Review of Victor Serge: Unruly Revolutionary by Mitchell Abidor (Pluto Press, 2025)
Many readers will be familiar with Victor Serge’s literary work: his novels, notably The Case of Comrade Tulayev, and his fascinating autobiography Memoirs of a Revolutionary. All his work centers around the great historical events of the first half of the twentieth century, the hopes aroused by the Russian Revolution of 1917, and its subsequent disastrous outcome.
Now Mitchell Abidor has written a biography of Serge, based on extensive research and using documentation collected by the great Serge scholar and translator, Richard Greeman. While Abidor does not fundamentally challenge the account Serge himself presented in the Memoirs, he does add much fascinating detail that places Serge’s political evolution in context.
Born to a Russian family in Belgium with the name Viktor Lvovich Kibalchich, Serge went through a remarkable process of intellectual development while still a teenager (he never went to school). He moved to Paris and became active as a writer and editor in the anarchist milieu, ending up in jail for five years.
Victor Serge went through a remarkable process of intellectual development while still a teenager.
Abidor devotes the first quarter of the book to Serge’s time as an anarchist. Revolutionaries are not born such, but make themselves, often through a path marked by difficulties and contradictions. Though Serge always retained a certain sympathy for anarchism, Abidor shows that there were some deeply reactionary elements in the Parisian anarchist scene.
The influence of radical individualism and a marked pessimism about the possibility of social change meant that Serge was very skeptical about the viability of collective action. It was his later experiences of mass action, first in Spain and then in Russia, that would lead to a fundamental reorientation of his political activity.
The Russian Revolution of 1917 was the vital turning point in Serge’s…
Auteur: Ian Birchall
