Instruct: Given a question, retrieve relevant passages that can help answer the question.
Query: Where was Victor Serge born?
Serge was born in Brussels, Belgium, to a couple of impoverished Russian anti-Czarist exiles. His father, Leo (Lev) Kibalchich, a former infantry trooper from Kiev, has been variously described as a distant relative[1] or a cousin[2] of Nikolai Kibalchich of the People's Will revolutionary organization, who was executed on a charge of being responsible for the bomb used in the assassination of Alexander II in 1881. Leo, himself a Peoples' Will sympathiser, had fled Russia around 1887 and gone to Switzerland, where he met Serge's mother, Vera Frolova, née Pederowska. She was the daughter of an impoverished petty nobleman of Polish extraction from the Nizhni-Novgorod province. Vera had married a Saint Petersburg official and, after giving birth to two daughters, had received permission to go to Switzerland to study and heal her consumptive lungs, but also to escape the reactionary environment of Saint Petersburg. She fell in love with the handsome, feckless Kibalchich, and the couple wandered Europe, according to their son, "in search of cheap lodgings and good libraries". Victor was born "by chance" in Brussels, where the couple were so poor that Victor's younger brother died of malnutrition before Leonid eventually found work as a teacher at the Institute of Anatomy. The "Kibalchich myth" of revolutionary idealism and sacrifice dominated Victor's impoverished childhood. He read a great deal, and became interested in socialism and anarchism along with his friends, including Raymond Callemin and Jean de Boë.
Susan Weissman: Victor Serge. A Political Biography, London [etc.]: Verso, 2nd edition 2013, ISBN9781844678877
Expelled from France on his release in 1917, he moved to Spain, which was neutral in World War I but was the scene of an attempted syndicalist revolution. Around this time, he first used the name Victor Serge, as a pen name for an article in the newspaper Tierra y Libertad.
In 1860 the Poltoratzky family left Russia for good. They went first to Charlottenburg, Prussia, where another son was born. They then proceeded to Paris, where Serge had long maintained a pied-à-terre for use on his literary trips. Thereafter the family divided their time between Paris and England, where the youngest son was born.
Victor Serge (French:[viktɔʁ sɛʁʒ]), born Victor Lvovich Kibalchich (Russian: Ви́ктор Льво́вич Киба́льчич; December 30, 1890 – November 17, 1947), was a Russian revolutionary and writer. Originally an anarchist, he joined the Bolsheviks five months after arriving in Petrograd in January 1919 and later worked for the Comintern as a journalist, editor and translator. He was critical of the Stalinist regime and remained a revolutionary Marxist until his death. He is best remembered for his Memoirs of a Revolutionary and series of seven 'witness-novels' chronicling the lives of revolutionaries of the first half of the 20th Century.
Serge was arrested and imprisoned again in March 1933. This time he was not released quickly. The arrest occurred while Serge was in the street trying to buy medicine for his wife. He was held and interrogated at the Lubyanka prison, where he spent 85 days in solitary confinement. The GPU claimed to have obtained a confession from his sister-in-law and former secretary, Anita Russakova, that she and Serge had been involved in a conspiracy led by Trotsky. Serge knew from his contacts in the Communist Party that if he signed the confession he would be executed. The GPU's claim was later proven to be entirely false (though Anita Russakova herself was arrested in 1936). Eventually, the GPU dropped this part of the case, stating that the "evidence from Anita" was not necessary, though Serge never knew that she had not made any confession. Serge never signed a confession of his own, though he did eventually sign a statement agreeing to his sentence of three years in Administrative Exile in Orenburg on the Ural River.
Serge returned to the Soviet Union in 1925. Soon after his arrival Zinoviev and Lev Kamenev, members of the ruling troika alongside Stalin, reconciled with Trotsky, and the United Opposition was formed. Serge was generally supportive of the United Opposition, despite continued disagreements on economic and other matters between its Trotskyist and "Zinovievist" members. Meanwhile, Serge moved to Leningrad (the former Petrograd), where he was actively involved in Opposition groups. Despite the support of Kamenev and Zinoviev, Stalin's allies were gaining more and more power, and the opposition often had to meet in secret. Serge soon realized that the defeat of the opposition was inevitable, and by 1927, the tenth anniversary of the Russian Revolution, he concluded that the reaction had been completed. He often compared the defeat of the Left Opposition to the Thermidorian Reaction that followed the French Revolution.
Protests against Serge's imprisonment took place at several international conferences, most notably the International Congress of Writers for the Defense of Culture in 1935 in Paris. Protests came from intellectuals of various political ideologies, including Georges Duhamel, Charles Vildrac, Boris Souvarine, André Gide and Romain Rolland. Serge was able to correspond with Gide, and had a strong influence on him, later telling Gide to "keep [his] eyes wide open" while visiting the Soviet Union in 1936. Rolland corresponded with Genrikh Yagoda about Serge's manuscripts, eventually visited the Soviet Union and had meetings with Stalin during which Serge was mentioned. The Serge case caused the Soviet government considerable embarrassment and in 1936 Joseph Stalin announced that he was considering releasing Serge from prison. The French prime minister Pierre Laval refused to grant Serge an entry permit, but Emile Vandervelde, a veteran socialist who by then was a member of the Belgian government, managed to obtain Serge a visa to live in Belgium.
