What Every Radical Should Know about State Repression - A Guide for Activists

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 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 Serge

List of contents

foreword 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

About the author

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.

Product details

• Authors: Anthony Arnove, Dalia Hashad, Victor Serge
• Publisher: Seven stories press
• Languages: English
• Product format: Paperback / Softback
• Released: 20.02.2024
• EAN: 9781644213674
• ISBN: 978-1-64421-367-4
• No. of pages: 160
• Dimensions: 139 mm x 215 mm x 11 mm
• Subject: Social sciences, law, business > Political science > Political science and political education