Men in Prison (3 page)

Arrested, Victor refused to ‘talk’ and was kept in solitary at the
Santé
prison for thirteen months. At the sensational 1913 mass trial, he and his lover Rirette (the business manager of
anarchie)
were cast in the role of the ideological ‘brains’ behind the gang. Against them, the evidence of two stolen pistols found during the police search at the office of
anarchie,
where Victor, Rirette and her children also lived. Neither had had anything to do with the robberies, indeed by then were out of sympathy with illegalism, but their ‘not guilty’ defense was compromised because their comrades, the surviving members of the Bonnot Gang also pleaded ‘innocent.’ This transparent masquerade lead to the conviction of Eugène Dieudonné, who really
was
innocent.
⁵

This non-political ‘not guilty’ defense was in any case pointless since the Prosecution’s evidence was as overwhelming as was the judges’ thirst for vengeance. Only Dieudonné’s repeated cries of innocence rang true, yet he too was sentenced to the guillotine (later ‘pardoned’ to Devil’s Island for life, whence he managed to escape).
⁶
Raymond (‘Science’), Victor’s oldest friend from Brussels, was sent to the guillotine, along with luckless Soudy, another close comrade. Rirette got off with time served. Victor, for refusing to cooperate with the law or renounce his anarchist ideas, was given the unusually harsh sentence of five years for possession of the pair of stolen pistols apparently bought by Rirette. The night of the verdict, Victor heard prolonged moans from the next cell: Carouy, the strongman from Brussels, managed to
poison himself rather than accept a life of sentence. As for Victor, he resolved to drink the bitter cup of prison to the lees and survive to tell the tale you are about to read.

Men in Prison,
Serge’s first novel, is thus based on the author’s experience of five years’ incarceration: thirteen pre-trial months in solitary at
La Santé
followed by forty-seven months in the Penitentiary at Melun. From January 31, 1912, until the end of the 1913 trial, Victor was kept in solitary under Maximum Surveillance among the Death Row prisoners, 14th div. cell 32, then 10th div. cell 20 of Paris’s
Santé
prison.
⁷

Although the name
Santé
(Health) derives from a former hospital that stood at the site in central Paris, the appellation is appropriate. The
Santé
was designed during the heyday nineteenth-century scientific progressivism for reasons of ‘philanthropic hygiene’ to replace traditional dungeons which were dark, filthy, malodorous and the source of epidemics like cholera.
⁸
Billed as a ‘model prison,’ the
Santé
was designed to offer its inmates ‘light and air’ as well as central heating, gaslights, washstands, toilets, and sewer evacuations—luxuries only dreamed of by its honest neighbors in 1867 when
La Santé
opened (or rather closed) its heavily reinforced door—and it is still in operation, albeit much overcrowded and degraded, today. Its towering stone walls loom over the 14th
arrondissement
on the Left Bank, lending a somber tinge to the whole quarter. Up through the 1940s on days of public (executions) the guillotine was erected in the street under its shadow.

As Serge notes in his chapter of meditation on carceral architecture, prison is “impossible to mistake it for any other kind of edifice. It is proudly, insularly,
itself.”
According to Serge, except for the American skyscraper, the modern city’s “architects have added practically nothing to the legacy of the past except, for its victims, this scientifically imperfectible hive of crimes, vices, and iniquities.” Inspired by
the
Panopticon
of eighteenth-century philanthropic reformer Jeremy Bentham, modern prison is “a model of functionalist architecture … From the center of the hub a single man can keep his eye on the whole prison without difficulty, and his glance can ferret into the most remote corners. Maximum ease of surveillance is ensured with a minimum of personnel. The lines are simple, the plan faultless.”

Prison is “imperfectible,” writes Serge in ironic praise, anticipating Foucault’s
Discipline and Punish
by a half century. However, Serge is writing from a very different viewpoint than the late postmodern philosopher. In the words of Marshall Berman, “Foucault is obsessed with prisons, hospitals, asylums, with what Erving Goffman has called ‘total institutions.’ Unlike Goffman, however, Foucault denies the possibility of any sort of freedom, either outside these institutions or within their interstices.”
⁹

For Foucault, criticisms of the system (including his own) only add to the triumphant of the all-pervasive ‘discourse of power.’ “Any criticism rings hollow,” he writes, because the critic himself or herself is “in the panoptic machine, invested by its effects of power, which we bring to ourselves, since we are part of its mechanism.”
¹⁰
Perhaps. But much depends on
where
one is situated within that inhuman ‘mechanism.’ Foucault the university professor writes from the point of view of the guard in the power center of the hub, spying on the prisoners (and on society in general). Serge writes from the prisoners’ viewpoint, testifying to and affirming the triumph of that freedom and that subjectivity whose existence Foucault’s postmodern philosophy denies.

