Quotations from Victor Serge's Midnight in the Century

Below are some favorite quotations from Victor Serge's Midnight in the Century

"I don't completely understand your distinction between good and bad Thermidoreans."

"He liked her.  He didn't know if he loved her, exactly.  We live that way, without knowing."

Two days later they arrested him.  Just like that, in the street, near the trolley stop.

Two Trostkyists, one genuine, the other doubtful, were quietly discussing Radek's objections to the theory of permanent revolution.

"I'm charged with espionage.  And I'm only a poor slob, citizens and comrades, I swear to you, only a poor slob!"

"It's over.  What a bitch of a life.  When will it end?"
The elder replied sententiously:
"The Permanent Session of Chaos No. 16. continues.  Next point on the agenda."

Men existed here in sharp relief, the accumulated hours crushed them, but time per se did not exist."

"We have nothing, nothing in common with Menshevism."

"You're not a bad guy, but you're a born rat.  I'm not worried about the solidity of your skull-bone:  you're destined to have an honorable career in the concentration camps."

"Anyone want to write to the Proletarian authorities?"

"If our houses of detention are overcrowded, it's not the fault of the proletarian dictatorship but that of the counter-revolution which assails us on every side."

It all began with a dull pain in the area of the heart.  But was it in the area of the heart?  We don't know precisely where the heart is nor what it is.

Control yourself--it's just a heart attack--and if it were something worse?

He lost his calendar, the addition of weeks and months, and decided to live outside time.

"Do you know the difference between a great misfortune and a national disaster, Zina Valentinova?  Imagine a very great leader falling to the sidewalk from the eighth floor balcony of the Central Committee.  That would be a great misfortune.  Now imagine him surviving.  That would be a national disaster."

The glaciers are starts smashed across the earth.

The revolution will be stranded on the beach for the next twenty years.

"We're between two counter-revolutions.  How clear can anything be!"

His brains were spread over the dandelions, but his pince-nez glasses, their frame mended with black thread, were still perched on the bridge of his nose.

"Comrade Ryzhik's report on the joys of boreal springtime is adopted without debate, unanimously with one abstention:  mine.  I have ideological reservations."

",,,I request a three-second recess for Karl's latest revelation (may his revolutionary's soul rest in peace:  His body is rotting slowly in the toilet of the General Secretary's office).

"Listen, brother, I'm uneasy.  There are five of us--and not one informer!  Do you think that's possible?"

"And what does homo sovieticus need beyond a thousand roubles a month?"

Pessimism, in our age of disciplined energy, is perhaps in involuntary form of sabotage.

"We're right, comrades.  Right, like stones are right to be hard, like the grass i right to grow, for the Revolution doesn't want to die out."

"And for the moment the dialectic of history has placed us under its wheel."

Miorzly, every limb alert in that embrace, watched that hand reaching for murder with prodigious shrewdness, seized it on the wing as it clenched its face.

You don't hit a man when he's down, but you can hit a man when he's falling, before he hits the ground.

"Citizen Chief, I'm a Civil War Communist, wounded at the age of eighteen on the Orenburg front.  I hope that's enough for you."
"I very much regret that it isn't."

On the scale of history, of what importance are these little sufferings, this senseless resistance of micro-organisms in a drop of water?

She always had that absent air at work.  Is she married?  The Interim Director considers her for a short moment with the bizarre attention of a solitary man who suffers from liver-trouble, smokes too much, and whom a sad woman has walked out on...

"Subjectively, perhaps they are still revolutionaries.  Objectively, they are hardened counter-revolutionaries."

"How do you say son-of-a-bitch in Marxist terms?"

"Got shot, that brother, a little while back.  Was really too fat to hide himself nowadays now that everyone else got thin."

He demanded an extremely conspicuous zeal from his subordinates, in order that it should be noticed.  What, indeed, is the use of unnoticed zeal?

"Your establishment is hardly on par with socialism, citizen chief.  Beginning with the bedbugs."

Lion Feuchtwanger and the Festival of Revenge

"There can be no question that in the great majority of cases this exaggerated veneration is genuine. The people feel the need to express their gratitude, their infinite admiration. They do in truth believe that they owe to Stalin all they are and have, and however incongruous and at times distasteful this idolatry may seem to us of the West, no where have I found anything to indicate that is in the least artificial or ready-made."

"The future lies before them like a well-defined and carefully tended path through a beautiful landscape."

"They are unable to repress the happiness which fills them."

"[Moscow is a] city built from its foundations in accordance with the dictates of sound sense, and the first of its kind since man wrote history."

"Everything is from the first an essential part of an intelligently conceived plan."

