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From New Militant, Vol. II No. 19, 16 May 1936, p. 1.
Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for ETOL.
After three years of exile in Stalin’s Siberia, Victor Serge, author of The Year One of the Russian Revolution and many other working class books, and a life-long and devoted militant in the revolutionary movement, has been released-and returned to Belgium.
He was arrested in 1933 by an administrative order to the G.P.U. and exiled without the slightest semblance of a trial in violation of the Soviet laws for his continued refusal to give up his revolutionary views and prostitute himself to the task of liquidating the October Revolution.
He was deprived of all communication with the outside world, and blacklisted so that he was unable to obtain employment in Orenburg, where he was exiled. For three years he tried to support a sick wife and child on the meagre returns from the publication of his works in France. During this time the Stalinist bureaucrats constantly harassed him for a capitulation.
On April 1 of this year the growing wave of protest against the treatment of Serge, especially in France where a committee of prominent authors carried on a long fight for his release, finally forced the Stalinist bureaucrats to let him go. But they took their revenge by holding his former secretary, a young French stenographer, who was completely inactive in politics, as a “hostage.” At the same time all Serge’s papers, notes and manuscripts for books, in which the authorities vainly searched for “counter-revolutionary” statements were confiscated.
The release of Serge is the second victory of this year in the struggle to free the thousands of revolutionists who are rotting in the jails and in exile in the Soviet Union, jailed and exiled by administrative decrees without trial, and unknown even to the population of the U.S.S.R. itself.
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