En défense de Victor Serge, contre les procès d’intention de Mitchell Abidor

https://fed.brid.gy/r/https://www.contretemps.eu/en-defense-de-victor-serge-contre-les-proces-dintention-de-mitchell-abidor/

Today in Labor History June 7, 1896: Anarchists supposedly set off a bomb during a Corpus Christi parade in Barcelona, Spain. As a result, a dozen people died and thirty were wounded. No one knows who actually set off the bomb, but the government blamed anarchists, who had set off numerous bombs over the previous four years. Consequently, the government went on a witch-hunt, arresting and torturing dozens of anarchists in the infamous Montjuich Prison. However, many leading anarchists denied the accusations and said they would never have set off a deadly bomb in a working-class community like this. They reserved their attacks for members of the ruling class. Nevertheless, the government tried and executed five anarchists, all of whom proclaimed their innocence. They sentenced 67 others to life in prison. Worldwide protests erupted in response. Montjuich Prison was graphically depicted in the opening scene Victor Serge’s epic novel, Birth of Our Power, which he wrote while imprisoned in the Soviet Union for his opposition to Stalin.

#workingclass #LaborHistory #anarchism #spain #barcelona #bombing #prison #torture #VictorSerge #soviet #russia #stalin #writer #author #books #fiction #novel @bookstadon

Today in labor history April 28, 1896: Tristan Tzara was born. He was a Romanian-French poet, journalist, playwright, literary and art critic, film director. He co-founded the anti-establishment Dada movement. During Hitler’s rise to power, he participated in the anti-fascist movement and the French Communist Party. In 1934, Tzara organized a mock trial of Salvador Dalí because of his fawning over Hitler and Franco. The surrealists Andre Breton, Paul Éluard and René Crevel helped run the trial. In the 1940s, Tzara lived in Marseilles with a large group of anti-fascist artists and writers, under the protection of American diplomat Varian Fry. These included Victor Serge, Claude Lévi-Strauss, Andre Breton and Max Ernst. Later he joined the French Resistance, writing propaganda and running their pirate radio station. After the Liberation of Paris, he wrote for L'Éternelle Revue, a communist newspaper edited by Jean-Paul Sartre. Other contributors to the newspaper included Louis Aragon, Éluard, Jacques Prévert and Pablo Picasso. Varian Fry, and his communal home for radicals in hiding, was portrayed in the historical drama series “Transatlantic.”

#workingclass #LaborHistory #dada #TristanTzara #nazis #antifascist #poetry #literary #communism #pirateradio #fascism #surrealism #maxernst #sartre #picasso #victorserge #dali #andrebreton #film #hitler #books #playwright @bookstadon

Today in Labor History April, 21, 1913: Andre Soudy and Raymond Callemin, members of the anarchist Bonnot Gang, were executed. Callemin had started the individualist paper "L'anarchie" with author and revolutionary Victor Serge. The Bonnot Gang was a band of French anarchists who tried to fund their movement through robberies in 1911-1912. The Bonnot Gang was unique, not only for their politics, but for their innovative use of technology, too. They were among the first to use cars and automatic rifles to help them steal, technology that even the French police were not using. While many of the gang members were sentenced to death, Serge got five years and eventually went on to participate in (and survive) the Barcelona and Soviet uprisings. Later, while living in exile, Serge wrote The Birth of Our Power, Men in Prison, Conquered City, and Memoirs of a Revolutionary.

#workingclass #LaborHistory #anarchism #illegalism #BonnotGang #Revolutionary #VictorSerge #Revolution #uprising #barcelona #soviet #writer #author #books #fiction #novel @bookstadon

Today in Labor History December 30, 1890: Victor Serge was born on this date in Brussels. Serge was a novelist, poet, historian, & militant activist most well-known for his novel, “The Birth of Our Power.” In 1909 he moved to Paris, where he collaborated with Raymond Callemin on the newspaper L’anarchie. Callemin was executed in 1913 for his role in the Bonnot gang of anarchist bank robbers. Serge never participated in any of their robberies, but refused to denounce them in his paper. Consequently, he got five years imprisonment for his association with the gang. He wrote about this in his novel, “Men in Prison.”

