Read Online Midnight in the Century (NYRB Classics) by Victor Serge - Free Book Online Page B
Authors: Victor Serge
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. . .) Sacha was saying:
“With scientific methods of repression, not a single typewriter can escape surveillance any more. There will be as many stool-pigeons as comrades. More, if necessary. Believe me, it’s finished. After Germany, after China. There’s nothing left for us but to write ourselves off. The revolution will be stranded on the beach for the next twenty years. The last to talk about it will be right, sublimely right, but they will be broken on the rack. Give me a drink. No, fill up my glass. As long as I’m not completely drunk, I can’t help seeing things clearly. Listen, brother. The Chinese are magnificent. At night our unions have little posters pasted up: ‘Comrades, calm, discipline, etc. Surrender your weapons. . . .’ In the morning the streets are full of young officers in khaki with round glasses. Dirty sons of bitches from any angle. They grab anyone—a worker’s mug is easy to recognize, you understand—and drag him before a young, principled lieutenant who says one word without looking at the bugger. And you notice that there is also a big brute with a shaved head and a curved sabre standing there. The worker kneels down without a word and holds out his neck. Talk about people who know how to hold their tongues in front of executioners! It’s unforgettable. It’s horrible. The brute winds up, the sabre whirls, the head comes off all at once, a fountain of blood spurts out a full metre. I was standing smoking on the sidewalk next to two Americans who smelled of whiskey. I had the formal directive of the Executive in my pocket: ‘Prohibit and disavow resistance.’ Never have I wanted so much to be recognized by chance and killed in a corner. If that had happened before passing on the directive, my death might have been of some service to the revolution.”
Sacha went on:
“Yet we must sign Ivan Nikitich’s paper. Capitulate. What else do you want us to do? Going to jail wouldn’t accomplish anything. At least let them give us a chance to build factories, to prevent the specialists—with their irresistible and false expertise which leads God-knows-where—from taking that away from us. Piatakov is right: let’s become technicians. If the revolution is able to come back to life one day, it will be on the basis of a revitalized technology with a new proletariat. We’ll be finished by that time, but we will have contributed something. Those who talk of resisting are crazy: either they’ll be crushed like fleas, or the counter-revolution will support them at first and later carry them along with it.”
“But isn’t it already supporting the Central Committee?”
You only dared say such things because you were pretty drunk. And Sacha shouted: “Of course! We’re between two counter-revolutions—how clear can anything be!” He threw the empty bottle out of the window into an empty lot where sparrows were hopping about. Your face felt like a block of stone with welded jaws. Forty-five years old. Worn out. More cowardice than strength.
“Sacha, my friend, I feel like smashing you in the face! And I want you to beat me senseless.”
“No,” said Sacha, seriously. “I’ll fetch another bottle.”
Sacha is in jail. A ferocious petty-bourgeoisie hunts us down even when we surrender. They’re afraid of our past, of our silences. When we give in, they imagine we’re trying to trick them. When we join them, out of lassitude and in order to live, they’re afraid we’ll betray them one day. The men of ’17 and ’20 will never seem emasculated enough for them. They have seen the promised land, tasted of the new bread, gone through the trials of fire, hunger, and conviction: of the truth. These have marked them forever.
Too bad for us.
* * *
The next morning he asked for paper to write to the Central Committee—and wrote out one more surrender. All the right words were there: The edification of socialism, the great wisdom of the C.C., the correctness of its
“With scientific methods of repression, not a single typewriter can escape surveillance any more. There will be as many stool-pigeons as comrades. More, if necessary. Believe me, it’s finished. After Germany, after China. There’s nothing left for us but to write ourselves off. The revolution will be stranded on the beach for the next twenty years. The last to talk about it will be right, sublimely right, but they will be broken on the rack. Give me a drink. No, fill up my glass. As long as I’m not completely drunk, I can’t help seeing things clearly. Listen, brother. The Chinese are magnificent. At night our unions have little posters pasted up: ‘Comrades, calm, discipline, etc. Surrender your weapons. . . .’ In the morning the streets are full of young officers in khaki with round glasses. Dirty sons of bitches from any angle. They grab anyone—a worker’s mug is easy to recognize, you understand—and drag him before a young, principled lieutenant who says one word without looking at the bugger. And you notice that there is also a big brute with a shaved head and a curved sabre standing there. The worker kneels down without a word and holds out his neck. Talk about people who know how to hold their tongues in front of executioners! It’s unforgettable. It’s horrible. The brute winds up, the sabre whirls, the head comes off all at once, a fountain of blood spurts out a full metre. I was standing smoking on the sidewalk next to two Americans who smelled of whiskey. I had the formal directive of the Executive in my pocket: ‘Prohibit and disavow resistance.’ Never have I wanted so much to be recognized by chance and killed in a corner. If that had happened before passing on the directive, my death might have been of some service to the revolution.”
Sacha went on:
“Yet we must sign Ivan Nikitich’s paper. Capitulate. What else do you want us to do? Going to jail wouldn’t accomplish anything. At least let them give us a chance to build factories, to prevent the specialists—with their irresistible and false expertise which leads God-knows-where—from taking that away from us. Piatakov is right: let’s become technicians. If the revolution is able to come back to life one day, it will be on the basis of a revitalized technology with a new proletariat. We’ll be finished by that time, but we will have contributed something. Those who talk of resisting are crazy: either they’ll be crushed like fleas, or the counter-revolution will support them at first and later carry them along with it.”
“But isn’t it already supporting the Central Committee?”
You only dared say such things because you were pretty drunk. And Sacha shouted: “Of course! We’re between two counter-revolutions—how clear can anything be!” He threw the empty bottle out of the window into an empty lot where sparrows were hopping about. Your face felt like a block of stone with welded jaws. Forty-five years old. Worn out. More cowardice than strength.
“Sacha, my friend, I feel like smashing you in the face! And I want you to beat me senseless.”
“No,” said Sacha, seriously. “I’ll fetch another bottle.”
Sacha is in jail. A ferocious petty-bourgeoisie hunts us down even when we surrender. They’re afraid of our past, of our silences. When we give in, they imagine we’re trying to trick them. When we join them, out of lassitude and in order to live, they’re afraid we’ll betray them one day. The men of ’17 and ’20 will never seem emasculated enough for them. They have seen the promised land, tasted of the new bread, gone through the trials of fire, hunger, and conviction: of the truth. These have marked them forever.
Too bad for us.
* * *
The next morning he asked for paper to write to the Central Committee—and wrote out one more surrender. All the right words were there: The edification of socialism, the great wisdom of the C.C., the correctness of its
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