For decades, anyone writing about Victor Serge had to begin by explaining who he was and why we should care. Despite an enormous literary legacy, he had been literally airbrushed from Soviet history, a forgotten figure even on much of the Left. History is rarely kind to the vanquished, and Serge stood on the side of the defeated, with those who refused to compromise with capitalism or surrender to Stalinism. The cost was high, but Serge’s eloquent voice and mighty pen could not prevent his being sidelined by history, ignored or poorly understood, consigned to a life of poverty. Four of his books were confiscated by the Soviet Censorship (Glavlit), and other writings were left unpublished, though they establish him as a man who belongs to our future.

Who was Serge? A worker, a militant, an intellectual, an internationalist by experience and conviction, and always poor, Serge lived from 1890 to 1947. He took part in three revolutions, spent a decade in various prisons, and was politically active in seven countries. He published more than thirty books and left behind thousands of pages of unpublished work. He was born Victor Kibalchich in Belgium, to Russian anarcho-populist parents in exile, and died in exile himself in Mexico as an independent, nondoctrinaire socialist thinker and writer. He spent the years 1919–1936 for the most part in the Soviet Union, part of a revolutionary generation that sought to create a socialist society.

They were outmaneuvered and defeated by Joseph Stalin, who established a bureaucratic authoritarian dictatorship ruling in the name of communism. Serge devoted what remained of his life to understanding the Soviet experiment’s promise and its failure — not to renounce socialism but to rescue it from the catastrophe of Stalinism.