After his release, in 1913, he was expelled from France, moved to Barcelona, joined the CNT union, wrote for their newspaper, “Tierra y Libertad,” and participated in the General Strike and anarchist uprising of 1917. He went to Russia in 1918, initially in support of the communists. However, he quickly became disillusioned with the repressive, autocratic rule, particularly the suppression of the Kronstadt rebellion in 1921. Throughout the 1920s, he was stationed in Berlin and Vienna, where he wrote for the Comintern journal International Press Correspondence and began associating with the Trotskyists. After his return to the Soviet Union in 1925, he was kicked out of the Communist Party and later imprisoned, where he began writing his most famous books. In the late 1920s-early 1930s, he completed “Men in Prison,” “Birth of Our Power,” and “Year One of the Russian Revolution,” which were published abroad, but suppressed in the USSR and ignored or criticized by much of the mainstream and Communist press.

In 1933, he and his son were deported to a gulag in Orenburg, where they were nearly starved to death. Yet he still managed to write four more books while imprisoned there. An international campaign for his release was launched by friends abroad, including Magdeleine Paz, André Malraux and André Gide. In 1936, he was granted permission to leave the Soviet Union, but they confiscated all of his manuscripts and had to rewrite them from memory. He fled to France, where he was under constant harassment by the left and the right. In 1940, he reached Marseilles, which was then a refuge for anti-fascist intellectuals and political militants seeking to escape Europe. He lived there briefly under the protection of American diplomat Varian Fry, working there with other anti-fascist artists and writers on the Emergency Rescue Committee, before fleeing to Mexico, where he lived until his death in 1947. Throughout his latter years, while living in Mexico, he continued to be harassed by both the left and right, with some even accusing him of being a Nazi sympathizer. Many believe he was poisoned by the Soviet secret police and there is evidence that the MGB ran an assassination squad among Mexico City cab drivers. He also continued to write, publishing “Memoirs of a Revolutionary, 1901–1941,” “The Case of Comrade Tulayev,” and “The Long Dusk.”

#workingclass #LaborHistory #victorserge #anarchism #communism #fascism #nazis #soviet #ussr #bonnottgang #revolution #uprising #antifascism #writer #author #fiction #novels #books @bookstadon

Today in Labor History December 21, 1911: The Bonnot Gang, a group of anarchist bandits, pulled off one of the first bank robberies known to have used an automobile as a getaway car. They did it in broad daylight, in the midst of a populous Paris district. They were also among the first to use repeating rifles, technology that the French police did not yet have. They successfully robbed several banks before being caught and executed. The gang members were anarchist individualists, of the Max Stirner school. They were loosely connected with the anarchist periodical, “L’Anarchie,” edited by Victor Serge, who later participated in the Russian Revolution. Serge was imprisoned by the Bolsheviks and, while in prison, wrote his most famous novel, “Birth of Our Power.” You can read more about the Bonnot Gang in Richard Parry’s book “The Bonnot Gang.”

#workingclass #LaborHistory #anarchism #BonnotGang #VictorSerge #russia #banks #Revolution #prison #books #novel #fiction #author #writer @bookstadon

“The truth is never fixed…” #victorserge #plutopress #DoorstoppersInDecember

As I mentioned in my post on Victor Serge's "Unforgiving Years", this was a book I'd been hoping to get to all year. However, when I finally picked it up at the end of November, I had no idea that today's book was on the horizon... But a mention on social media alerted me to the fact that the left-wing indie publisher, …

https://kaggsysbookishramblings.wordpress.com/2025/12/18/the-truth-is-never-fixed-victorserge-plutopress/

“The hoops of danger tighten without warning and you can’t breathe.” #victorserge

Victor Serge is an author whose name has turned up many, many times on the Ramblings; I love his writing and I've read most of his titles released by NYRB Classics. Some of these have been my big summer reads ("Last Times" and "Notebooks") and others are scattered about on the blog. However, as I noted in my…

https://kaggsysbookishramblings.wordpress.com/2025/12/11/the-hoops-of-danger-tighten-without-warning-and-you-cant-breathe-victorserge/