A literary river.(Book Review)

Victor Serge The Case of Comrade Tulayev, translated by Willard R. Trask, introduction by Susan Sontag. New York Review Books, 368 pages, $14.95

Victor Serge was, and remains, unique: the only novelist to describe successfully, from the inside, the now long-lost milieu of the socialist movement in Europe, its Soviet product, and its destruction by Stalinism. He has been described by myself and others as a political Ishmael, comparable to the lone survivor of the wrecked vessel Pequod in Melville's Moby-Dick.

Born in 1890 in Belgium, to a family of Russian exiles, he died in 1947 in a Mexico City taxicab. He was very likely murdered by Soviet agents, He had been associated both with Trotsky and, after the latter's assassination in 1940, with Trotsky's widow Natalya Sedova--with whom Serge coauthored a biography of her husband. The US government's release, in July 1995, of the decrypted Soviet secret message traffic known as "Venona" revealed that there indeed was a cell of Mexico City cab drivers under Soviet discipline, who specialized in liquidations.

Serge perished at fifty-seven, too young, and a year short of an event about which his commentary might have been quite significant: the Stalin-Tito break. As it happened, Serge knew quite a bit about the Serbian radical circles that brought about the Sarajevo assassination of 1914, and therefore the First World War.

As with the other Communist opposition intellectuals done to death by Moscow, the chief loss to humanity in their destruction may have been that they were prevented from sharing, with the generations that followed, their reactions to events they never anticipated--the birth of the state of Israel, the maturation of American consumer society, the Korean War, the proletarian rebellions against Communism in Berlin in 1953 and Poland and Hungary in 1956, and, of course, Nikita Khrushchev's denunciation of Stalin in the latter year. Trotsky, whose visceral horror of Nazism led him, at the end of his life, to accept a need for a Jewish national home, would have been no older than sixty-eight when Israel declared its independence. His widow was driven by North Korean aggression against its southern neighbor to break with the Trotskyist movement altogether.

Serge's novels have never been widely read in English, and it's a pity. His fiction emulated the now-also-defunct French genre of the roman-fleuve or literary river, once exemplified by the work of Jules Romains, in which a group of characters is followed through the passage of decades. In his series, Serge traced the revolutionary events of the twentieth century from the anarchist movement and disasters of the "Great War" (Men in Prison), through the revolutionary dawn in Barcelona and Petrograd in 1917 (Birth of Our Power), to the inner life of Soviet secret police agents in besieged Petrograd in 1919 (Conquered City).

These three volumes were published in France in 1930-1932, after their author, a former functionary of the Communist International, had been barred from political work in the Russia where he had chosen to live. In 1933, he was arrested by the Soviet secret police, and in 1936 a campaign in his favor, which gained the support of Andre Gide, secured his release from house arrest in Orenburg, a town on the border of Kazakhstan (where his former residence is now a museum dedicated to him). He was sent to live in the West, probably thanks to his birth there and claim ...