I this book because...
Why do utopias fail? Why does the world of human dignity and equality they aspire to so often ossify into a mechanism of repression that strangles the very people revolutionaries attempted to liberate?
Victor Serge is, for me, one of the essential writers of the 20th and now 21st centuries. A rebel since adolescence, he watched the revolution he had become part of in Russia begin to devour itself through internal terror, while at the same time fighting against the White terror of its opponents.
This novel gives an insider view of St. Petersburg, once the Czarist capital of Russia under the Bolsheviks in 1919-1920. What is remarkable in all of Serge’s writing, both fiction and non-fiction, is that in spite of being nearly killed by the revolution he worked for, he never turned away from his ideals and belief that a new form of society was possible.
2 authors picked Conquered City as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.
1919–1920: St. Petersburg, city of the czars, has fallen to the Revolution. Camped out in the splendid palaces of the former regime, the city’s new masters seek to cement their control, even as the counterrevolutionary White Army regroups. Conquered City, Victor Serge’s most unrelenting narrative, is structured like a detective story, one in which the new political regime tracks down and eliminates its enemies—the spies, speculators, and traitors hidden among the mass of common people.
Conquered City is about terror: the Red Terror and the White Terror. But mainly about the Red, the Communists who have dared to pick up…