After sentencing, Victor was transferred to the Penitentiary at Melun on the Marne, where he was held until his release on January 31, 1917. Serge’s summary: “solitary cell at night, ten hours of forced labor by day (printer, later corrector). Permitted studies: living languages, religion. Arbitrary punishments. Rule of absolute silence. Chronic undernourishment. Stays in the infirmary every eight or ten months thanks to the sympathy of a doctor allowed me to survive.” These harsh rules were modeled after the Quaker-inspired U.S. Auburn System. Isolation and solitary confinement, today recognized by the UN as torture, were
supposed to provoke meditation and penitence while preventing the spread of bad influence among inmates.
¹¹

Soon after the 1913 verdict, Victor and Rirette applied for permission to marry in order to have the right to correspond. Approved by the warden, their request was twice vindictively overruled at the highest level of the Ministry of Justice. Finally, in May 1915, the prison authorities granted permission to Victor and Rirette to marry with the proviso that “following the marriage he must immediately be reintegrated into the Penitentiary.”
¹²
Similarly, two separate appeals for clemency were overruled, and Serge was made to serve the full sentence of 1,825 days (the original title of
Men in Prison),
but at least granted twelve days in Paris before being expelled from French territory as an undesirable ‘Russian subject.’
¹³

Released in 1917 at the age of twenty-six, Victor was deported to Barcelona, where he slowly came back to life, racked with survivor guilt. Rirette followed him to Barcelona, but with a living to earn and two little girls to support, she could not stay. Victor worked in a print shop, joined the anarcho-syndicalist CNT, participated in the preparation of an anarcho-syndicalist uprising and began signing his articles
Victor-Serge,
marking a kind of rebirth. This was his first experience of mass revolutionary activity and coincided with the outbreak of revolution in his ancestral Russia.

When the Barcelona revolt faltered, Serge heeded the call of the 1917 Russian Revolution and set off across war-torn Europe to join the longed-for revolution of his exiled anti-Czarist parents’ dreams. Arrested
in Paris, he spent nearly two years in a wartime French concentration camp for subversives before arriving in frozen, besieged Red Petrograd in January 1919. In his 1931 novel,
Birth of Our Power,
¹⁴
Serge brought to life this odyssey across war-torn Europe ‘burning at both ends’ with the flame of revolution.

Once in Russia, Serge threw himself into the Revolution and fought with the Reds in the Civil War—along with other ‘Soviet’ anarchists like the Americans Bill Chatov and Bill Haywood.
¹⁵
Along with another ‘Soviet Anarchist’ and ex-prisoner, Vladimir Mazin, Serge was drafted by Zinoviev to improvise the press services of the new Communist International—finding paper, setting up print shops, working as a translator, editor, journalist, and propagandist. When his soul-brother Mazin was killed during the White siege of Petrograd,
¹⁶
Serge joined the Communist Party—all the while retaining his anarchist scruples about Bolshevik authoritarianism and hoping that, once the Civil War was ended, he would be able to fight for his libertarian ideals from
within
the Revolution.
¹⁷

Meanwhile, Serge used his daily contact with the top Bolsheviks to help save anarchists and other dissidents from the clutches of the Cheka secret police, and privately revealed his fears to a few trusted European anarchist comrades visiting Russia. Ten years later, he would express the tragedy of the revolution savagely turned in on itself in his 1931 novel
Conquered City.
¹⁸
Meanwhile, he addressed letters to his comrades back in France ‘for insertion’ in the anarchist press in the hope of winning French anarchists over to the cause of the embattled, starving Soviets, beleaguered by Allied-financed White armies supported by Czech, French, British, Japanese, and even a few U.S. troops. Serge’s pro-Soviet arguments were taken up in France by revolutionary syndicalists
and anti-war internationalists like Pierre Monatte, Alfred Rosmer, and Marcelle Martinet, but rejected by mainstream anarchists like Jean Grave, who had patriotically supported France in World War I.

