The Fifty Years: A Literary Tribute

Twenty selections from the literature of anti-Communism, dedicated to those millions without voices, and to their masters

V teror SERGE (1890-1947) was the authentic type of twentieth-century revolutionist. His father was a Russian terrorist exiled by the Czar. Born in Brussels, Serge schooled himself in French anarchism, eventually making his way to revolutionary Russia where for ten years he occupied a high post on the Comintern. There he witnessed the rise of the Cheka (se- eret police) and the total abandon- ment of the revolution to repression and terror. Finally, neither Stalinist nor Trotskyite, Serge fled to the West, to die mysteriously in Mexico. Through his portrait of Ryzhik in The Case of Comrade Tulayev—the “old Bolshevik” imprisoned as an “enemy of the people” who remem- bers the moment of intellectual dis- covery that changed his life—Serge exposes the full tragedy of the revo- lutionary consciousness.

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Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

Twenty selections from the literature of anti-Communism, dedicated to those millions without voices, and to their masters

V teror SERGE (1890-1947) was the authentic type of twentieth-century revolutionist. His father was a Russian terrorist exiled by the Czar. Born in Brussels, Serge schooled himself in French anarchism, eventually making his way to revolutionary Russia where for ten years he occupied a high post on the Comintern. There he witnessed the rise of the Cheka (se- eret police) and the total abandon- ment of the revolution to repression and terror. Finally, neither Stalinist nor Trotskyite, Serge fled to the West, to die mysteriously in Mexico. Through his portrait of Ryzhik in The Case of Comrade Tulayev—the “old Bolshevik” imprisoned as an “enemy of the people” who remem- bers the moment of intellectual dis- covery that changed his life—Serge exposes the full tragedy of the revo- lutionary consciousness.