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tempt) was more often right than the "old man." This fact is acknowl–
edged by Ms. Weissman, and it provoked the ire of some of the more
orthodox Trotskyist reviewers of her book.
More important yet, it has to be proved that with all his harsh criti–
cism of the Soviet Union, he would, had he lived, never have become a
cold warrior and renegade. Thus the Trotskyists (as does Ms. Weiss–
man) compare Koestler's
Darkness at Noon
unfavorably with Serge's
"Case of Comrade Tulayev" and "Midnight in the Century." In fact,
both Koestler and Serge were wrong with their explanations of Stalin–
ism and the purges. Koestler argued that the "enemies of the people"
confessed because Stalin appealed to party discipline, whereas for Serge
the case of Tulayev was more or less an accident. As Serge saw it, Stalin
was a tool of the bureaucracy, which, as we now know, was very far
from historical truth. Koestler is rejected by the Trotskyists not so much
because of what he wrote at the time but because (to quote Ms. Weiss–
man) he became one of the god-that-failed anti-communists. She also
calls his book "a pure statement of Stalinist thinking." In contrast,
Serge, we are told, kept his hope despite all that had happened and all
that he had witnessed. ] have a strong suspicion that with all this,
Koestler would have been acceptable to the Trotskyists had he died, like
Serge, in
1947.
Ms. Weissman and others have been struggling valiantly to make
Serge posthumously one of them, a revolutionary who never wavered,
perhaps not a faithful member of the movement but an outstanding fel–
low traveler.
It
is a struggle against overwhelming odds . After his escape
from France he contributed almost exclusively to social democratic
journals and some which were not socialist at all. This is not just
because others would not publish him; his views had changed as the
result of his experiences. The socialism he envisaged during the last fif–
teen years of his life had little to do with traditional Marxism, let alone
Marxism-Leninism, but was based on radical rethinking and revalua–
tion. It included an emphasis on freedom and humanism, and in some
ways it was a return to the libertarian socialism of his youth.
He praised the Mensheviks and strongly recommended their writings,
for their understanding of the Soviet danger was far more astute than
that of his old political friends of the far left. All this appears not just in
his articles published in the United States but most strikingly in his let–
ters in
1945-1946
to his old friend Emanuel Mounier, a left-wing
Catholic leader and founder of the influential French monthly
Esprit.
Early on Serge called the Soviet Union and the various Communist
parties "totalitarian," a term considered today cold warrish and unfor-
