William2's Reviews > Midnight in the Century

Though it’s not necessary to start, since there’s a fine glossary here, the more you know about the Russian revolution and events leading up to it, the more this book will resonate with you. Early on this novel’s reminiscent of Arthur Koestler’s Darkness at Noon, though the writing is better and even blackly humorous at times. Published in Paris in 1939, the novel is about Stalin’s betrayal of the revolution. Actually, according to Richard Pipes (see The Russian Revolution)—and I think Serge would concur here—the revolution was not a revolution at all but a coup d’état which resulted in tyranny.

Victor Serge was the son of Russian political exiles who fled the Czar. He did not set foot in Russia in support the Bolshevik Revolution until 1919 at age 28. Unlike many of his fellow revolutionaries, Serge had grown up in the democratic West where speech went for the most part unpunished, though even there he was jailed for his political activities. In 1928 he was arrested for criticizing Stalin's rule. André Gide was part of the international literary front that demanded his release. Fortunately Serge had been born in Brussels, which made him a foreign national. Yet as a Communist Party functionary for some nine years he came to know the workings of the Soviet government and its players well. Fortunately we have Robert Conquest's superb The Great Terror to corroborate Serge's vision in excruciating detail.

The novel starts light but graduates into a seething indictment of Stalin and his thugs. Serge reviews many of the accusations his fellow “counter-revolutionaries”—Trotskystes or “Left Deviationists”—were changed with. The general fault, it seems, was wrong thought. And if one espoused such thoughts to friends, or in a classroom as with Kostrov here, you were doomed, arrested, imprisoned and made to confess to the most absurd fabrications: that you were a class enemy; that you besmirched the reputations of the leaders of the revolution, and so on. Serge was himself arrested by the Cheka for questioning so he writes from intimate knowledge.

This may on it surface seem terribly boring but it’s not for two reasons: (1) the vivid police-state setting, and (2) Serge’s brilliant style. The novel is stylistically Modernist, but it is Serge’s astonishing ingenuity and élan, his eye for arresting description, that carry the day. It’s not a genre novel, but it does contain elements of espionage and prison-break tales. This is my third Serge novel. It is not my favorite but I recommend it, especially for those who have already read the five-star works, The Case of Comrade Tulayev and Unforgiving Years.