What Every Radical Should Know About State Repression
By Victor Serge
Ocean Press 2005
148 pages (pb) $25
REVIEW BY ALEX MILLER
Victor Serge was born to Russian refugee parents in Brussels in 1890. Originally an anarchist, he joined the Russian Communist Party in 1919 and was expelled from the Party in 1928 for his anti-Stalinist politics.
This book, first published in 1921 and expanded in 1926, paints a vivid picture of the surreal world inhabited by revolutionaries in Tsarist Russia. This is a world where activists are advised to write as little as possible, to use code when they do, to sew letters into the backs of envelopes "and cover the thread with an elegant wax"; to use the telephone as little as possible and never to use it to make appointments; and where the use of agents provocateurs was so widespread that Serge advises activists not to confide in even their closest comrades unless breaking silence is absolutely necessary.
As Dalia Hashad points out in her introduction, however, Serge's book is far from having merely historical interest: "The table of contents [of Serge's book] reads like a list of present-day offenses committed by the US administration". Hashad, the Arab, Muslim, and South Asian advocate for the American Civil Liberties Union, notes a number of features the contemporary US has in common with the Russia of the Romanovs: "secret arrests and detentions, the use of torture as a tool of interrogation, the creation of a spy network, unchecked government surveillance and the widespread suppression of dissent, the government's plan to use average citizens as agents to spy on people".
While the Tsar's secret police might not seem out of place in Bush's America, though, it's hard to draw conclusions about how contemporary activists in advanced capitalist societies should conduct their work. One can only wonder what advice Serge would give to activists in the world of email and the internet, where (seemingly) nothing is hidden and where you use your credit card online to take out a subscription to Green Left Weekly or buy Marxist texts from Resistance Books. Serge's book won't provide the answers activists need today, but it certainly helps pose the questions in a striking and compelling fashion.
From Green Left Weekly, June 7, 2006.
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