Birth of Our Power Read online

  These lines, penned in Leningrad in 1930, turned out to be prophetic. Five years later, in 1936–1937, the Barcelona workers were ‘in the saddle,’ to use Orwell’s classic expression. By then, Serge’s friend Seguí had been murdered by the bosses’ pistoleros, but a new generation of Barcelona revolutionaries had replaced them. These included Serge’s friends among Spanish workers’ leaders like Angel Pestana the anarcho-syndicalist and Andrés Nin of the independent Marxist POUM, who briefly shared power in Barcelona during the early days of the Spanish Civil War, only to be betrayed and assassinated by the Stalinists. Serge’s 1930 meditation, set on the eve of a doubtful July 1917 insurrection, has thus acquired new layers of historical irony.

  Meanwhile, back in July 1917, Victor Kibalchich’s personal Odyssey took a new departure. When the Barcelona uprising fizzled, he heeded the call of Revolutionary Russia, the land of his exiled Russian revolutionary parents, the land where in February the ‘we’ of Birth of Our Power succeeded in overthrowing the Czar and are now contesting for power under the pro-Allied Provisional Government. The road to Russia led through wartime Paris, where, in order to be repatriated to revolutionary Russia, Victor tried to join the Russian forces still fighting on the Western Front. There, he found his former French anarchist comrades mostly demoralized and was soon arrested and thrown into a French detention camp for ‘undesirables.’

  Précigné (depicted in the novel as ‘Crécy’) was one of seventy officially nominated ‘concentration camps’ set up during World War I into which the French Republic threw anarchists, pacifists, refugees from German-occupied Belgian and dozens of other countries, Gypsies, prostitutes, and even an odd American ambulance driver (the poet E.E. Cummings, whose Enormous Room is often compared to this section of Serge’s novel). At the end of the war, after sixteen months of captivity, Victor was released as part of an exchange of alleged ‘Bolsheviks’ (including children!) imprisoned in France for an equal number French officers held hostage by the Soviets. Accompanied by a group of returning revolutionary exiles, Serge-Kibalchich debarked in Red Petrograd and joined the Revolution on the side of the Bolsheviks at the darkest moment of the Civil War.

  Serge’s Literary ‘Restraint’

  In a review of Birth of Our Power published in Paris in 1931, Marcel Martinet, Serge’s literary mentor, praised his style for its ‘restraint’ (pudeur) and its total absence of exhibitionism. However, Martinet also wondered aloud if these virtues were not “defects” in a novel. Comparing Serge to Jules Vallès, the revered revolutionary novelist of the Paris Commune, Martinet demanded of him more emotional expressiveness (pathétique).8

  From Leningrad, Serge replied to his mentor, explaining apologetically that his years in prison had hardened him and made him incapable of that kind of romantic literary emotional expressiveness. On the other hand, subtly defending his post-romantic twentieth-century modernist aesthetic, Serge pointed out that his style was appropriate to the modern age: “I wonder if Vallès’ emotional temperament would be able to withstand the singular power of the telephone in an age of terror. The formidable killing machines invented and put in place since 1914 have succeeded in obliterating some of man’s essential instincts.”

  Such is Serge’s restraint that the reader of his ‘semiautobiographical’ Birth of Our Power would have no idea that 1917–1919 was a critical time in the personal and political life of its author. Serge’s narrator functions as a camera-eye, presenting the reader with a series of jumpcut scenes, sharing his political reflections but nothing of his personal life. Through the narrator’s eye, we see Barcelona as a vibrant, joyful, sun-washed city, but in fact Serge’s Memoirs tell us that prison was still hanging heavily over his head and that he was obsessed with guilt at having escaped the common fate of his generation: participation in the great slaughter that was World War I. He also went through a political crisis. It was in Barcelona that Kibaltchich settled his score with French anarcho-individualism, was drawn to syndicalism under the influence of the charismatic workers’ leader Salvador Seguí (Dario in the novel), returned to the orbit of his Russian forebears, and metamorphosed himself into “Victor Serge.”

