Thank God for Dynamite

‘Early on, I learned from the Russian intelligentsia that the only meaning of life is conscious participation in the making of history.’ In this line from the memoirs of Victor Serge – revolutionary, exile, implacable opponent of capitalism, critic and sometimes accomplice of Bolshevik terror – there is an entire worldview that is now as foreign to Serge’s admirers as to his enemies. Its animating question is about the relationship between an individual and the time in which he lives. How does he know if he is swimming with or against the current of history? And if he finds himself swimming against it, does that make his efforts futile? On his deathbed in 1947, looking back on decades of defeat and disillusionment for the libertarian brand of communism that had been his lifelong cause, Serge still believed that history was on his side.

He was born Viktor Lvovich Kibalchich in 1890 to a Russian family living in Belgium. A distant relative, Nikolai Kibalchich, had been a prominent member of the revolutionary Narodnaya Volya, or ‘People’s Will’ – source of the term ‘narodniks’, or ‘populists’ – and had helped to manufacture the bomb that killed Tsar Alexander II in 1881. He was one of the first to be hanged in the subsequent crackdown. Viktor’s father, Leonid, was less distinguished: although he had been a populist sympathiser, he had ended up in Europe for more quotidian reasons, in particular gambling debts. In his Memoirs, Serge describes his father fleeing across the Austrian border under a hail of gendarmerie bullets – an account that appears to be, at the very least, embellished.

The story of the three Kibalchiches (Nikolai, Leonid, Viktor) captures something essential about the Russian populists’ historical moment. For every terrorist, there was a hanger-on; for every myth, there was a follower shaped by that myth. The number of active revolutionaries at the height of the populist movement in the 1870s and 1880s was at most a few thousand. In a country of eighty million people, they were as isolated from the majority of the population as they were from the ruling class that had produced most of them. But there was a much broader web of sympathisers and donors, often inspired by sensationalist depictions of revolutionaries in the press. Without those sympathisers, there would have been no movement. It was the populists’ growing resonance with the citizenry at large that convinced them they were on the right track and that the empire was doomed – even though the imperial secret police, the Okhrana, continued to hang and imprison their comrades. ‘The link they forged’ – one that extended back to the Decembrists and other past revolts – ‘continues down to ourselves,’ Serge wrote. For him, their principal legacy had been a faith in history.

Advocacy for political prisoners was essential both to the continuation of the movement and to its visibility. Stuart Finkel’s new book examines the foundations and early years of what was sometimes known as the Red Cross of the People’s Will (nothing to do with the Russian Society of the Red Cross, which was directly controlled by the Romanov family). It was the first organised effort to raise money for Russian political exiles, and the forebear of organisations from the Anarchist Black Cross to Amnesty International.

At first, many populists scoffed at what seemed to be a task for idle society ladies rather than seasoned underground operatives: they had become professional revolutionaries to break their ties with well-meaning liberals rather than court them for donations. But one of their most respected militant leaders, Vera Zasulich (heroine of a celebrated 1878 trial for her attempted assassination of St Petersburg’s brutal governor-general), helped convince them that the effort was worthwhile; she headed the Red Cross until she broke with her party in 1883.

The populists kept public accounts of donations and expenditure, which paint a rather unimpressive picture by today’s standards (and provided fodder even for 19th-century critics of the party). Yet the significance of fundraising and prisoner aid went beyond monetary value. The project engaged sympathisers and liberals at home as well as providing an opportunity for foreign allies to aid their Russian comrades. In the 1880s, an Italian campaign led by the poet and scholar Filippo Turati at the prompting of one of Zasulich’s collaborators raised thousands of lire for exiled and imprisoned Russians. Many others were galvanised by causes célèbres in the press. In 1890, George Kennan gave a shocking account of the Siberian exile system, leading Mark Twain to announce that ‘if such a government cannot be overthrown otherwise than by dynamite, then thank God for dynamite.’

As a young man, Serge drifted into the Parisian anarchist underworld, known for its campaign of bombings and assassinations across Europe. But he also documented its degeneration into acts of opportunistic violence and widespread police subornment and infiltration. Despite being innocent of any violent acts, in 1913 he was sentenced to four years in prison. On his release, he emerged into a Europe transformed by the First World War. After witnessing a failed anarchist uprising in Spain and being briefly interned in a French concentration camp, he left for Russia, where the revolution and civil war were in full swing.

In Russia, Serge – he used the pen name from 1917 – encountered an explosion of revolutionary zeal amid staggering material scarcity and what appeared to be imminent military defeat. Like many anarchists, he found it difficult to reconcile his desire to fight for the revolution with his concern about the Bolsheviks’ extrajudicial executions. This practice, as carried on by the Cheka, worried him more than terror: public revolutionary tribunals à la 1793 were in some sense inevitable or even praiseworthy in the context of a state struggling to establish itself, but the growing autonomy of the secret police from party oversight – as well as the indifference of the Bolshevik leadership – was different. He admired Felix Dzerzhinsky, the Cheka’s founder, for later denouncing the death penalty and the Cheka’s impunity.

