He was imprisoned and deported to Soviet Asia and finally expelled from Russia in 1936. He supported, for a time, the Left Opposition led by Leon Trotsky and it was probably his reputation abroad as a writer that saved him from a grim death in the Gulag. After a spell in Vienna he returned to the Soviet Union and became increasingly alarmed at the rise of the rise of Stalin and the degeneration of the early values of the Bolsheviks. Beginning as an anarchist, Serge moved to Russia shortly after the end of WWI and became a committed supporter of the Revolution. Serge was a Belgian-Russian whose life is both a chronicle of and an eye-witness to the struggle for socialism in the Twentieth Century with its victories and, too numerous, defeats. Paperback, £17.99.Īny publication of works previously untranslated into English by Victor Serge can only be welcomed. The Notebooks are translated by Mitchell Abidor and Richard Greeman, and published by New York Review of Books, 2019. Notebooks: 1936-1947 by Victor Serge, reviewed by John Cunningham. The passengers also included the anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss and the artist André Bréton. Above: On the boat to (eventually) Mexico (1941), Victor Serge on the very far left of the photo.
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