The Communist establishment publicly denounced him as a Trotskyist, and he was strongly criticised by the Mexican press and by the veteran Communist propagandists Otto Katz (writing under the pen name André Simone) and Paul Merker. Serge was charged with being a fascist secret agent, like Trotsky had been. A public meeting where Serge was to speak was broken up by an armed mob of thugs sent by the Mexican Communist Party. His friend Enrique Gironella of the POUM was seriously wounded, and Serge barely escaped alive. However, he found support from the International Revolutionary Marxist Centre, participated in the group Socialismo y Libertad, and co-authored Los problemas del socialismo en nuestro tiempo with Marceau Pivert and Julián Gorkin.
After the United States and the Soviet Union became temporary allies in 1942, criticism of Serge spread to the American press, and though he had staunch defenders there, his ability to defend himself was limited by the fact that he was still distrusted by many Trotskyists. Serge and his allies in Mexico were also victims of several assassination attempts by the GPU and Mexican Stalinists.
Richard Greeman (born Aug. 11, 1939 in New York City) is a Marxist scholar long active in human rights, anti-war, anti-nuclear, environmental and labor struggles in the U.S., Latin America, France, and Russia. Greeman is best known for his studies and translations of the Franco-Russian novelist and revolutionary Victor Serge (1890–1947). Greeman also writes regularly about politics, international class struggles and revolutionary theory. Co-founder of the Praxis Research and Education Center in Moscow, Russia, and director of the International Victor Serge Foundation, Greeman splits his time between Montpellier, France and New York City.
Serge's first published article was written in September 1908. Under the pen name "Le Rétif" ("The Maverick" or "The Stubborn One"), Serge wrote many articles for Le Révolté and, starting in 1909, L'Anarchie, a journal founded by Albert Libertad, whom Serge and his friends considered to be a hero. Serge at this stage was an outspoken supporter of individualist anarchism and illegalism, often clashing with the editor of L'Anarchie, André Roulot (aka "Lorulot"), who favoured less inflammatory rhetoric. In 1910, after a schism in L'Anarchie, Lorulot departed and Serge was named as the new editor of the paper. During this time, Serge was in a relationship with Rirette Maitrejean, another anarchist activist.
Soon after Serge's arrival in Belgium, he immediately began corresponding with anti-Stalinist socialists, including Leon Trotsky and his son Leon Sedov. His mail was still often intercepted, both by Stalinist agents and spies for western countries. Trotsky welcomed Serge warmly, gave him work as his French translator, and urged him, through his emissary A. J. Muste, to join the IVth International. However, Serge found the organization sterile and sectarian. Meanwhile, Trotsky had many disagreements with other non-Stalinist leftists, and was unhappy that Serge continued to associate with his critics. Former GPU operatives like Elsa Reiss also distrusted Serge because they felt that he could not have been released unless Stalin thought that he would be useful. These allegations were untrue, but caused difficulties for Serge.
Susan Weissman Victor Serge: The Course is Set on Hope (Verso, 2001). Adam Hochschild Finding the Trapdoor: Essays, Portraits, Travels (Syracuse University Press, 1997), "Two Russians," pp.65–87.
In September 1914, Serge was in the Melun prison on an island in the Seine, about 25 miles from the Battle of the Marne. The local population, suspecting a French defeat, began to flee, and for a while Serge and the other inmates expected to become German prisoners.
As a libertarian socialist, Serge protested against the Red Terror organized by Felix Dzerzhinsky and the Cheka. Serge also criticized the New Economic Policy, believing that it was counter-revolutionary, though in 1923 he admitted that it had resulted in improved conditions compared to war communism.
As he travelled to Orenburg, Serge was finally able to meet and have discussions with Left Oppositionists who were also being deported. Orenburg was an impoverished town and he had to struggle for food. He could not work because he refused to declare his support for the general line of the party. He depended on parcels of food from his wife and money from the sale of his books in France. However, after his first year in Orenburg, the GPU largely cut off mail delivery to and from Serge. Serge addressed manuscripts to the French writer Romain Rolland, who was sympathetic to Stalin but was against Serge's repression, but many manuscripts that Serge tried to send were 'lost' (confiscated by the GPU). Paradoxically, the postal insurance payments on the missing packages helped Serge survive.
Serge's parents broke up in 1905, when he was 15. Living on his own from then on, he and his friends soon joined the Socialist Young Guards (youth section of the Belgian Workers' Party), but soon came to feel that it was not radical enough, loudly protesting the Party's support for the annexation of the Congo. Meanwhile, he and his friends were hanging out at an anarchist commune in the forest near Brussels, where they learned the printing trades and put out a newspaper. They became increasingly involved in anarchism and increasingly under suspicion in Brussels, especially after defending their Russian comrade Hartenstein, who had made a bomb and shot at Belgian policemen at Gand. Serge left Brussels in 1909 and, after a stay in the Ardennes, moved to Paris, where he made his living teaching French to Russians and anonymously translating Russian novels by Artzybachev.