He was no purist, however. He served as an officer in the Red Army, and worked with the secret police when he thought he could improve conditions for its captives, especially his own anarchist friends. Despite his misgivings, he remained in the party and maintained amicable relationships with people on all sides of the political spectrum; years later, old Cheka men still remembered him fondly.

In 1918, along with the writer Maxim Gorky and Mikhail Novorusskii, a veteran of People’s Will, he set up the Museum of the Revolution in Petrograd, which gave him access to the archives of the Okhrana. ‘For the first time,’ he wrote, ‘the entire mechanism of an authoritarian empire’s police repression had fallen into the hands of revolutionaries.’ Not only would this help militants in other countries, it would also be useful to the Bolsheviks if the party were defeated and forced once more to go underground – not an unlikely potential outcome of the civil war. The archives contained identifying information on tens of thousands of police infiltrators and agents provocateurs, many of whom remained active in Soviet Russia. In November 1918, the most famous of them, Roman Malinovsky, a former Bolshevik Duma deputy and ally of Lenin, presented himself at the Bolshevik headquarters in the Smolny and – in Serge’s telling – demanded to be shot. He was.

Serge wrote up his findings in a series of articles for the French Bulletin communiste in 1921, and in 1926 expanded them into a pamphlet called Behind the Scenes at a Secret Police Organisation: What Every Revolutionary Should Know about State Repression. It has been republished dozens of times, in many languages, in part because the general character of state repression has not changed. As in 1881, radical groups today are surveilled, infiltrated, subjected to campaigns of lies and demonisation, and targeted for imprisonment or even execution. They should be wary of phones, and should assume that all post, and emails, will be opened. Serge’s pamphlet examines the mentality of informers and infiltrators, their contradictory mixture of dogged perseverance, desire for financial gain and personal vindication, and even the remnants of their revolutionary idealism – Serge thought Malinovsky, if he had been allowed to live, would have loyally served the Soviet government. Many tsarist agents provocateurs impersonated revolutionaries for years or decades, as police and corporate informants sometimes do today.

There is a disquieting undercurrent to Serge’s pamphlet. His immersion in the archives seems to have overwhelmed him with the scale and sophistication of the Okhrana’s workings; even the handful of cases in which revolutionaries double-crossed their police contacts can’t counteract the impression that every move had been seen in advance from its headquarters at No. 2 Gorokhovaya Street in St Petersburg. While the secret police was on the back foot until the tsar’s assassination in 1881, its power grew rapidly afterwards. In 1909, it turned out that Yevno Azef – one of the senior leaders of the neo-populist Socialist Revolutionary Party, who had been involved in some of its most high-profile assassinations – had been an Okhrana agent for almost two decades. Serge found examples of even longer-serving informers who had remained undetected.

There was one obvious consolation: history was on their side. ‘The agent provocateur is a policeman who serves the revolution in spite of himself,’ he wrote, ‘because he must always appear to be serving it. But in this question there are no appearances. Propaganda, fighting, terrorism is all reality. There is no way you can be a member halfway or superficially.’ As in the old Babylonian tale of the man who, fleeing a prophesied death in Baghdad, found it instead in Samarra, all the Okhrana’s work was only serving to advance the revolution. Serge consoled his readers:

When you have on your side the laws of history, the interests of the future, the economic and moral needs which lead to revolution, when you know with certainty what you want, what arms you have and what the enemy has; when you have decided on illegal action; when you have confidence in yourself and you work only with those in whom you have confidence; when you know that revolutionary work demands sacrifices and that every lovingly sown seed will bear fruit a hundred times over, then you are invincible.

History was especially on the side of the Communists: as they saw it, their party wasn’t merely an underground network but the incarnation of class struggle itself. Serge’s pamphlet included a section on the revolutionaries’ internal policing. In light of his later writings, it’s a shocking text. It is almost as full-throated an apologia for Bolshevik dictatorship, revolutionary terror and the Cheka’s ‘strong contribution to preventing the overthrow of Soviet power’ as one might expect from a Stalinist, though it at least acknowledges abuses and mistakes. All of the Okhrana’s sophistication couldn’t prevent its defeat; could the Cheka do any better? History, once again, would make the difference: ‘Repression is effective when it acts along the lines of historical development; it is impotent in the last reckoning when it goes against the grain of historical development.’

Serge would soon have cause to consider this judgment in his own case. Less than two years after the pamphlet was published, he was expelled from the Communist Party for his participation in the Left Opposition and for criticising the ascendant Stalin, especially over his involvement in China (which had resulted in Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalists nearly destroying the Communists). Spied on constantly by the Cheka’s successor, the OGPU (established in 1923), he remained at relative liberty in Leningrad for a few more years. While he was a consistent anti-Stalinist, he retained some of his idealism about the possibility of effecting change within the party or rallying dissident forces to change it. He also remained sceptical of Stalin’s leading rivals, especially Grigory Zinoviev, whom he saw as a narrow-minded, bureaucratic dictator in the making. Whatever Stalin’s rise meant for Serge, it was less about the new leader as an individual than the forces that had been causing the party to degenerate since 1918. It was no longer clear whether its mistakes and abuses were the inevitable by-products of revolution or the revolution itself.

