Men in Prison (5 page)

We were the only men on earth forbidden to know about the war; but, though we read nothing and could only glimpse, through the double smokescreen of war and administrative stupidity, the general outline of events, some few of us were blessed with exceptional clear-sightedness. I knew enough about the inner decay of the Russian Empire to foresee, at a time when the Cossacks still incarnated the hope of several old Western countries, its inevitable fall. Long before Europe ever dreamt it, we were discussing, in whispers, the coming Russian Revolution. We knew in what
part of the globe the long-awaited flame would be born. And in it we found a new reason for living …

The bell gave the signal for lights out. Squadrons of airplanes flew over the prison on the way to Paris. The sky was golden.

The tone is at once ironical, lyrical, apocalyptic. The bitter irony of being “privileged” through loss of liberty, of being forbidden to know war; the paradox of feeling joy and serenity in the face of catastrophe, the lyricism of the final image of bombers against a golden sky. And yet politics informs and organizes this vision of the totality of a world organized for repression and finding its ultimate expression (and its own negation) in the brutalities of prison and war. Without this savage irony there would be no exaltation, no apocalyptic vision. And the image of the Russian Revolution, that dim candle flickering at the end of a long, dark corridor, evokes the ironic theme of the whole passage, indeed of the whole novel: victory-in-defeat.
³³
As literature, it is a powerful and compelling vision; as politics, a kind of poetic equivalent of Lenin’s 1917 “revolutionary defeatism.”

Men in Prison
Today

As David Gilbert’s foreword indicates, inmates in times and places far from Serge’s own context continue to appreciate
Men in Prison.
As an inmate in a Minnesota prison wrote in 1970: “My prison is separated from Victor Serge’s by half a century, half a continent and an ocean and yet we have shared the same experience … Nothing changes. Absolutely nothing changes.”
³⁴
Indeed, if anything, things have gotten worse as the number of human beings in captivity has increased incrementally, resulting in overcrowding, increased brutality, and deteriorating conditions.

The construction and populating of prisons is apparently dying capitalism’s answer to massive youth unemployment, and Serge would certainly have seen today’s so-called war on drugs as a war against the poor. Nearly half of America’s two million prisoners are ‘guilty’ of non-violent crimes, mostly low-level marijuana and coke dealing—the principal occupations open to Black and immigrant youth, nearly half of whom have ‘done time’ by age thirty-five. The United States, once
a model of liberal democracy, has now surpassed Russia and China in percentage of its population behind bars, with about two million men and women trapped in the criminal justice system. Mandatory long-term sentences, which Serge correctly termed ‘slow death sentences,’ have created a whole population of wheelchair-ridden inmates, while undocumented immigrants and small children are increasingly being confined under unnecessarily brutal prison-like conditions.

Indeed, privatized prisons have become vastly profitable, and the building of new high-tech maximum-security and ‘supermax’ prisons where inmates are kept in solitary twenty-three hours a day and allowed zero contact with other prisoners, is one of the few remaining growth industries. If history is likely to remember the twentieth century for Hitler’s Auschwitz and Stalin’s Gulag, the young twenty-first is already marked by Guantánamo, Abu Ghraib, and the U.S. ‘supermax’ penitentiaries on which they were modeled.
³⁵

As Serge wrote in his
Memoirs:
“The fact that nobody in more than a century has considered the problem of criminality and prisons; the fact that since Victor Hugo, nobody has really raised the issue reveals the power of inertia in our society. This machine whose function is to turn out felons and human refuse is expensive without fulfilling any useful purpose.” Serge said it all eighty years ago: “Modern prisons are imperfectible. Being perfect, there is nothing left to do but destroy them.”

I ended my original 1968 introduction to this translation of
Men in Prison
with the sentence: “If this book doesn’t make you angry, nothing will.” I was twenty-eight and fresh from the barricades of the Columbia University student strike. A
New York Times
critic archly described my introduction as “somewhat overwrought.” Meanwhile, prisons have grown exponentially, conditions worsened drastically, and I have waxed ever more overwrought. The recent prolonged hunger strikes at Guantá

Meanwhile, as the saying goes, “If you’re not overwrought, you’re not paying attention.”

