Victor Serge

Victor Lvovich Khibalchich (December 30, 1890– November 17, 1947), better known as Victor Serge, was born in Brussels, the son of Russian Narodnik exiles. Originally an anarchist, he joined the Russian Communist Party and worked for the Communist International as a journalist, editor and translator. He was openly critical of the Soviet regime, but remained loyal to the Bolsheviks.

Victor Serge

Quotations

• It is often said that “the germ of all Stalinism was in Bolshevism at its beginning”. Well, I have no objection. Only, Bolshevism also contained many other germs, a mass of other germs, and those who lived through the enthusiasm of the first years of the first victorious socialist revolution ought not to forget it. To judge the living man by the death germs which the autopsy reveals in the corpse – and which he may have carried in him since his birth – is that very sensible?

• • New International, Vol V No. 2, February 1939, pp. 53–55. (A Letter and Some Notes))

Attributed

• Revolutionaries knew quite well that the autocratic Empire, with its hangmen, its pogroms, its finery, its famines, its Siberian jails and ancient iniquity, could never survive the war.
  • On Russia in World War I
• All right, I can see the broken eggs. Now where's this omelette of yours?
  • After visiting Russia, to the pro-Leninist sentiment in the global left.