Mitchell Abidor’s new biography, “Victor Serge: Unruly Revolutionary,” argues that Serge’s final years in Mexican exile hardened him into an anti-communist — an early stop on the familiar ex-leftist road to the Cold War. Three writers from different traditions, Claudio Albertani, Suzi Weissman, and Christian Dubucq, answer in Jacobin that this turns a life defined by resistance into “a trial by innuendo.”

Who Serge was:

  • Lived 1890–1947; born Victor Kibalchich in Belgium to Russian anarcho-populist exiles, died in exile in Mexico City
  • Took part in three revolutions, spent a decade in prisons, was politically active in seven countries, published more than thirty books
  • Anarchist, then Bolshevik, then Left Oppositionist — argued with Trotsky from inside the anti-Stalinist left, and opposed both fascism and the emerging Cold War
  • Four of his books were confiscated by Soviet censorship (Glavlit); airbrushed from Soviet history, he became a forgotten figure “who belongs to our future”

The dispute with Abidor:

  • Abidor’s “inner paradigm” psychologizes Serge, casts doubt on his sincerity, and invites suspicion where evidence is absent — e.g., why Serge escaped prosecution in the 1910 Liabeuf affair
  • He treats Stalin’s USSR as still “the only socialist state” — accepting Stalin’s own definition of his system, which Serge spent his life refuting
  • The authors counter with Serge’s own texts: “collectivism is not synonymous with socialism” (“For a Renewal of Socialism,” 1946); his socialism put freedom, rights, and democracy at the center
  • Letter to René Lefeuvre: alarmed by Stalinism, but “we must not play into the hands of the anti-communist bloc”
  • Five months before his death (letter to Ukrainian writer Hryhory Kostiuk, June 1947): “I remain — unshakeably — a socialist, a partisan of democratic socialism”
  • His writing for The New Leader in Mexico was poverty, not convergence — Soviet pressure closed his other outlets, he refused censorship, and he also wrote for Dwight Macdonald’s libertarian-socialist journal Politics

The essay’s stakes are clear: Stalinism’s defeat of the October revolution did not make Serge one of the “god that failed” converts. He tried to rescue socialism from its bureaucratic and totalitarian deformation — the difference, as the authors put it, between writing history and conducting a prosecution.

Octavio Paz, who met him in Mexico in 1942, remembered Serge as “the epitome of the fusion of two opposing qualities: moral and intellectual intransigence combined with tolerance and compassion.” The piece arrives amid a Serge renaissance: his Carnets (1936–1947) newly published by Agone, New York Review Books editions of Memoirs of a Revolutionary and the novels, and Albertani’s own first volume of a Serge biography.