Anarchists, Bolsheviks, and Serge 

From Daniel Guerin's _Anarchism_ (Monthly Review Press) (reprinted
with permission):

During the revolutionary days that brought Kerensky's bourgeois republic
to an end, the anarchists were in the forefront of the military struggle,
expecially in the Dvinsk regiment commanded by old libertarians like
Grachoff and Fedotoff. This force dislodged the counter-revolutionary
"cadets." Aided by his detachment, the anarchist Gelezniakov disbanded
the Constituent Assembly: the Bolsheviks only ratified the accomplished
fact. Many partisan detachments were formed or led by anarchists... and
fouch unremittingly against the white armies between 1918 and 1920.

Scarcely a major city was without an anarchist or anarcho-syndicalist
group, spreading a relatively large amount of printed matter--papers,
periodicals, leaflets, pamphlets, and books. There were two weeklies
in Petrograd and a daily in Moscow, each appearing in 25,000 copies.
Anarchist sympathizers increased as the Revolution deepened and then
moved away from the masses. The French captain Jacques Sadoul, on a 
mission in Russia, wrote in a report dated April 6, 1918: "The anarchist
party is the most active, the most militant of the opposition groups and
probably the most popular.... The Bolsheviks are anxious." At the end
of 1918, according to Voline [the premier historian of the anarchists
during the revolution, as well as an active participant in the events
described--cf], "this influence became so great that the Bolsheviks,
who could not accept criticism, still less opposition, became seriously
disturbed." Voline reports that for the Bolshevik authorities "it was
equivalent... to suicide to tolerate anarchist propaganda. They did 
their best first to prevent, and then to forbid, any manifestation of
libertarian ideas and finally suppressed them by brute force."

The Bolshevik government "began by forcibly closing the offices of
libertarian organizations, and forbidding the anarchists from taking part
in any propaganda or activity." In Moscow, on the night of April 12,
1918, detachments of Red Guards, armed to the teeth, took over by 
surprise twenty-five houses occupied by the anarchists. The latter, 
thinking that they were being attacked by White Guards, replied with
gunfire. According to Voline, the authorities soon went on to "more
violent measures: imprisonment, outlawing, and execution." "For four
years this conflict was to keep the Bolshevik authorities on their 
toes... until the libertarian trend was finally crushed by military
measures (at the end of 1921)."

The liquidation of the anarchists was all the easier since they had 
divided into two factions, one of which refused to be tamed while the
other allowed itself to be domesticated. The latter regarded "historical
necessity" as justification for making a gesture of loyalty to the
regime and, at least temporarily, approving its dictatorial actions. 
They considered a victorious end to the civil war and the crushing of the
counter-revolution to be the first necessities.

The more intransigent anarchists regarded this as a short-sighted
tactic. For the counter-revolutionary movements were being fed by the
bureaucratic impotence of the government apparatus and the disillusion-
ment and discontent of the people. Moreover, the authorities ended up
by making no distinction between the active wing of the libertarian
revolution which was disputing its methods of control, and the criminal
activities of its right-wing adversaries. To accept dictatorship and
terror was a suicidal policy for the anarchists who were themselves
to become its victims. Finally, the conversion of the so-called soviet
anarchists made the crushing of those other, irreconcilable, ones
easier, for they were treated as "false" anarchists, irresponsible and
unrealistic dreamers, stupid muddlers, madmen, sowers of division, and,
finally, counter-revolutionary bandits.

Victor Serge was the most brilliant, and therefore considered the most 
authoritative, of the converted anarchists. He worked for the regime 
and published a pamphlet in French which attempted to defend it against
anarchist criticism. The book he wrote later, _L'An 1 de la Re'volution
Russe_ [_Year One of the Russian Revolution_--cf], is largely a justifi-
cation of the liquidation of the soviets by Bolshevism. The Party--or
rather its elite leadership--is presented as the brains of the working
class. It is up to the duly selected leaders of the vanguard to discover
what the proletariat can and must do. Without them, the masses organized
in soviets would be no more than "a sprinkling of men with confused
aspirations shot thorugh with gleams of intelligence."

Victor Serge was certainly too clear-minded to have any illusions about
the real nature of the central Soviet power. But this power was still
haloed with the prestige of the first victorious proletarian revolution;
it was loathed by world counter-revolution; and that was one of the 
reasons--the most honorable--why Serge and many other revolutionaries
saw fit to put a padlock on their tongues. In the summer of 1921 the
anarchist Gaston Leval came to Moscow in the Spanish delegation to the
Third Congress of the Communist International. In private, Serge confided
to him that "the Communist Party no longer practices the dictatorship
of the proletariat but dictatorship *over* the proletariat." Returning
to France, Leval published articles in "Le Libertaire," using well-
documented facts, and placing side by side what Victor Serge had told
him confidentially and his public statements, which he described as 
"conscious lies." In _Livining My Life_, the great American anarchist
Emma Goldman was no kinder to Victor Serge, whom she had seen in action
in Moscow.

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For more information on Guerin's _Anarchism_, which, by the way, takes
more of a libertarian socialist position than that of what might be
called traditionally anarchist, contact Monthly Review at 
<mreview@igc.apc.org>.

Chris
-- 
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"Free thought, necessarily involving freedom of speech and press, I may
tersely define thus: no opinion a law--no opinion a crime." --Alexander
Berkman*********************************************cfaatz@teleport.com

