Home : Book details : Book description

Description of  Year One of the Russian Revolution

Serge exposes the heart of the vital first year of the most important working class revolution in history. Brimming with the honesty and passionate conviction for which he has become famous, Victor Serge’s account of the first year of the Russian Revolution—through all of its achievements and challenges—captures both the heroism of the mass upsurge that gave birth to soviet democracy, and the crippling circumstances that began to chip away at its historic gains. Year One of the Russian Revolution is Serge’s attempt to defend the early days of the revolution against those, like Stalin, who would claim its legacy as justification for the repression of dissent within Russia. “The re-issuing of this remarkable work, by a truly remarkable individual, is so timely, and welcome…For all its faults (and Peter Sedgwick, who translated this work, is unsparing in his criticisms of some of Serge’s analyses), this work is a tribute to an outstanding, and unyielding revolutionary who told it as he saw it, was a fearless opponent of Stalin, and an intransigent revolutionary to his dying day. More importantly, it gives the reader an ability to comprehend the hard choices facing revolutionaries at a time when no one knew the outcome, when the very revolution itself was facing defeat…All of which makes this an heroic work.” - Richard Allday, Counterfire "This was Serge’s first non-literary work, composed in the late 1920s and, as he put it, “in detached fragments which could each be separately completed and sent abroad post-haste”. The book is both a testament to the popularity of the revolution and the hard necessities imposed on Red Petrograd confronted with the White counterrevolution. He was working on Year Two when he was permitted to leave Stalin’s Russia in 1936. The secret police decided to keep this manuscript and that of a complete novel, both of which disappeared from their archives." — Tariq Ali