Men in Prison (2 page)

While the numbers and the racial dynamics have changed, the continuities are amazing, and much of what Serge describes rings true today: the humiliations and degradations; the frisks where you have to bend over and spread; the obstacles to maintaining basic hygiene; the totally arbitrary authority the often contemptuous guards have. Serge writes of the terrible boredom; and to counter that, “it is a fundamental rule of mental hygiene to work at all costs, to occupy the mind” (
p.36
).
Men in Prison
also provides a couple of delightful vignettes of the creative little ways prisoners find to resist the restrictions and regimentation. Visits often provide warm rays of sunshine, and the vast majority of visitors are women. This holds true at today’s women’s facilities too, as men generally don’t do nearly as well at standing by loved ones.

At the same time, there have been some notable changes due to the prisoners’ rights struggle that flowed out of the Civil Rights and Black Power movements. We are now a little less isolated from the outside world because, even though there’s still censorship, we have access to wider range of reading material, visits, and phone calls. We have more, albeit still minimal, educational programs. Those in general population are allowed to socialize, no longer facing enforced silence twenty-four hours a day. On the other hand, Serge’s cell was 60 percent larger than mine, and back then there was a limit on how long someone could be sent to the total isolation of “the hole”—ninety days. It was recognized then that even that amount of time could do serious damage. As
Serge puts it, “Madness [is] the inevitable result of idle solitude” (
p.60
). In the United States today there are eighty thousand prisoners subjected to isolation, which many psychologists deem a form of torture, hundreds of whom have been held for years and even decades in segregation units at places such as Pelican Bay State Prison in California and the federal supermax in Florence, Colorado. In a 2008 report, the UN Special Rapporteur to the Human Rights Council expressed grave concerns about the widespread use of prolonged solitary confinement in U.S. prisons.

The guards we meet in
Men in Prison
range from friendly to sadistic. In 1913 France, as in the United States today, many of the guards are ex-soldiers just returned from brutal colonial wars. As we now know, cruelty and dehumanization have a synergy that flows in both directions, domestic and international. It’s no accident that Charles Graner Jr., the ringleader of the soldiers who tortured prisoners in Abu Ghraib, Iraq, went into the army straight out of a job as a prison guard in Pennsylvania.

Serge’s powerful meditation on capital punishment, which has since been abolished in France, serves as a ringing condemnation of the contemporary U.S. prison system, which has over three thousand human beings on death row. In the same paragraph that he condemns the state’s use of the death penalty as a weapon against working people, he also squarely faces the duty of a true revolutionary to oppose any cruelty or misuse of power within our movements by stressing that even in the heat of intense class warfare, we must maintain “the greatest humanity” and fight “to build a new world, forever cleansed of killing machines” (
p.83
).

As gruesome as the guillotine is, Serge writes that many on the inside see life imprisonment as “worse, in reality, than death” (
p.83
). What would he think of the United States today, with over 159,000 individuals serving life, nearly 50,000 of whom are serving sentences of “life without parole” (LWOP), with no chance of ever being released? For older prisoners, any long sentence is in effect LWOP. The post-1970s penchant for draconian sentences has led to an explosion in the number of convicts fifty-five years old and above—roughly 125,000 today—despite the high costs of holding them and the miniscule re-offend rate of elders who do get paroled.

Men in Prison
shows how “jail is a machine for grinding up lives slowly” (
p.84
), designed to stultify and efface people’s humanity. Already perfect for that function, prisons aren’t further perfectible; therefore,
“there is nothing left but to destroy them” (
p.43
). Abolishing prisons is a monumental challenge for us today, but we can take big strides toward that ultimate goal with campaigns to decarcerate, to radically reduce the prison population, and most important of all to build the healthier, stronger communities needed to provide the only viable basis for safety, well-being, and justice.

Prisons are neither an insignificant nor an exotic sideshow but rather serve as a frontline of the rulers’ offensive against the oppressed and their struggles. In this historical novel, a wonderfully principled revolutionary and vibrant writer takes us into the culture and realities behind bars in a different time and place but in ways that still resonate with relevance today.

The author of
Men in Prison
was no stranger to his grim subject. Victor Serge spent more than ten of his fifty-seven years in various forms of captivity, generally harsh. He did five years’ straight time (1912–17) in a French penitentiary (‘anarchist bandit’); survived nearly two years (1917–18) in a World War I concentration camp (‘Bolshevik suspect’); suffered three months’ grueling interrogation in the Lubianka, Moscow’s notorious GPU prison (‘Trotskyite spy’); and endured three years’ deportation to Central Asia for refusing to recant his oppositional views or confess to trumped-up charges (1933–36).

The present novel, completed in 1930, is based on Serge’s experience of 1,825 days in a French penitentiary (solitary confinement, rule of absolute silence, chronic undernourishment) to which he was sentenced essentially as punishment for his refusal to testify against his comrades at the infamous 1913 trial of the ‘Tragic Bandits’ of French Anarchism. Like Alexander Berkman’s better-known
Prison Memoirs of an Anarchist,
Serge’s book is a cry for justice fueled by bitter experience and personal sacrifice. Yet at the same time, Serge’s novel is also literature, a fiction created by a serious novelist. “Everything in this book is fictional and everything is true,” wrote Serge in the epigraph to
Men in Prison.
“I have attempted, through literary creation, to bring out the general meaning and human content of a personal experience.”

As Serge recalled in his
Memoirs,
“While I was still in prison, fighting off tuberculosis, insanity, depression, the spiritual poverty of the men, the brutality of the regulations, I already saw I kind of justification of that infernal voyage in the possibility of describing it. Among the thousands who suffer and are crushed in prison—and how few men really know that prison!—I was perhaps the only one who could try one day to tell all … For me, that is the
raison d’être
of this novel. I emphasize that it is a novel, for the convenient use of the first person
singular may lead to misunderstanding. I don’t want to write memoirs. This book is not about me, but about men … There is no novelist’s hero in this novel, unless that terrible machine,
prison,
is its real hero. It is not about ‘me,’ about a few men, but about men, all men crushed in that dark corner of society.”