"In itself there is nothing remarkable in the unanimous optimism of the Soviet people."

"Stalin laughed a little at those who demanded many written documents before they could bring themselves to believe in a conspiracy; practiced conspirators, he said, were not in the habit of leaving their documents lying around for all to see."

"Many of my friends, who are otherwise intelligent people, find these [the Show Trials], from beginning to end, in substance and in form, tragic-comical, barbaric, incredible, and appalling."

"But when I attended the second trial in Moscow, when I saw Pyatakov, Radek, and his friends, and heard what they said and how they said it, I was forced to accept the evidence of my own senses, and my doubts melted away."

"It at once becomes as clear as daylight that this modest, impersonal man cannot possibly have committed the colossal indiscretion of producing with the assistance of countless performers so coarse a comedy, merely for the purpose of holding a sort of festival of revenge with Bengal lights to celebrate the humiliation of his opponents."

"There is one eternally true legend," [Stalin] said, "that of Judas."

Lion Feuchtwanger, author of Moscow, 1937: My Visit Described for My Friends, was one of Stalin's chief international apologists. To apologize for the apologist, one should remember that the Jewish-German theater critic, novelist, and playwright was one of NAZI German's earliest and most vociferous enemies. With intimate knowledge of Hitler's monstrous villainy, Feuchtwanger is at pains to explain the Soviet Union's antidemocratic shortcomings as a natural outcome of its struggle against fascist Germany and Italy.

Feuchtwanger's description of his ten week visit to the "Union"--his pet name for the U.S.S.R.--is an aggressive, comprehensive defense of the world's first experiment in socialism. Feuchtwanger's apologia makes extensive use of economic and social statistics to tell the story of the revolutionary regime. Although the author admits that Russia suffers from a deplorable lack of adequate housing, he praises Russia for its alleged progress in public transportation, education, new housing construction, electrification, food production, water usage, good reserves, wage levels, and access to consumer goods.

Russia's superiority over its fascist and capitalist competitors is manifested in countless ways. Most importantly, Feuchtwanger believes that Soviet citizens appreciate their place in a fair, secure, rational, and planned society. While even wealthy Westerners suffer from the knowledge of their neighbors' poverty and joblessness, Soviet citizens understand that their modest prosperity is not purchased at the expense of the less fortunate. They know, or at least Feuchtwanger says they know, that they are organically connected to the whole of society, and that Party decisions are made on their behalf, and not on behalf of wealthy individuals. According to Feuchtwanger's vision, capitalist planning--if we overlook the oxymoron inherent in the term--is disorganized, unfair, irrational, and inefficient. But most importantly, capitalist planning is soulless and cruel.

For Feuchtwanger, the 1930s were an exciting time for Russians. Led by leaders of genius such as Stalin, Soviet citizens had just received one of the most progressive constitutions in the world in 1935. While the German writer admits that the 1935 Constitution is not yet fully implemented--a spectacular understatement to say the least--he admires the extent to which the Soviet legal framework asserts broad civil rights and demonstrates the way in which they will be guaranteed. If the Russian people had the right to freedom of expression, the Soviet government ensured that this right was tangible by maintaining public ownership over the press organs. It's a strange logic, but Feuchtwanger is generally content that the Soviet state is at least acting in the interest of its citizens.

Of course, the German playwright is impressed most of all by Stalin. Although claiming to be dissatisfied with crude Stalin-worship, Feuchtwanger argues that Soviet citizens merely seek to praise their country's accomplishments by heaping honor upon honor upon a concrete symbol of their good fortune. Stalin is allegedly a steady man and a builder, in touch with both the peasants and the proletarians. Feuchtwanger claims Stalin is Augustus to Lenin's Caesar, responsible for the defense of Tsaritsyn in the Civil War, and several brilliant socialist theories, such as Socialism in One Country, and the reconciliation of nationalism with socialist internationalism.

Most bizarrely, the author also credits Stalin with magnanimity. In the contest with Trotsky, Stalin claims that Stalin ordered that Trotsky be included in the official, Gorky-edited History of the Civil War, while pointing out that Trotsky spitefully uses all of his writings to defame the great Stalin. We know of course that Stalin erased Trotsky from the history books, and was ultimately responsible for Trotsky's death, as well as his children's deaths, but Feuchtwanger's test belies Stalin's pretensions to goodwill. In this same chapter on Stalin and Trotsky, Feuchtwanger allows that Zinoviev, Kamenev, Rydek and others were executed. And yet, he's not ashamed to write: "[Stalin] is supposed to be ruthless, but for many years he has been striving to win over competent Trotskyists rather than destroy them, and it is in a way affecting to see how doggedly he is endeavoring to use them for his work."