"The course is set on hope."
"It is often said that 'the germ of all Stalinism was in Bolshevism at its beginning'. Well, I have no objection. Only, Bolshevism also contained many other germs, a mass of other germs, and those who lived through the enthusiasm of the first years of the first victorious socialist revolution ought not to forget it. To judge the living man by the death germs which the autopsy reveals in the corpse – and which he may have carried in him since his birth – is that very sensible?"
"The author of Jean Christophe at 70 let himself be covered with blood, shed by a tyranny for which he was the faithful apologist. It was incomprehensible to me, demoralizing, and Jacques Mesnil could find only one response: “He is old” – he was old himself, J.M., alone and hurt, but of an absolute uprightness." — on Romain Rolland
"In Serge's world... politics is composed not of statements but of persons... The sketches of Stalin’s personality given by Victor Serge in From Lenin to Stalin, The Case of Comrade Tulayev, and Portrait de Staline are considerably more detached than the horrendous caricatures offered to us by Khruschev today." — Peter Sedgwick, his translator
The Belgian-born Russian revolutionary Victor Serge (1890-1947) was, at least in some way, persecuted by nearly every side he ever served, and never once purchased relief by adapting. The French Republic gave him five years' hard labor for refusing to disassociate himself from anarchist comrades whose ideas he had already privately outgrown. The Soviet state he defended in arms jailed and ultimately expelled him. The Trotskyist opposition he joined in exile lost him when he would not accept its new orthodoxy either. He died stateless in a Mexico City taxicab, having spent forty years declining to soften a position. Serge was closest to an ILE: the open, possibility-holding, truth-stating intelligence, constitutionally incapable of collapsing into any single orthodoxy or of flexing to survive inside one — with an EII accent that gave him some "moral conscience" traits unusual in a "pure" ILE.
His own coinage was "double duty". Joining the Bolsheviks in 1919 — as an anarchist, a fact he never renounced — he formulated the principle that would govern his whole life: defend the revolution against its enemies, and combat its flaws from within, both at once. Every revolutionary movement of his era demanded a single loyalty — and Serge's answer, sustained against unimaginable pressure, was both. He was the only Bolshevik at Kropotkin's funeral. He befriended anarchists, Mensheviks, theosophists, and assorted "reactionary but honest" persons, and used his party position to pull them out of the Cheka's cells. He was, in a friend's words, never one to disown past debts. This is the open intelligence holding the whole possibility-space alive. Even his opening quote about Bolshevism containing the seeds of Stalinism from the very beginning, but not reducable to it, testifies to his strongvalued Ne and willingness to see multivariance everywhere.
At every fork where the adaptive move was available, he openly stated his position. Levi-Strauss, sharing his refugee boat to Mexico, called him an "incorrigible Marxist". His Year One of the Russian Revolution is serious history, partisan yet scholarly; he was among the very first to grasp and theorize the "totalitarian state" concept years before the word became common property and a subject of academic debates on its validity, then he made a precocious attempt to dovetail Marxism with psychoanalysis, psychologizing the revolution itself when most of his comrades considered the psyche a bourgeois indulgence. The foresight that so impresses his readers is less socionics-Ni and more this analytical machinery running on the open intelligence's refusal to let tribal loyalty edit perception.
What the EII accent adds is the individuals rescued from the Cheka one by one and the novels that render the purges as the interior lives of people caught in the machine (The Case of Comrade Tulayev, praised precisely for being less monolithic in its psychology than Koestler's schematic Darkness at Noon). I. F. Stone judged this "splinter of a splinter" of the Marxist movement "one of the great moral figures of our time, an artist of such integrity and a revolutionary of such purity as to overshadow those who achieved fame and power." That moral gravity and conscience-keeping is the deviation from the classical specimen of ILE (and even of LII), which runs more purely cerebral and more detached from specific persons. And the base can't really be EII itself, the analytical foresight is logical material, and the EII's characteristic softness and withdrawal don't fit a man who edited L'Anarchie at twenty and fought in three revolutions. In general, though, intermediate ILE/EII combinations should score quite high on sheer unselfishness, which Serge did have.
Midnight in the Century, his novel of the Gulag, written in the same year as Darkness at Noon, does what Koestler's book cannot: it ends in light — the escaped prisoner under the stars, seeing the revolution whole, "its deadly waters, its invigorating waters... and all the seeds germinating in its womb." He formulated his double duty at twenty-nine and discharged it, at ruinous personal cost and in perfect consistency.
It's useful to compare him to another dissident Bolshevik, Gavril Myasnikov, also an ILE, but with a different accent. The ILE's dislike of prohibitions is what made both men early dissidents. But Myasnikov's SLE accent made him combative and physically fearless, the metalworker who fought, escaped across the border by swimming a river, the confrontational force-of-nature; Serge's EII accent made him the novelist of interior lives and the moral center.
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