Year One of the Russian Revolution
By Victor Serge (1930)
In January 1919, as Reed was completing his book, an anarchist born to Russian exiles in Brussels by the name of Victor Serge (né Kibalchich) arrived in Petrograd, where he joined the Bolsheviks and took a position with the Communist International, dedicating his life to world revolution. An ally of Trotsky, Serge was expelled from the party in the late 1920s with the rise of Stalin’s dictatorship, and he began writing his history of the revolution as an act of resistance to what he saw as the mounting betrayal of 1917.