  Nor do Serge’s mainly political Memoirs divulge that their author also went through a sentimental crisis during this period. Victor had been in love with Rirette Maitrejean, his coeditor of the Paris journal l’anarchie since 1910. It was partly to shield her that he took the rap in the 1913 ‘anarchist bandit’ trial that landed him in the penitentiary for five years. Rirette, who was a great beauty and took ‘free love’ literally, joined her lover in Barcelona after his release from prison, but she did not stay long, and her departure left him desolate. Nor did Serge ever talk about the serious emotional crisis he passed through during the year he spent in the French concentration camp at Fleury-en-Bière (Cummings’s Enormous Room) before being transferred to Précigné (‘Trécy’ in the novel).

  Liberated a month after the Armistice, Victor fell in love again in 1919, on the ship taking him to Red Russia through mine- and iceberg-infested waters, and for once his personal, sentimental interest is reflected in the novel. He bonded with another returning Francophone revolutionary exile, Alexander Russakov, a Russian-Jewish tailor and idealistic anarchist, the father of five children (and the model for ‘Old Levine’ in the novel). Victor fell in love with Alexander’s oldest daughter, Liouba Russakova, the ‘child woman’ whose haunting portrait illuminated by firelight appears in “The Laws Are Burning,” in the climactic scene that ends the novel. In Petrograd Victor lived in a collective apartment with the Russakovs, forming a Franco-Russian household, and a year later Liouba give birth to their son, Vladimir Kibalchich.9 It was in this collective apartment, now invaded by a resident GPU informer, that Serge, now an outcast, wrote Birth of Our Power during 1929–1930.

  Nonetheless, there is almost nothing ‘confessional’ in Birth of Our Power, Serge’s most autobiographical novel (or for that matter in his so-called Memoirs).10 Indeed, the novel tells us next to nothing about the narrator’s (or Serge’s) personal life. The true subject of the novel is not Serge’s personal rebirth but the rebirth and coming to consciousness of the worldwide workers’ movement after its collapse into the fratricidal nationalisms of World War I. Although the ‘plot’ follows the narrator’s somewhat picaresque wanderings, his near-anonymity shifts the reader’s focus to the true ‘hero’ of Serge’s novel, which is not an ‘I’ but a ‘we.’

  Serge’s Collective Hero

  Underlying Birth of Our Power, indeed running through all of Serge’s novels, there is a permanent and collective protagonist, a revolutionary subject, identified the ‘comrades,’ the ‘we’ of Birth of Our Power, the permanent revolutionaries of all lands and epochs, the invisible international. Behind this self-identified cohort stand the masses themselves—the workers, the poor farmers, the youth, the downtrodden and dispossessed—who are ever present in Serge’s novels. In this vision, individual rebels may be obliterated, but “the comrades” will always exist, gagged, exiled, jailed, or storming the heavens on the wave of revolution. So too the masses, in victory or in defeat, ensuring that no defeat will be permanent.11

  Serge’s concept of ‘we’ as collective subject flows directly from his spiritual heritage as a child of exiled members of Russia’s unique revolutionary intelligentsia for whom the meaning of life was to understand, to participate, to consciously integrate oneself into the process of history. He also spoke out of a long experience of European worker militancy and a lifelong identification with the international revolutionary movement. He saw himself as one of its ‘bards.’

  As an organic intellectual of the working class, Serge’s ‘Marxism’ was as integral to his vision of his narrator’s epic journey as Dante’s Christianity to his narrator’s road from Inferno to Paradiso. Serge conceived literature as “a means of expressing to men what most of them live inwardly without being able to express, as a means of communion, a testimony to the vast flow of life through us, whose essen
tial aspects we must try to fix for the benefit of those who will come after us.” He concluded, “I was thus in the main line of Russian writers.”12

  Serge believed that fiction, what he called ‘truthful’ fiction, could communicate aspects of the revolution better than history or theory. Although definitely a writer with a ‘message,’ his technique was to bring experience to life on the page in all its multiplicity, using the modernist device of stream-of-consciousness to multiply perspectives on a single action. For example, in the splendid bullfight scene in Barcelona on the eve of the uprising, we see the action simultaneously from a kaleidoscope of viewpoints: wealthy spectators seated on the shady side of the ring, armed workers in the bleachers opposite, the Killer down in the ring and facing him … the bull! The whole spectacle becomes symbolic of the class confrontation that will take place on the morrow, and the masses identify both with the powerful, angry, tormented beast and with the agile, skilled Killer—who is, after all, one of them, a poor cowboy risking death for money.

