Conquered City

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… show more.

Serge was a supporter of the Bolshevik revolution, though he never lost sight of its flaws. 

This extraordinary novel centres on Petrograd at the height of the civil war, as economic collapse, hunger, the threat from the Whites, and the depredations of the Red Terror crush the city’s spirit and ultimately destroy the revolution, even if the Bolshevik regime it spawned survives.