What Every Radical Should Know about State Repression

This classic manual on repression by revolutionary activist Victor Serge offers fascinating anecdotes about the tactics of police provocateurs and an analysis of the documents of the Tsarist secret police in the aftermath of the Russian revolution.

With a new introduction by Howard Zinn collaborator, Anthony Arnove.

“Victor Serge is one of the unsung heroes of a corrupt century.” —Adam Hochschild, author of King Leopold’s Ghost

As we approach the 100th anniversary of Victor Serge’s (1926) classic exposé of political repression, the specter of fear as a tool of political repression is chillingly familiar to us in world increasingly threatened by totalitarianism. Serge’s exposé of the surveillance methods used by the Czarist police reads like a spy thriller. An irrepressible rebel, Serge wrote this manual for political activists, describing the structures of state repression and how to dodge them—including how to avoid being followed, what to do if arrested, and tips on securing correspondence. He also explains how such repression is ultimately ineffective.

“Repression can really only live off fear. But is fear enough to remove need, thirst for justice, intelligence, reason, idealism…? Relying on intimidation, the reactionaries forget that they will cause more indignation, more hatred, more thirst for martyrdom, than real fear. They only intimidate the weak; they exasperate the best forces and temper the resolution of the strongest.” —Victor Sergeforeword by Anthony Arnove
introduction to the 2005 edition by Dalia Hashad
chronology
author’s preface to the 1925 French edition

1. The Russian Okhrana
A special kind of policeman
External surveillance—being followed
The secrets of provocation
Directive on the recruitment and operation of agents provocateurs
A monograph of provocation in Moscow (1912)
Files on agents provocateurs
A ghost from the past
The case of Malinovsky
The mentality of the provocateur
Provocation—a two-edged sword
Russian informers abroad
Mail-opening and the international police
Decoding
Summarizing reports
Forensic evidence
An analysis of the revolutionary movement
Protection of the czar’s person
The cost of an execution
Conclusion: Why the Russian Revolution was still invincible

2. The problem of illegality
Don’t be fooled
The postwar experience
The limits of legal revolutionary action
Private police forces
Conclusions

3. Simple advice to revolutionaries
Simple advice to revolutionaries
Being followed
Correspondence and notes
General conduct
Among comrades
In the event of arrest
Before judges and police
Ingenuity
A supreme warning

4. The problem of revolutionary repression
Machine gun, typewriter, or . . . ?
The experience of two revolutions
Terror has gone on for centuries
From Gallifet to Mussolini
Bourgeois law and proletarian law
Two systems
Economic constraints: Hunger
Decimation, mistakes and abuses
Repression and provocation
When is repression effective?
Consciousness of the dangers and the goal

notes
Victor Serge was born to Russian émigré parents in Belgium in 1890. He became active at an early age in revolutionary activities, for which he was imprisoned for five years in France. On his release he returned to revolutionary Russia where he threw himself into the defense of the fledgling government. After Lenin’s death he became increasingly alienated from Stalin’s clique and was expelled from the Soviet Union in 1936 for speaking out against the purges. He died in exile in Mexico in 1947. He wrote numerous novels, poems, memoirs and political essays. Prefiguring Solzhenitsyn by 40 years, Serge believed: “He who speaks, he who writes is above all one who speaks on behalf of all those who have no voice.”

Anthony Arnove (introduction to this edition) is the editor of several books, including, with Howard Zinn, Voices of a People’s History of the United States and Terrorism and War. He wrote the introduction for the thirty-fifth anniversary edition of Zinn’s classic book A People’s History of the United States. Arnove cofounded the nonprofit education and arts organization Voices of a People’s History of the United States. Arnove is on the editorial boards of Haymarket Books and Tempestmag.org and is the director of Roam Agency, where he represents authors including Arundhati Roy and Noam Chomsky. He lives in Hopewell, New Jersey.author’s preface to the 1925 French edition
Victor Serge

With the victory of the Russian Revolution, the whole mechanism of the most modern, most powerful, most battlehardened political police, which had taken shape in over fifty years of bitter struggles against the leaderships of a great people, fell into the hands of the revolutionaries.

An acquaintance with the methods and proceedings of this police force is of immediate practical interest for every revolutionary, for the defense of capitalism everywhere uses the same tools; and moreover all police forces work together and are similar to each other.

The science of revolutionary struggle which the Russians acquired in over half a century of immense effort and sacrifice will have to be acquired in a much shorter space of time by revolutionaries in countries where action is developing today, in the circumstances created by the war, by the victory of the Russian proletariat and the defeats of the international proletariat—the crisis of world capitalism, the birth of the Communist International, the marked development of class consciousness among the bourgeoisie, with fascism, military dictatorship, White Terror and antiworking class laws; revolutionaries need this knowledge today. They will perhaps suffer fewer losses if given good warning of the means the enemy has at its disposal. There is thus good basis for practical reasons to study the main instrument of all reaction and all repression, that is, the apparatus for strangling all healthy revolt known as the police. The weapon perfected by the Russian autocracy to defend its existence—the Okhrana (Defensive), the general security police of the Russian Empire—has fallen into our hands enabling us this analysis.

To make the most thorough study would require leisure, which the author of these lines does not possess. The pages you are about to read do not make any claim to fulfill this task. They will, I hope, be adequate in giving comrades a warning and enabling them to see an important truth which struck me on my very first visit to the Russian police archives: there is no force in the world which can hold back the revolutionary tide when it rises, and that all police forces, however Machiavellian, scientific or criminal, are virtually impotent against it.

This work, published for the first time in the Bulletin Communiste in November 1921, has been carefully completed. The practical and theoretical questions, which a study of the workings of such a police force cannot fail to raise in the mind of a worker reading it, are examined in two new sections. Section “Simple advice to revolutionaries,” which despite its obvious simplicity is very useful, outlines the fundamental rules of the workers’ defense against surveillance, informing and provocation.

Since the war and the October Revolution, the working class can no longer be content with carrying out solely negative and destructive tasks. The epoch of civil wars has begun. Whether they are posed today, or not for “some years,” the many questions relating to the seizure of power still exist today for most communist parties. At the beginning of 1923, capitalist order in Europe might have appeared sufficiently stable to discourage the impatient. By the end of the year, however, the “peaceful” occupation of the Ruhr was to raise over Germany the powerfully real specter of revolution.

Now, all action aimed at the destruction of capitalist institutions needs to be complemented by the preparation, at least in theory, of the creative work of tomorrow. “The urge to destroy,” Bakunin used to say, “is also the creative urge.” This profound thought, which when taken literally has sent many revolutionaries astray, has just become practical reality. The same class struggle outlook today leads communists to destroy and create at the same time. Just as antimilitarism today needs to be complemented by the preparation of the Red Army, the problem of repression posed by the police and bourgeois justice has a positive side of great importance. It is necessary to define the main lines of it, to get to know the means the enemy has at his disposal and to get to know the full extent of our own tasks.

Victor Serge
March 1925