Richard Greeman
November 2013

¹
See Serge’s Memoirs of a Revolutionary: 1905–1941, the first complete English translation of which was published in 2012 by NYRB Classics, with a translator’s introduction by Peter Sedgwick, a foreword by Adam Hochschild, and a glossary by Richard Greeman.

²
De Boe and Serge were reunited in Brussels in 1936, when Serge was freed by the Russians. De Boe was by then a respected leader in the printers’ union.

³
Curiously, the only serious, reliable, and politically astute book on the gang was written by an Englishman, Richard Parry. Malcolm Menzies has written an excellent novel about the tragedy, En Exil chez les hommes, which sticks close to the facts and brings to life the characters and atmosphere.

⁴
For Serge’s articles as Le Rétif, see Anarchists Never Surrender: Essays, Polemics, and Correspondence on Anarchism, 1908–1938 (Oakland: PM Press, 2015).

⁵
Bonnot and Garnier, the two most hardened killers in the gang, each sent an open letter to the press and police proclaiming Dieudonné’s innocence, then fought it out to the death, surrounded by police and army units. At the trial, Raymond pretended to have nothing to do with the robbers and so waited until after the verdict—when it was too late—to shout out Dieudonné’s innocence. The bandit’s ‘innocence’ pleas contrasted with the 1905 trial of the anarchist burglar Marius Jacob, who proudly admitted: “I have burned down several townhouses, defended my freedom against the aggression of the agents of power. I am a rebel, living off the product of his thefts … I beg no indulgence from those I hate and scorn,” and reportedly “took over the trial,” expounding his anarchist principles.

⁶
Dieudonné and Serge were reunited in the 1930s in Paris, where both worked in print shops as proofreaders.

⁷
Which I was permitted to inspect on August 6, 1993, accompanied by M. Didier Voituron, a young directeur adjoint who was interested in Serge. Grim. The architecture of the Santé and its bare cells had not changed, but the 1974 prison riots all over France had led to some visible humanization of the regime as M. Voituron explained to me as he greeted unescorted prisoners in the halls. Apparently these reforms did not last. A sensational 2012 expose, Chief Doctor at the Santé Prison by Veronique Vasseur, describes a “pathogenic universe” of overcrowding, “which secretes its own arbitrary rules of despair, boredom, violence, forced cohabitation, promiscuity, domination by the strong, and corruption with no prospect but passing time badly.”

⁸
Michel Fize, Une Prison dans la ville. Histoire de la “prison modile” de la Santé, lire epoque, 1867–1914. Ministere de la Justice, Coll. Archives penitentiaire. June 1983.

⁹
Marshall Berman, AH That Is Solid Melts into Air: The Experience of Modernism (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1982), 34.

¹⁰
Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, quoted by Berman.

¹¹
Ironically, David Gilbert, author of the foreword to this volume, is interned at Auburn in upstate New York. Another irony, it was Alexis de Tocqueville, revered by U.S. liberals, who as Justice Minister imposed this harsh, dehumanizing system in France. As a result, the French penitentiary system remained more repressive than the Spanish, even under Franco, as testified to by Serge’s comrades from the Spanish POUM who were incarcerated in both. The late Wilebaldo Solano laughingly told me the story of receiving in his French prison a postcard from a comrade in one of Franco’s jails that read: “It’s Paradise here! The guards even play soccer with us.” And of course Spain permitted conjugal visits.

¹²
Prefecture du Marne, May 19, 1915. In fact, the couple were left alone in an office for an hour or so.

¹³
It was unusual for a non-violent inmate to serve out the full sentence, and Serge’s clemency appeals, organized by Rirette, had influential sponsors. However, a high ministry official considered him an anarchist firebrand ‘dangerous to good order’ and kept him in the pen. Nonetheless, enemies in anarcho-individualist circles spread the rumor that Victor had been let off early

¹⁴
Translated by Richard Greeman (Oakland: PM Press, 2015).

¹⁵
Dave Renton cites among the Russian ‘Soviet anarchists’ the names of Benjamin Aleynnikov, Herman Sandorminsky, Alexander Shapiro, Nikolai Rogdayev Novomirsky, Grossman-Roschin, and Appolon Karelin,
http://www.dkrenton.co.uk/research/serge.html
.

¹⁶
Serge’s son Vladimir, my late and dear friend, was named after Vladimir Mazin, not after Vladimir Lenin as has been surmised.

