When I began writing Victor Serge: Unruly Revolutionary, I expected to write a biography in keeping with the image common on the left of Serge as an uncompromising enemy of Stalinism who never fell into anti-communism and fought all his life for revolutionary socialism. This is what we find in the many writings of Richard Greeman, who single-handedly rescued Serge from oblivion by translating his novels and tirelessly writing about him. In fact, my biography began as a collaboration between me and Richard, one we abandoned due to differences in interpretation. Suzi Weissman presents that image as well in her biography of Serge, The Course Is Set on Hope.

A fuller account of this Serge was what I thought I was going to write. Things did not turn out that way.

I worked mainly from primary sources from archives around the world as well as long-forgotten newspapers and magazines for which Serge wrote. What I found was a man far different from the one we find in Greeman’s and Weissman’s books (and all those who draw from their work) but also the one Serge presented in his justly famous Memoirs of a Revolutionary, 1901–1941. I found a man who ceaselessly evolved politically, which I found admirable.