Not surprisingly, Serge has been attacked over the years both by anarchists (for collaborating with the Bolsheviks) and by Trotskyists (for his criticism of the Cheka secret police under Lenin) as well as for his political ‘inconsistency’ and even ‘schizophrenia.’ These critics fail to see that he was guided by an underlying revolutionary principle of ‘double duty’: to defend the revolution from its external enemies (the Whites, the imperialists) and its internal enemies (intolerance, bureaucracy, corruption).

In 1921 as the Civil War was winding down, the Bolshevik leadership harshly repressed of the revolt of the Kronstadt sailors’ Soviet. Serge was shaken to the core by this tragic conflict among revolutionaries, and he attempted to help the mediation efforts organized by U.S. anarchists Emma Goldman and Alexander Berkman. Serge was particularly revolted by the lies in the Communist press as well as the continuing massacres of defeated Soviet sailors by the Cheka. Dispirited, he retreated to a French anarchist agricultural commune north of Petersburg. When it collapsed, he then accepted a job as a Comintern editor, journalist, and revolutionary agent in Berlin, where he hoped the German revolution would triumph and by so doing liberate the USSR from isolation and increasing bureaucratic tyranny.
¹⁹

After the fiasco of the 1923 Communist
putsch
in Hamburg, Serge fled to Vienna. It was there, working along side Gramsci, Lukács, and Lucien Laurat, that he finally found time to seriously study Marx—and discover Freud. In 1925, with his hopes for a European revolution dashed and in conflict with the bureaucratic leadership of the Comintern, Serge returned to Russia to participate in the Left Opposition’s fore-doomed struggle against Stalin. As the Opposition’s
rapporteur
on China, Serge was the first writer published in the West to analyze Mao Zedong’s Hunan Report, with its perspective for a peasant-based revolution.
²⁰
In early 1928 Serge was expelled from the Party after blaming the massacre of workers at Canton on Stalin’s policy.
²¹
Arrested, interrogated
for weeks, released after protests in France, Serge was politically dead. A few days later, Serge came face to face with physical death, struck down by an intestinal occlusion. On his hospital bed, he resolved that if he survived, he would devote whatever time he had left to writing, and that is how he was reborn as a novelist.

Serge turned to literature as the best way to serve the revolution— by preserving its truth for future generations. He was living with his family in ‘semicaptivity’ in Leningrad, harassed by GPU spies—even within their collective apartment. However thanks to his self-discipline and long apprenticeship as a writer, editor, translator, and literary critic, Serge managed to finish three novels as well as a history of the
Year One of the Russian Revolution
and to publish them in Paris before being arrested again in 1933. Interrogated for months in the GPU’s notorious
Lubyanka,
accused of espionage, Serge stubbornly refused to confess to any ‘crimes’ other than his public opposition to the Party line and was deported, without trial, to Orenburg on the Ural in Central Asia.

Out on the Ural, the tragic experiences of Serge’s anarchist youth continued to haunt him. Around 1935 he completed another novel,
The Lost Men
—the ‘prequel’ to
Men in Prison
—based on Tragic Bandits and the collapse of French anarchism in the face of World War I patriotism. Ironically, the forty-five-year-old author of
Men in Prison
and
The Lost Men
was once again in detention, now as a Communist Left Oppositionist deportee in GPU custody. Alas, the typescript of
The Lost Men
may never be found. Serge painstakingly retyped multiple copies of his novel and sent them abroad, but they were ‘lost’ (confiscated by the GPU) and despite years of effort have not been recovered.
²²
As the twenty-year-old anarchist Victor the Maverick had famously predicted: “The present order crushes us, tracks us down, kills us. The revolutionary order will crush us, will track us down, will kill us.”
²³

In 1935, protests in France by well-known writers and teacher unionists demanding that Serge be either tried or released eventually persuaded Stalin to permit Serge to emigrate with his wife (driven mad
by persecution) and children.
²⁴
However, for a year no ‘free’ country would grant a visa to this notorious revolutionary. He was finally granted asylum in Belgium in April 1936, just before Stalin unleashed the Great Terror that would certainly have spelled his doom. However, the GPU arrested his relatives in Russia as hostages and confiscated his manuscripts. These included two novels:
The Lost Men,
about the Tragic Bandits; and
Men in the Storm,
about the Russian Civil War (the sequel to
Conquered City).
²⁵