tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4427463727935379036.post5294545017473724363..comments2023-06-18T07:17:49.103-07:00Comments on Avanti!: Guest Post: Victor Serge- Memoirs of a RevolutionaryAvanti!http://www.blogger.com/profile/14778606749543607723noreply@blogger.comBlogger1125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4427463727935379036.post-16172857797975415972008-09-28T16:27:00.000-07:002008-09-28T16:27:00.000-07:00When I read Serge, I'd meant to write up a post, b...When I read Serge, I'd meant to write up a post, but never did. The following are my disconnected notes:<BR/><BR/>Serge believed the creation of the Cheka was the greatest mistake of the revolution. Abolition of the death penalty and free and open trials would have been infinitely better.<BR/>Still, with the blockades, the interventions, the plots, and Kolchak burning Red prisoners alive at Ufa, who would have done better? (Before Lenin published his decree ending the Terror, the Chekists "liquidated their stock.")<BR/><BR/>Perhaps the greatest contribution of Serge's book is the memorial to the forgotten, erased individuals who made the Revolution, and who would have probably avoided the disaster which followed: Riazanov, who argued tirelessly against the death penalty, Shatov the anarchist mayor of St. Petersburg, Bordigia who opposed Lenin on organization and Soviet domination of foreign Communist parties and on the issue of supporting rather reactionary Third-World revolutions. Even Martov, the inventor of the Mensheviks, who Lenin protected from the Cheka.<BR/><BR/>Probably due in no small part to Serge's anarchist background, it is surprising the prominence which the anarchists play in his story. On p.104, he writes that Lenin "was very anxious to have the support of 'the best of the anarchists.'" and goes on to explain quite credibly that there probably were not any real Communists in the world outside Russia and Bulgaria at that time (it seems like China is a notable absence here, but even then we may quibble over definitions) but instead the vast majority of revolutionaries were some stripe of social democrat or anarchist or syndicalist.<BR/><BR/>On the failure of Tukhachevsky to take Warsaw, which Taylor saw as the turning-point for all of Europe: here we find Stalin, who instead of providing support marched on Lvov to gain a personal victory. The disaster for the cause of world revolution cannot be overstated.<BR/><BR/>As early as the winter of 1920-21, there was a "Workers' Opposition," protesting the increasing bureaucracy, the forceful compulsion of economic activity, the suppression of dissent. By then the Soviets had become auxiliary organs of the Party, and the intolerable nature of the economic system required an abolition of the freedom of speech.<BR/><BR/>According to Serge, Trotsky wrote in 1938 that Lenin considered recognizing an autonomous region in the Ukraine under the control of Nestor Makhno's anarchists. "That arrangement would have been both just and diplomatic, and w perhaps an outlook as generous as this would have spared the Revolution from the tragedy towards which we were drifting." p. 122, on the great use and aid given and won by the anarchists in the Ukraine and the Crimea, only to be arrested and shot by the Cheka.<BR/><BR/>Lenin in 1917 wrote of a press organization whereby any group with 10k votes could publish its own journal free, of peaceful transitions of power within the Soviets from party to party, and of police made through the people, run by directly elected councils, protected by a people's militia.<BR/><BR/>At Krondstadt, the Reds lied to the people, refused to negotiate, and killed everyone, despite enacting the NEP which proved the Krondstadt demands had been correct anyway. The NEP meant economic liberalism without a shred of political or social liberalism; the justification was the failure of the German revolution.<BR/><BR/>p.153, "I was and still am convinced that the new regime would have felt a hundred times more secure if it had henceforth proclaimed its reverence, as a Socialist government, for human life and the rights of all individuals without exception."<BR/><BR/>p. 374, "[Intolerance and persecution] originated in an absolute sense of possession of truth, grafted upon doctrinal rigidity. What followed was contempt for the man who was different, of his arguments and way of life."<BR/><BR/>and "the only meaning of life lies in conscious participation in the making of history...it follows that one must range oneself actively against everything that diminishes man, and involve oneself in all struggles which tend to liberate and enlarge him. This categorical imperative is in no way lessened by the fact that such an involvement is inevitably soiled by error: it is a worse error merely to live for oneself, caught within traditions which are soiled by inhumanity."<BR/><BR/>p. 377 The Central Committee in 1918 could have set up public revolutionary trials with no death penalty, habeas corpus, right of defense, etc to deal with counter-revolutionaries. But it didn't, it set up the Cheka, with secret trials, no right of defense, and no input of public opinion.Eccariushttps://www.blogger.com/profile/13282052687219463566noreply@blogger.com