There Are No Supreme Saviors
Briefly, first, about the author. Victor Serge (born Victor Lvovich Kibalchich) was born to internationalism--born in Belgium to two Russian revolutionaries in exile. As a youth he moved to Paris, joined the anarchists, was arrested by the French police for refusing to testify against the freewheeling Bonnot Gang. After his release he left Paris for Russia, his homeland which he had never seen before, and joined the Bolsheviks in the Russian Civil War. After the war he remained in Russia to help build socialism, aligning himself with the left opposition to Stalin. He was sent to a prison camp by Stalin, and only by the help of an old friend's letter did he avoid being executed. Instead he was forced to flee into exile, first to Paris, then out of Europe from the Nazis, ending up in Mexico in his final years. All this time he remained, above all, a true revolutionary beyond reproach, forever committed to the labor movement, and a tragic embodiment of the heroes of the 20th century revolutions. Greater than all the Great Men, and forced to watch from a far as the proletarian revolution degenerated into an absurd bureaucracy, himself holding to hope all the while.
Soon They Will Know Our Bullets Are For Our Own Generals
Second, and again briefly, what this book is about. It begins with two neighbors, Romachkin and Kostia, divided only by a thin partition in collective housing in Moscow. They're both clerks in the Soviet state, both living in poverty, searching for something, not sure of what it is. One night, by chance, Kostia comes upon Comrade Tulayev, a member of the Central Committee of the Soviet state. Kostia shoots Tulayev and flees into the night, evading capture. We do not see Romachkin and Kostia again until the final chapter.
Fantastic writeup. This is one of those books that's been vaguely on my radar for years and clearly it's high time I got to it.