He was arrested in 1933 and placed in solitary confinement in the OGPU headquarters in Moscow’s Lubyanka Square. Over the course of six gruelling interrogations, Serge – as he tells it – refused to give an inch or compromise any of his contacts; the investigators eventually gave up for lack of concrete evidence. The whole case turned out to rest on a coerced, false confession by his sister-in-law, who didn’t even know his oppositionist comrades.

In Memoirs of a Revolutionary, posthumously published in 1951, Serge didn’t reflect on the comparison between the police methods of the 1930s and those he had found in the Okhrana archives. If you could confirm guilt by simply fabricating information, then what was the purpose of such a sophisticated police apparatus? By the 1930s the Soviet state had vastly expanded its network of police informants, and its postwar counterparts in the Warsaw Pact were even more ambitious: the Stasi had up to five times as many registered informants as the Okhrana, in a country less than a third of the size of the Russian empire. In an essay published in 1997, Peter Holquist argued that the purpose of this apparatus – which also existed in similar, if not always equally extensive, forms in fascist and liberal-democratic states – was not policing per se. The Okhrana wanted to find deviants and punish crime; the Soviet state and its contemporary bureaucracies wanted to monitor and shape the attitudes of the entire population. If historical change was determined by processes discernible less on the level of individuals than of society, it was important to manage them in real time. What for Serge in 1926 had been the basic assumption of revolutionary policing was endlessly provoking new anxieties.

As Serge returned from his final interrogation, he received a parcel from the Political Red Cross. Spearheaded in 1918 by Yekaterina Peshkova, Gorky’s first wife, the organisation was the post-revolutionary successor to the prisoners’ aid efforts of the People’s Will (Peshkova had been a member of the Socialist Revolutionary Party). For twenty years it interceded openly on behalf of exiles and prisoners in the Soviet Union, until it was finally shut down at the height of the Great Terror in 1938. Just as the People’s Will had tried to help prisoners in the Russian empire by cultivating interest from abroad, the Political Red Cross lent support to campaigns in the West. Serge’s parcel contained onions and soap, but more importantly it reassured him that Western comrades knew about his case, and their interest would afford a degree of protection in exile. In fact, it saved his life many times over.

Instead of immediate execution, Serge was sentenced to be deported to Orenburg in the Kazakh steppe. The steppe was then experiencing a catastrophic famine, the result in large part of aggressive Bolshevik efforts to uproot nomadic pastoralism; the consequent loss of millions of livestock led to some 1.5 million deaths. Serge survived on his book royalties, probably transmitted to him from Europe with the assistance of the Political Red Cross. Francs could be redeemed for scarce food at the local hard-currency shop, the Torgsin. Thanks to his foreign allies he was eventually able to obtain a Belgian visa and leave the Soviet Union just before 1937, when he would almost certainly have been shot.

On his return to Europe, Serge broke with the party and soon with Trotsky too, though he retained his communist convictions and led campaigns on behalf of imprisoned members of the POUM, the anti-Stalinist Marxist party fighting Franco in Spain. The complacency of the well-fed social-democratic left and the servility of official Communists disgusted him; he predicted fascism’s imminent triumph in Europe. When France surrendered, an old comrade from the POUM helped him obtain a Mexican visa.

In his final years, Serge was consumed by the idea of totalitarianism, a term he was one of the first to apply to the Soviet Union. Its subsequent general use as a reference to both Stalinism and Nazism helped establish his reputation both in the 1940s and afterwards, when resistance to totalitarianism became the governing intellectual framework for the West in the Cold War. His self-conscious marginality, the cause of enormous struggle during his life, became a posthumous badge of authenticity: it helped reassure countless liberals and leftists that one could oppose the Soviet Union without giving up on the dream of liberation from capitalism. But unlike most of his mid-century admirers, for whom his Marxism smacked of the ideological certainties that so defined the ‘closed society’, Serge retained his faith in history – the conviction that totalitarianism would ultimately lose out, and that freedom in the Marxist sense would eventually triumph.

As Finkel argues elsewhere, many Soviet dissidents and their allies abroad would appropriate the human rights rhetoric pioneered by the Red Cross of the People’s Will and the Political Red Cross. In the process, they stripped that rhetoric of its original revolutionary context. What was left was liberal advocacy for prisoners, and in totalitarian societies everyone was a prisoner. By the 1980s, if history still had a guiding logic, it was the certainty that these prisons would soon be dismantled: the culmination of the liberal project. As to what happened when former inmates finally emerged into the chilly, indifferent air of freedom, that was someone else’s problem.