¹⁷
See Serge’s 1921 “The Anarchists and the Russian Revolution,” translated by Ian Birchall, in Serge, The Revolution in Danger: Writings from Russia 1919–1921 (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2011).

¹⁸
Translated with an introduction by Richard Greeman (New York: NYRB Classics, 2010).

¹⁹
See Serge’s Witness to the German Revolution, translated by Ian Birchall and published by Haymarket Books.

²⁰
“The Class Struggle in the Chinese Revolution,” 1927–28,
http://www.marxists.org/archive/serge/1927/china/index.html
.

²¹
Serge (writing as ‘Paul Sizoff) “Canton, December 1927,”
http://www.marxists.org/archive/serge/1927/china/canton.html
.

²²
A copy found its way inside the Kremlin, where the French writer Romain Rolland, a guest of Stalin, read it and returned the manuscript (which he had agreed to take to Serge’s Paris publisher) to GPU chief Yagoda. See my “The Victor Serge Affair and the French Literary Left” in Revolutionary History 5, no. 3,
http://www.marxists.org/history/etol/revhist/backiss/vol5/no3/greeman.html
.

²³
“The Revolutionary Illusion” (1910) translated by Mitch Abidor,
http://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/le-retif-the-revolutionary-illusion
.

²⁴
See Greeman, “The Victor Serge Affair and the French Literary Left.”

²⁵
So far our efforts to recover them in the Russian archives, partly open since glasnost, have come to naught. On the other hand, Serge was able to reconstruct from memory his book of poems, Resistance, translated into English by James Brook with an introduction by Richard Greeman (San Francisco: City Lights, 1972)

²⁶
Serge’s brilliant and prescient articles appeared in the small-circulation syndicalist magazine La Révolution proletarienne and in one union-owned large-circulation local paper in Liège, Belgium, La Wallonie. They have recently been collected and published in France (Agone, 2010) under the title Retour à l’Ouest: Chroniques, juin 1936-mai 1940 (preface by Richard Greeman), which we hope to see translated in the near future.

²⁷
Translated with an introduction by Richard Greeman (London: Writers and Readers Publishing Co-op, 1982; New York: NYRB Classics, 2014).

²⁸
“If the Soviet regime is to be criticized, let it be from a socialist and working-class point of view.” Quoted from Ian Birchall, “Letters from Victor Serge to René Lefeuvre,” Revolutionary History 8, no. 3 (2002).

²⁹
Serge’s posthumous ‘rightward evolution’ is posited (most recently in the New Left Review 82 (July-August 2013) on the basis of guilt by association: since the editors of Partisan Review (where Serge published two articles) later moved right as did some of his comrades in exile in Mexico, Serge too is guilty of joining the Cold War consensus. Please see my “Victor Serge’s Political Testament,” Postface to the 2012 NYRB edition of Serge’s Memoirs, online at
http://assets.nybooks.com/media/doc/2012/07/02/Greeman-Serge.pdf
.

³⁰
Paradoxically, we find similar Philistine attitudes—reducing Serge’s novels to useful sociological documents—on the Left as well. For example, Trotskyist Susan Weissman, in her Victor Serge: A Political Biography (formerly The Course Is Set on Hope, 2001 and 2013) concludes: “Writing, for Serge, was something to do only when one was unable to fight…. Serge wrote with a mission: to expose and analyse the significance of the rise of Stalinism” (the subject of Weissman’s PhD dissertation). Meanwhile Weissman’s colleague, the celebrated Trotskyist literary critic Alan Wald, ignores Serge’s novels entirely, viewing Serge through the lens of his particular academic specialty, the ‘New York Intellectuals,’ forgetting that 99 percent of Serge’s writings were published in Paris in French (a language which Wald, like Weissman, doesn’t know).

³¹
Serge, Memoirs, 305.

³²
Stanley Reynolds, “Courage & Blood,” New Statesman, July 17, 1970, 63.

³³
Coincidentally, Alexander Berkman, in The Bolshevik Myth, called the day he first heard of the revolution in Russia the “happiest day” of his life.

³⁴
Harley Sorensen, an inmate at Stillwater Prison and former editor of the Prison Mirror, writing in Book News (Minneapolis), Sunday, January 18, 1970.