  In Birth of Our Power, more than anywhere else, it is Serge’s collective hero, the “comrades,” the first-person plural pronoun of the title, who supply the underlying unity to the novel. It is “we” who awaken to power in Barcelona, “we” who suffer the frustrations of confinement in France, “we” who must face the problem of power in Petrograd. The collective hero is introduced in the first chapter of Birth of Our Power, significantly titled “This City and Us.” How does Serge characterize this “we”? Neither as an ideological abstraction nor through any blurring sentimentality, but quite matter-of-factly:

  There were at least forty or fifty of us, coming from every corner of the world—even a Japanese, the wealthiest of us all, a student at the university—and a few thousand in the factories and shops of that city: comrades, that is to say more than brothers by blood or law, brothers by a common bond of thought, habit, language, and mutual aid…. No organization held us together, but none has ever had as much real and authentic solidarity as our fraternity of fights without leaders, without rules, and without ties.

  Dario, El Chorro, Zilz, Jurien, José Miro, Lejeune, Ribas, and the other comrades whom Serge introduces here are not idealized; indeed, some turn out to be actual betrayers. But, although each is a perfectly individualized type (Serge excelled in the ability to create a sharp, living portrait with a few rapid strokes), they are at the same time representative of thousands of others: the rebels of every time and place.

  Later, in the center section of the novel, after Serge has introduced us to the world of the concentration camp (another microcosm, with its deportees from every land, its criminals, its capitalists, its idealists and madmen) we meet another group of comrades. This time it is the organized group of Russian revolutionary prisoners, for whom solidarity is not just a word but the only means of survival against starvation, epidemics, and the psychological ravages of life in the camp. There is Krafft, the doctrinaire Bolshevik who strangely refuses to return to Russia when he has the chance; Fomine, the white-maned old rebel who is too worn out to face the long-awaited revolution when it finally comes; Sonnenschein, the Jew who can settle any political argument with a folk tale that reminds you of Sholom Aleichem; Karl and Gregor, sailors from an American battleship, two silent giants who more and more incarnate the power of the revolution as they move closer and closer to their goal; Sam, “Uncle Sam,” the ironic paradoxical character who is the most devoted revolutionary and yet—a double-agent. The chapter title is “Us.”

  We formed a world apart within this city. It sufficed for one of us to call the others together with that magic word “Comrades,” and we would feel united, brothers without even needing to say it, sure of understanding each other even in our misunderstandings. We had a quiet little room with four cots, the walls papered with maps, a table loaded with books. There were always a few of us there, poring over the endlessly annotated, commented, summarized texts. There Saint-Just, Robespierre, Jacque Roux, Babeuf, Blanqui, Bakunin were spoken of as if they had just come down to take a stroll under the trees….

  When there are six of us around a table, we have the experience of all the continents, all the oceans, all the pain and the revolt of men: the Labor parties of New South Wales, the vain apostleship of Theodor Herzl, the Mooney trail, the struggles of the Magón brothers in California, Pancho Villa, Zapata, syndicalism, anarchism, Malatesta’s exemplary life, anarcho-individualism and the death of those bandits who wanted to be “new men,” Hervéism, social democracy, the work of Lenin—as yet unknown to the world—all the prisons.

  Here, the meaning of “the comrades” is extended not only across oceans and continents but backwards in time, with Robespierre and the others, and forward into the future with Karl and Gregor, with Lenin. However, if like Malraux’s “virile fraternity,” Serge’s “comrades” were held together only by a common heroism or by a subjective feeling, the novels might be moving, but they would not have the solid foundation nor the biting realism they do in fact exhibit. But the basis here is not sentiment but necessity, objective social truth, as Serge shows in a characteristic scene of “epiphany” or unveiling, where realistic detail is used to reveal a social reality, in the chapter titled “The Essential Thing.”

