1929 Preface to Life of Revolutionaries by Victor Serge

February 15, 2026

Serge originally issued his pamphlet “Life of Revolutionaries” in 1923, shortly after the Moscow State Bookstore issued a list of the people known to have taken part in the 1917 Russian Revolution and died, either in the revolution itself or in the few years afterward. Serge’s pamphlet was a tribute to the men and women who had spent most of their militant activity functioning as a misunderstood minority, during a time when most people could not see the possibility for revolution. These men and women did. They said they were building the party that the working class needed to lead the struggle for power. For that reason, polite society considered them “fanatics,” according to Serge. But they managed, as Serge would say, to swim against the tide, to maintain their clear-sighted intransigence, to fight stubbornly with absolute selflessness, for their convictions and the future, which according to Serge was the same.

What follows is the preface that Serge wrote in 1929, which traced out what happened to the greater number who died after the revolution. It gives the viewpoint of someone directly involved in the great revolution of 1917, a testament of faith expressed in the name of all those who had created the first revolution to shake the capitalist world. It will not be the last, if today’s generation finds the way to produce the same kind of men and women.

I have changed only a few words in this pamphlet written several years ago. This subject—the life, education, struggles, and character of the revolutionary generation that triumphed in Russia—deserves more in-depth study. But our generation has barely more leisure than that generation had. However inadequate it may be, this pamphlet will help to publicize the example of the men who, in our time, have done the most to transform the world.

The years have passed. The number of pages would have had to be at least doubled, adding to the mostly obscure names found here those of the dead of peacetime, some of whom are among the greatest. The years of peace have cost us more in some respects than the years of civil war. The wear and tear on the leaders, the wear and tear on the brain of the revolution, has been cruelly felt. So many have disappeared! Lenin, struck down precisely in the brain, consumed by his immense labor; Leonid Krasin, technician of the proletarian party in two revolutions; Felix Dzerzhinsky, who had unwaveringly carried on his revolutionary shoulders the terrible burden of necessary terror; Tsuryupa, the organizer of supplies during the terrible years; Frunze, a former textile worker who became the victor of Perekop; Lachevich, a vigorous soldier and army commander; Lilina, organizer of education in Leningrad; Stepanov-Skvortsov, one of the first popularizers of Marxism in Russia.… They killed, in Geneva, on the threshold of the League of Nations, our writer and thinker Vorovsky, ambassador of the republic of labor.

Others, worn down in their will to live, desperate at no longer being able to work or making their very death a supreme gesture of struggle, left voluntarily: Lutovinov, the organizer of the metalworkers; Yevgenia Bosch, one of the greatest fighters of the Soviet revolution in Ukraine; Glozman and Boutov, good companions of the organizer of the victory; Adolph Joffe, who had represented the revolution in Germany, China, and Japan at times when decisive events were unfolding, committed suicide. Absurd accidents took Sklionski, economist and soldier, and Larissa Reissner, a surprisingly gifted young revolutionary who had crossed the battlefields of the Volga, the mountains of Afghanistan, and the barricades of Hamburg. Bogdanov, philosopher and scholar, companion and adversary of Lenin, died from a blood transfusion experiment.

Let us cherish the rich memory of these lives that light our way like torches, and think about our work, our struggles, the present, and the future. The example of these revolutionaries teaches us lessons that we particularly need today, when the old capitalist order seems secure once again and so many evils test the courage and tenacity of proletarian militants every day.

Less fortunate than we who are witnesses to the victory of the Russian proletariat, these men entered the struggle at a time when bourgeois society seemed so stable that its apologists dared to claim it was based on the immutable laws of human nature; at a time when their country was living under a thousand-year-old despotism. Yet they were able to discern the underground currents of revolution in their present.

They experienced the greatest adversity. To the “wise men” of their time—barely twenty or thirty years ago!—liberal academics, stale-minded people, mutualists, cooperators, and ‘socialists’ full of “practicality,” these men who were building the proletarian party to seize power seemed like fanatics. They were not shy about saying so. They continued on their path through smiles, polemics, prisons, poverty, and exile; they continued their work.

For a long time, they formed only small groups, sometimes bitterly divided. The difficulties of the struggle against Russian autocracy and the international bourgeoisie were too often compounded by crises within the movement, personal disagreements, the mistakes of some, and the vileness of a few others. After the defeat of the 1905 revolution, they experienced a period of dark reaction, during which the hesitant became discouraged, the cowardly backed down, the weak withdrew, and the best were sometimes disoriented. Being only a minority within the working class, they nevertheless managed to maintain their clear-sighted intransigence, to swim against the tide, to fight stubbornly, with absolute selflessness, for their convictions, their faith, and the future (which is all one and the same). And it is perhaps in the present lull, as the great struggles of tomorrow are being prepared, in our era of arduous crystallization of the first nuclei of the proletarian parties of tomorrow, in our era of obscure struggles on two opposing fronts against the class enemy and against the evils afflicting the revolutionary workers’ movement, that the greatest lesson of these lives can be learned.

Leningrad, December 1929