

Pluto Press

Memoirs of a Revolutionary

<p>The author, an anarchist, Bolshevik, and Trotskyite, recounts his political involvement from 1906 to 1941, including exile in Siberia</p>

Biographies & Memoirs

Historical

Writers & Readers

A New York Review Books Original    Victor Serge is one of the great men of the 20th century —and one of its great writers too. He was an anarchist, an agitator, a revolutionary, an exile, a historian of his times, as well as a brilliant novelist, and in Memoirs of a Revolutionary he devotes all his passion and genius to describing this extraordinary—and exemplary—career. Serge tells of his upbringing among exiles and conspirators, of his involvement with the notorious Bonnot Gang and his years in prison, of his role in the Russian Revolution, and of the Revolution’s collapse into despotism and terror. Expelled from the Soviet Union, Serge went to Paris, where he evaded the KGB and the Nazis before fleeing to Mexico. Memoirs of a Revolutionary recounts a thrilling life on the front lines of history and includes vivid portraits not only of Trotsky, Lenin, and Stalin but of countless other figures who struggled to remake the world.    Peter Sedgwick’s fine translation of Memoirs of a Revolutionary was abridged when first published in 1963. This is the first edition in English to present the entirety of Serge’s book.

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Books by SERGE, Victor