Victor Serge's Midnight in the Century

Victor Serge produced many first class political books, historical works, and novels.  Thus far, I've been most impressed with Serge's Memoirs of a Revolutionary, which gave me a deep appreciation for the cosmopolitan Serge's political, aesthetic, literary, philosophical, and moral talents.  Although Serge's Midnight in the Century covers same themes as that non-fiction masterpiece, it isn't his best novel.  While too overtly polemical to be a great novel, Serge's novel is filled with witty dialogue, deep philosophical observations about the nature of human beings and nature, exquisite sentences, and insightful character descriptions. A work of striking moral and political sophistication, Serge's Midnight in the Century is nevertheless a relatively thinly disguised indictment of Stalinism.  His protagonists all share the author's political views, and therefore find themselves persecuted by the revolution they once served. Midnight in the Century does offer profoundly illuminating glimpses of the human cost of totalitarianism.

In a sense, the Midnight in the Century's take on Stalinism resembles Koestler's Darkness at Noon or even Solzhenitsyn's Gulag Archipelago, which it precedes.  But Serge is an unwavering follower of Trotsky, and so his critique of Stalinism is directly concerned with the way in which Stalin and his cronies have betrayed socialism.  From Serge's point of view, Stalininism was the Russian Revolution's Thermidor, a form of counterrevolution. Serge's characters do debate the extent to which they owe some modicum of allegiance to the government they helped to bring about. They also debate the historical meaning of Stalinism. Yet ultimately they classify Stalinism as a form of State Capitalism, and avow that true revolutionaries need to "start again" to build a true proletarian government. 

In the end, the book tells readers a lot about Soviet terror.  We understand that people are put into cells for little reason, or no reason whatsoever.  We understand the Old Bolsheviks, Social Revolutionaries, and religious zealots suffer equally at the ends of a brutal state apparatus.  We understand that arrests are motivated by jealousy, by chaotic government processes, or crude economic mandates and absurd planning mechanisms which require culprits.  We know that Soviet justice is not justice at all, and that even innocent people can be shot with scarcely a pretense of a judicial process.  But reading the book now, one is most struck by the viewpoint of a Trotskyite.  While we know that Stalin was paranoid about Trotsky and his followers, this book makes one wonder if Stalin wasn't right to fear this form of sustained, informed, courageous, and socialist critique.  Communists were steeled in the art of anti-capitalist and anti-colonialist rhetoric.  But they were probably much less comfortable debating their erstwhile allies who were actually arguing that the Soviet government had betrayed the true principles of the revolution.  Serge's characters charge Stalin and his government with every sort of villainy, from famine, to Chinese massacres, to the rise of fascism, to economic ruin. But their worst charge is that Stalin has ended any pretense of worker democracy and socialist fraternity.

Gulag Literature

A lot of you out there are asking why I haven’t spent much time discussing the gulag. You’re saying, Fur Coat, Soviet history is nothing if not gulag history. Truth be told, I haven’t dabbled too deeply in the literature, perhaps because the subject is so vast, perhaps because it’s just too depressing to contemplate so many spent lives.

I did read the first of Solzhenitsyn’s trilogy, the Gulag Archipelago. It’s fantastic. One could be forgiven for wondering whether the book deserves the literary attention it received back in the 1970s. Its role in publicizing Soviet moral depravity was obviously necessary, but, in the words of Patsy in Absolutely Fabulous, Is it Art, Eddie?

Well, it turns out it is. It’s a beautiful book. Its sarcasm and wit and dark humor are extraordinary effective. And the book takes you through every phase of Soviet tyranny, from illegal arrest, to brutal and absurd interrogation, to flawed trial, to crushing sentencing, to torturous journey into Siberian exile, to destructive and deadly time-served. The book reveals an awesome mind and Nobel-worthy writing.

On a sentence-by-sentence basis, it’s perfect, but its power stems from the magnitude of the indictment. Or, put another way, it’s power stems from the way in which Solzhenitsyn links a personal story of degradation to a national story of extreme totalitarianism. The wonder is that Solzhenitsyn experienced the Gulag first-hand, paying for his own military service with years of hard labor and official persecution, and yet lived to write a coherent and still-artistic condemnation of the system.

Some literary critics have said that the Holocaust produced few great works of art because it was simply too horrifying to portray. At some level, the suffering was too great to produce great art. There seems to be something too that. Books like Survival in Auschwitz and Night are excellent, but they are rare and are probably more prose than literature. In Lydia Ginsburg’s opinion, art depends on some degree of optimism, even in the midst of darkness. Tragedy, after all, depends upon genuine hope, however submerged. Auschwitz, in this sense, seems beyond tragedy in this sentence, as Levi must have felt when he committed suicide after wrestling with the memory of Auschwitz in his books.

This is what is ultimately most impressive about Solzhenitsyn. He seems to have retained the ability to portray tragedy in the sense that he retained a real attachment to life as it should be in the midst of physical and psychological and spiritual oppression. So the book takes the reader through every phase in the destruction of the human soul. However, the author retains a sense of his own inherent superiority to all things Soviet.