Ironically, Serge returned to writing (after a long career as a revolutionary activist) upon his release from another spell in prison—this time in the same Communist Russia for which he had fought in the Civil War (1919–21) and whose revolutionary promise glimmers in
Men in Prison
like a candle at the end of the long, dark tunnel of incarceration. In 1928 Serge was arrested and interrogated by the GPU secret police for his declared opposition to the bureaucratic tyranny of Stalin’s monolithic Communist Party. Writing under the shadow of another arrest, Serge sent his chapters abroad one by one as soon as he finished them. Serge managed to complete
Men in Prison
and two other novels in what he called ‘semicaptivity’ before being re-arrested and deported to Central Asia in 1933.

Reviewers have compared Serge’s classic prison novel to Dostoyevsky’s
House of the Dead,
Koestler’s
Spanish Testament,
Genet’s
Miracle of the Rose,
and Solzhenitsyn’s
One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich.
Nonetheless, his notoriety as a revolutionary has always overshadowed his achievements as a writer. We will return to the literary qualities of
Men in Prison,
but first let us look at the remarkable life of the man behind the novel.

The Life of a Revolutionary Maverick

The briefest chronological summary of Serge’s career as a rebel reads like a roll call of the radical movements and revolutionary uprisings of the first half of the twentieth century.
¹
Born Victor Lvovitch Kibalchich in 1890 in Brussels to an unmarried couple of penniless Russian revolutionary refugee students, Serge was by birth a stateless exile and remained a lifelong internationalist. From his parents he inherited the critical spirit of the radical Russian
intelligentsia
and the heroic ideals of the
Narodniki
—the Party of the People’s Will who executed Czar Alexander II in 1881. By his mid-teens, Victor was already an activist, signing his radical articles
Le Rétif
(Maverick). Alone in the world after
his parents’ breakup, he bonded with his crew of teenage comrades. They were “closer than brothers,” idealistic, overworked apprentices, who devoted their rare free time to reading dangerous books and hardening their bodies through all-night hikes. They all met tragic ends.

Raymond Callemin, a.k.a. ‘Science,’ with his baby-face, myopic squint, and sarcastic tongue, was Victor’s oldest friend—and rival. [See jacket cover, photo B4 (bottom row, fourth from left)]. On the steps of the guillotine, Callemin taunted reporters with a sarcastic: “A beautiful sight, eh, to watch a man die!” Tough Edouard Carouy (M1, middle row #1, with beard and moustache), built like a circus strongman, newly awakened to reading and ‘ideas.’ Sentenced to Devil’s Island for life, Carouy took poison in prison. Serious Jean de Boë, a.k.a. ‘Printer’ (photo B5), was the organizer of their Brussels Revolutionary Group. Sent to Devil’s Island for life, he managed to escape, after several attempts.
²

Together, these serious young rebels evolved from the Brussels Socialist Young Guard, through anarchist ‘communes’ (where they learned printing and put on their own four-page
Rebel!),
to anarchism, which, unlike reformist socialism, demanded deeds not just words. By 1909, their strident militancy had provoked repression in Brussels, and one by one they drifted to Paris, to anarcho-individualist circles where ‘illegalism’ (individual expropriation) was
à la mode.
There the group was swelled by new comrades: handsome, violent Octave Garnier (photo M2); pale, tubercular André Soudy (B2), a.k.a. ‘Out-of-Luck,’ who on the morning he was guillotined didn’t even get his ‘last request,’ coffee and a croissant (the cafés were still closed); Victor’s red-headed Left Bank soul-brother René Valet, a.k.a. ‘Carrot-Top’ (M3) a square-jawed ‘young Siegfried’ who loved poetry and shot himself with his last bullet after a twelve-hour gun battle with the police; and sentimental Eugene Dièudonné (T1), condemned to death although known to be innocent.

In Paris, in the Summer of 1911, Victor and his lover Rirette Maitrejean had been uneasily sharing the suburban print shop-commune of the anarcho-individualist weekly
anarchie
with Victor’s Brussels homeboys, who had been more-or-less living off small ‘expropriations’ (thefts) and needed to disappear. The boys soon teamed up with an anarchist chauffeur—an older desperado from Lyon named Jules Bonnot (T2)—and embarked on a series of bloody holdups that literally paralyzed Paris for half a year. They have gone down in French judicial history as the ‘Tragic Bandits of Anarchy’—the subject of dozens of books, radio and TV dramas, graphic novels, and a popular film with Jacques Brel.
³

Victor and Rirette c. 1911. This photo appears on the cover of
Confessions
magazine with Rirette’s account of the ‘Tragic Bandits’ affair.

The ‘Bonnot Gang’ have also gone down in history as the first bank-robbers to use a stolen getaway car (the cops only had bicycles), but their robberies, although bloody, were not very successful. On the run for months, they were joined—out of solidarity—by other comrades who offered them asylum according to the unwritten laws of anarchism and who ended up sharing their tragic fates. When finally cornered, they defiantly held off regiments of police and military units in gun-battles so spectacular they pushed the sinking of the
Titanic
off the front page. Victor, who in his writings had defended the expedient of ‘illegalism’
in theory,
had nothing to do with the robberies, whose bloodiness rather
horrified him. However, writing in the pages of
anarchie
as Le Rétif, Victor was bound by solidarity and loudly proclaimed, “I am with the wolves” in their war against society.
⁴
He had just turned twenty-one.