Conquered City
Author(s): SERGE VICTOR
1919-1920. St. Petersburg, city of the tsars, has fallen to the revolution. Camped out in the splendid palaces of the former regime, the new masters of the city seek to cement their control, even as the counter-revolutionary White Army musters its forces. Conquered City, Victor Serge's toughest and most unrelenting narrative, is structured like a detective story--one in which the new political regime seeks to track down and eliminate its enemies--the spies, speculators, and traitors hidden among the exhausted mass of common people. Conquered City is about terror: the Red Terror and the White Terror. But mainly about the Red, about the Communists who have dared to pick up the weapons of power--police, guns, jails, spies, treachery--in the gamble that wielding them with purity, in a righteous cause, they can put an end to the need for terror, perhaps forever. And yet those who wield these weapons know that they are doomed. Conquered City is their tragedy and testament.
General Information
- :
- : New York Review of Books, Incorporated, The
- : New York Review of Books, Incorporated, The
- : 0.23
- : 09 March 2011
- : United States
- : books
Other Specifications
- : SERGE VICTOR
- : TP
- : English
- : 843.912
- : 208
- : FA
More About The Product
VICTOR SERGE (1890-1947) was born Victor Lvovich Kibalchich to Russian anti-tsarist exiles, impoverished intellectuals living "by chance" in Brussels. A precocious anarchist firebrand, young Victor was sentenced to five years in a French penitentiary in 1912. Expelled to Spain in 1917, he participated in an anarcho-syndicalist uprising before leaving to join the Revolution in Russia. Detained for more than a year in a French concentration camp, Serge arrived in St. Petersburg early in 1919 and joined the Bolsheviks, serving in the press services of the Communist International. An outspoken critic of Stalin, Serge was expelled from the Party and briefly arrested in 1928. Henceforth an "unperson," he completed three novels (Men in Prison, Birth of Our Power, and Conquered City) and a history (Year One of the Russian Revolution), all published in Paris. Arrested again in Russia and deported to Central Asia in 1933, he was allowed to leave the USSR in 1936 after international protests by militants and prominent writers like Andre Gide and Romain Rolland. Using his insider's knowledge, Serge published a stream of impassioned, documented exposes of Stalin's Moscow show trials and machinations in Spain, which went largely unheeded. Stateless, penniless, hounded by Stalinist agents, Serge lived in precarious exile in Brussels, Paris, Vichy France, and Mexico City, where he died in 1947. His classic Memoirs of a Revolutionary and his great last novels, Unforgiving Years and The Case of Comrade Tulayev (both available as NYRB Classics), were written "for the desk drawer" and published posthumously. RICHARD GREEMAN has translated and written the introductions for five of Serge's novels (including Unforgiving Years and Conquered City, both available as NYRB Classics). A veteran socialist and co-founder of the Praxis Center and Victor Serge Library in Moscow, Greeman is the author of the Web site The Invisible International.
