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PARTISAN REVI EW
never really a faithful party man. All his life he remained an anarchist
at heart, which is borne out both in his novels and in his political behav–
ior. Party discipline did not come to him naturally-he was a born rebel.
Serge was released from prison in early 1917 and deported from
France. He spent some time in Spain and then found his way to revolu–
tionary Russia; in later years he wrote a fascinating account of Year One
of the Russian revolution. Serge's attitude towards Bolshevism was crit–
ical almost from the beginning-or, to be precise, from Kronstadt
(1921), the uprising of the sailors against the Soviet government which
was suppressed by Trotsky. Serge joined the Russian left-wing opposi–
tion early on but for a number of years was sent to missions on behalf
of the Communist International in Berlin and Vienna, where he made
the acquaintance of most leading Communist intellectuals and political
leaders of the day. He returned to Moscow in 1926 and witnessed the
growth of Stalinism and the destruction of the various oppositions. He
was excluded from the party, put under surveillance, and eventually
arrested. Most of his friends and relations disappeared in the 1930S.
His fate would not have been different but for the fact that his friends
in France launched a massive campaign demanding his liberation. This
campaign lasted for years, and the Serge case became a major embar–
rassment for the Communists and for Soviet policy in Western Europe.
Serge's friends enlisted Andre Gide and even Romain Rolland, who
intervened with Stalin on his behalf. Thus, alone among all the opposi–
tionists, he was released from prison just before the great purges. The
fact that he was originally of foreign nationality might have helped the
Soviet authorities to let him leave the country (minus his manuscripts )
while saving face. In Moscow Serge was considered not so much a polit–
ical figure but a litterateur, and this could also have been of importance
in Stalin's unprecedented magnanimity.
The next few years Serge spent in France; Weissman's biography con–
tains many interesting details about his meetings with defectors from the
Soviet Union such as Ignaz Reiss and Walter Krivitsky as well as Trot–
sky's assistants, who included Mark Zborowski, the leading Soviet spy
in these circles. Serge was also in touch with many independent figures
of the far left, and his portraits of the left-wing opposition in Russia, of
Soviet writers of the twenties (many of whom he knew intimately), and
of his revolutionary friends in Western Europe are of considerable his–
torical importance.
Serge admired Trotsky and joined the Trotskyists in France for a lit–
tle while. Whereas Trotsky wanted to create a Fourth International at
the time, Serge thought the timing altogether bad, since the Left in