  At last the small band of revolutionary exiles reach the famous Finland station in Petrograd, the scene of Lenin’s triumphant return. Serge creates a scene of anti-climax. As the narrator listens to the official welcoming speech, his eyes wander over the freezing musicians standing the cold in their shabby, mismatched uniforms. The trombone player had put on a pair of “magnificent green gloves. Others had red hands, stiffened by the cold. Some wore old gloves, of leather or cloth and full of holes.” Their appearance expresses nothing but “hunger and fatigue.” The narrator reflects:

  Never could the idea come to anyone to rush forward toward them with outstretched hand saying Brothers! for they belonged entirely to a world where words, feelings, fine sentiments, shed their prestige immediately on contact with primordial realities…. I stared intensely at these silent men, standing there in such great distress. I thanked them for teaching me already about true fraternity, which is neither in sentiments nor in words, but in shared pain and shared bread. If I had no bread to share with them, I must keep silent and take my place at their side: and we would go off somewhere to fight or to fall together, and would thus be brothers, without saying so and perhaps without even loving each other. Loving each other? What for? Staying alive, that’s what counts.

  Rarely has the true heroism of the revolution been presented in a grimmer, more realistic light. The ragged, starving musicians are not pathetic. They are just there, a fact. They are there because necessity has put them there. They are comrades, not out of love, but because the revolution has given them a common social destiny—or a common death. And Serge, in this scene, has managed to epitomize a whole world and the individual’s relation to it, in the outlandish green gloves of a shivering trombone player.

  “The Laws Are Burning”

  The final chapter in Birth of Our Power, titled “The Laws Are Burning,” is based on an actual incident that took place in February 1919 when, soon after their arrival in Petrograd, the Soviet authorities moved Victor and the Russakov family into a vast empty apartment formerly occupied by a senator. This assignment was no privilege. The reason there were so many palaces vacant is that it was impossible to heat them, and floorboards were quickly consumed. How to cope with this problem? The climactic passage of Serge’s novel reveals the practical solution and in so doing transforms essentially anecdotal material into a concretely significant symbolic structure, what Serge’s contemporary Joyce, applying a religious notion to literature, termed an ‘epiphany.’

  The Levines had gathered in the smallest of the rooms, probably a nursery, furnished with two iron bedsteads with gilded balls on which only the mattresses remained … (one of them appeared stained with blood). This candle-lit room was like a corner in steerage on an immigrant ship. The
children had fallen asleep on the baggage, rolled up in blankets. The mother was resting in a low armchair. The young woman, like a solemn child, with large limpid eyes which seemed by turns distended by fear and then victorious over the fleeting shadows, was dreaming before the open stove, the reddish glow of which illuminated from below her graceful hands, her thin neck, and her fine features. Old Levine’s footsteps echoed on the floor of the grand salon, plunged in darkness. He entered, his arms loaded with heavy green-covered books which he dropped softly next to the stove. Silent laughter illuminated his ruddy face.

  “The laws are burning!” he said.

  The friendly warmth in front of which the young woman was stretching out her hands came from the flames which were devouring Tome XXVII of the COLLECTION OF THE LAWS OF THE EMPIRE. For fun, I pulled out a half-burned page, edged with incandescent lace. The flames revealed these words forming a chapter heading: CONCERNING LANDED PROPERTY … and, further down: “… the rights of collateral heirs …”

  The anecdote of “The Laws Are Burning” is an example of the petit fait vrai, the commonplace observation which Stendhal prized so highly for its undeniable authenticity and consequent ability to authenticate a whole idea, description, or emotional effect. Serge has dramatized it and given it symbolic significance by turning it into ‘Jewish humor.’ Old Levine’s exclamation is the punchline of an elaborately prepared visual pun, albeit a pun which could only be understood in a precise historical situation. Like any pun, this one is based on a verbal ambiguity—the basis of much of the power of poetry as well. Since laws cannot “burn” in any material sense, the effect created by “The laws are burning!” explodes like a Surrealist poem or an anarchist slogan; a powerful image of the violence and destructive energy of revolution.