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Haymarket Books, 2011).
    18 Translated with an introduction by Richard Greeman (New York: NYRB Classics, 2010).
    19 See Serge’s Witness to the German Revolution, translated by Ian Birchall and published by Haymarket Books.
    20 “The Class Struggle in the Chinese Revolution,” 1927–28, http://www.marxists.org/archive/serge/1927/china/index.html .
    21 Serge (writing as ‘Paul Sizoff) “Canton, December 1927,” http://www.marxists.org/archive/serge/1927/china/canton.html .
    22 A copy found its way inside the Kremlin, where the French writer Romain Rolland, a guest of Stalin, read it and returned the manuscript (which he had agreed to take to Serge’s Paris publisher) to GPU chief Yagoda. See my “The Victor Serge Affair and the French Literary Left” in Revolutionary History 5, no. 3, http://www.marxists.org/history/etol/revhist/backiss/vol5/no3/greeman.html .
    23 “The Revolutionary Illusion” (1910) translated by Mitch Abidor, http://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/le-retif-the-revolutionary-illusion .
    24 See Greeman, “The Victor Serge Affair and the French Literary Left.”
    25 So far our efforts to recover them in the Russian archives, partly open since glasnost, have come to naught. On the other hand, Serge was able to reconstruct from memory his book of poems, Resistance, translated into English by James Brook with an introduction by Richard Greeman (San Francisco: City Lights, 1972)
    26 Serge’s brilliant and prescient articles appeared in the small-circulation syndicalist magazine La Révolution proletarienne and in one union-owned large-circulation local paper in Liège, Belgium, La Wallonie. They have recently been collected and published in France (Agone, 2010) under the title Retour à l’Ouest: Chroniques, juin 1936-mai 1940 (preface by Richard Greeman), which we hope to see translated in the near future.
    27 Translated with an introduction by Richard Greeman (London: Writers and Readers Publishing Co-op, 1982; New York: NYRB Classics, 2014).
    28 “If the Soviet regime is to be criticized, let it be from a socialist and working-class point of view.” Quoted from Ian Birchall, “Letters from Victor Serge to René Lefeuvre,” Revolutionary History 8, no. 3 (2002).
    29 Serge’s posthumous ‘rightward evolution’ is posited (most recently in the New Left Review 82 (July-August 2013) on the basis of guilt by association: since the editors of Partisan Review (where Serge published two articles) later moved right as did some of his comrades in exile in Mexico, Serge too is guilty of joining the Cold War consensus. Please see my “Victor Serge’s Political Testament,” Postface to the 2012 NYRB edition of Serge’s Memoirs, online at http://assets.nybooks.com/media/doc/2012/07/02/Greeman-Serge.pdf .
    30 Paradoxically, we find similar Philistine attitudes—reducing Serge’s novels to useful sociological documents—on the Left as well. For example, Trotskyist Susan Weissman, in her Victor Serge: A Political Biography (formerly The Course Is Set on Hope, 2001 and 2013) concludes: “Writing, for Serge, was something to do only when one was unable to fight…. Serge wrote with a mission: to expose and analyse the significance of the rise of Stalinism” (the subject of Weissman’s PhD dissertation). Meanwhile Weissman’s colleague, the celebrated Trotskyist literary critic Alan Wald, ignores Serge’s novels entirely, viewing Serge through the lens of his particular academic specialty, the ‘New York Intellectuals,’ forgetting that 99 percent of Serge’s writings were published in Paris in French (a language which Wald, like Weissman, doesn’t know).
    31 Serge, Memoirs, 305.
    32 Stanley Reynolds, “Courage & Blood,” New Statesman, July 17, 1970, 63.
    33 Coincidentally, Alexander Berkman, in The Bolshevik Myth, called the day he first heard of the revolution in Russia the “happiest day” of his life.
    34 Harley Sorensen, an inmate at Stillwater Prison and former editor of the Prison