Later in 1923, Serge moved to Vienna, Austria. Austria was then ruled by the Social Democrats and the Communist Party was so small that there was no possibility of revolution there. However, many Communists were working or in exile in Vienna, and Serge befriended some of them, including Georg Lukács, Adolf Joffe and Antonio Gramsci. Serge watched political events in Russia, Germany and elsewhere, but could participate little, and worked on other pursuits, such as literary analysis.
Serge lived in Petrograd, the former Saint Petersburg, which was going through a difficult period. At one time, he lived in a mansion that had belonged to a noble family. With no other way to keep warm, Serge and his companions began burning books, and he was particularly happy to burn a book of the laws of the Russian empire.
in the Marxists Internet Archive Victor Serge: in Marxists Internet Archive, 2005. Translation, editor's Introduction, and notes © 1972 by Peter Sedgwick. (Retrieved April 5, 2005) Victor Serge: Bulletin of the Russian Opposition: . Statement criticising Serge by the editors of the Bulletin of the Russian Opposition, writing in Quatrième Internationale, April 1939. Source: Victor Serge & Leon Trotsky, La Lutte Contre le Stalinisme. Maspero, Paris, 1977. Translated for Marxist Internet Archive by Mitch Abidor in 2005. Retrieved April 28, 2005. Richard Greeman, , International Socialism 58 (1993) Peter Sedgwick: , History Workshop Journal, No. 17, Spring 1984. Available online at Marxist journal. Retrieved May 11, 2005. Peter Sedgwick: to Victor Serge, Memoirs of a Revolutionary Susan Weissman: to Critique 28/29: The Ideas of Victor Serge: a Life as a Work of Art (Edited by Susan Weissman) (Retrieved March 14, 2007.)
In 1991, during Russia's "perestroika" period, Greeman travelled to Petersburg and Moscow as part of the first group of "informali" : U.S. political, labor and environmental activists invited by their Russian counterparts. In 1993 Greeman organized the ‘Books For Struggle’ drive, collecting 88 cartons of non-Stalinist Left books and periodicals to be shipped to Russia. In 1997, he helped establish the Victor Serge Public Library in Moscow and in 1998 co-founded the Praxis Research and Education Center in Moscow, which promotes anti-totalitarian socialism in the ex-Soviet space. Praxis has published Serge's works for the first time in Russian translation as well as books by anarchists like Volin and libertarian Marxists like Maximilian Rubel and Raya Dunayevskaya. Praxis also publishes a newspaper, "Free Thought", and holds annual international conferences. These projects are funded in part by the Victor Serge Foundation Inc., a 501(c)(3) US non-profit, established in 1997 by Vlady Kibalchich, Serge's son, with Greeman as Secretary, to accept tax-free contributions and promote Serge's writings and philosophy internationally. The Foundation is currently underwriting Arabic translations of Serge and related authors.
Victor Serge, born in Belgium of Russian parents, had spent 17 years in the Soviet Union, and had also contributed to French reviews such as "La Vie Ouvrière", "Clarté" and "L'Humanité". 
For his sympathy with Trotsky he was expelled from the party and thrown in prison.
Magdelaine Paz and Jacques Mesnil conducted a tireless campaign on behalf of Serge, writing letters to left-wing journals, talking at conferences and meetings, canvassing influential lawyers and writers, and so on.
They managed to turn the case of the writer imprisoned for his beliefs into a "cause célèbre".
In August 1933 Magdeleine Paz was one of the signatories of an open letter addressed to Henri Barbusse protesting the fact that his periodical "Monde" had been silent about the case of Victor Serge.
It was through the efforts of French left-wing intellectuals led by Magdeleine Paz that Serge was released and allowed to return to Belgium and then France in April 1936.
Several controversies have surrounded the end of Serge's life. There have been suspicions that Serge, who was on the GPU assassination list, was poisoned on Stalin's orders. However, there is no evidence to indicate this. It has also been rumoured that Serge had abandoned socialism, because a few weeks after his death André Malraux published excerpts of a personal letter written six days before his death, implying that he would join him in support of the Gaullist cause. Serge's defenders point out that Serge wrote to Malraux, who was an editor at the Gallimard publishing house, as a friend attempting to reestablish a relationship and eager to get his novel published in France, and that Serge's words were taken out of context. Serge's last published articles, written weeks before his death, reiterate his support for the Bolshevik Revolution and warn his comrades against trucking with American-style anti-Communism.
Noting that the Soviet Union was in economic recovery by 1935, Serge predicted that Stalin would choose normalization, but by 1936 the terror was expanding, using the assassination of Sergei Kirov in December 1934 as a pretext. (Serge believed that Kirov had been killed by an assassin acting alone, with no involvement by either the opposition or Stalinists.)