Serge V. From Lenin to Stalin

Translated from French By Ralph Manheim. — New York: Pioneer Publishers, 1937. — 116 p.Victor Serge wrote "From Lenin to Stalin" in December 1936, several months after he had been deported from the Soviet Union, after having been internally exiled to Orenburg, for being a member of the Left Opposition, in other words a "Trotskyist." It traces the history of the Russian Revolution from its first phase, dominated by Vladimir Lenin, to the rise of the bureaucracy, and the Thermidorian reaction or counter-revolution of Joseph Stalin and his persecution and purging of the "revolutionist" generation, i.e. the old Bolsheviks, from the ranks of the Communist Party. Prior to emigrating to Petrograd, RSFSR (Russian Soviet Federated Soviet Republic) in 1919, Serge had been an anarchist journalist in Paris, France, where he served five years in solitary confinement for refusing to testify against his anarchist-terrorist acquaintances in the Bonnot Gang. He also had militant anarchist/syndicalist associates in Spain. Serge and his Spanish comrades were not Marxists, but they were very excited about the Russian Revolution and much impressed with Lenin. Serge explained Bolshevism to them as being "the unity of word and deed. Lenin's entire merit consists in his will to carry out his program. Land to the peasants, factories to the working class, power to those who toil." This was the utopian ideal, an ideal that Serge never lost sight of despite the brutal reality which never came close to the ideal.