Birth of Our Power Read Online Free PDF Page A

Revolutionary,
346.

Historical Note
    The opening pages of
Birth of Our Power
are steeped in symbolism and poetic beauty, but they may prove exasperating for the reader who does not share the author’s intimacy with Spain and Spanish revolutionary history. To point up the universality of his story, for instance, Serge never refers to Barcelona, the setting for the first half of the novel, by name, only as “this city.” And it is only through passing references to World War I that the reader is able to place the events in the early chapters historically.
    For most of us, the phrase “Spanish Revolution” brings to mind the 1936–39 Civil War. But in fact the Spanish revolutionary tradition, with all its passion and brutality, goes back much further, to Napoleonic times (cf. Goya’s “Disasters of War”). Throughout the nineteenth century, repeated attempts to establish liberal government in Spain resulted only in bloody fusillades and paper reforms. Spain entered the twentieth century, after its stunning defeat by the United States in 1898, as a backward, corrupt, priest- and soldier-ridden monarchy. The anarchism of the Russian Bakunin caught the imagination of the peasants and of the workers in the new industrial centers like Barcelona, and their revolt took the form of
jacqueries
and individual terrorism (a situation quite similar to that in Czarist Russia). The government’s response to social unrest was the establishment of a new Spanish Inquisition that was responsible for wholesale arrests and executions, and for the brutal torture of anyone even remotely connected with the revolutionary movement. The judicial murder at Montjuich of Francisco Ferrer, the progressive educationalist, after the 1909 general strike, raised a worldwide storm of protest. Spain was again a land of martyrs.
    In
Birth of Our Power,
the citadel of Montjuich, where many rebels had been tortured and shot, becomes the symbol both of the revolutionary past and the oppressive power of the present. Under the shadow ofMontjuich, the masses, led by a handful of anarchists, awaken to their power and prepare to do battle for a better life. Many of the characters are real personages; Dario, Serge’s hero, was modeled on the syndicalist leader, Salvador Seguí, who was murdered by government scabs in 1922. The events are all historically true. The confused day of street fighting, described in Chapter 9 , took place on July 19, 1917. It was followed by a full-scale insurrection in August.
    Neutral Spain had been trading profitably with both sides in World War I, but the ancient political forms had not kept pace with the rapidly developing economy. Both the liberal parliamentarians and the anarchistic workers felt that the time had come to put forward their demands. The revolt failed because the liberals abandoned their alliance with the workers at the last minute, leaving them to face the government alone, and because the Barcelona workers were so poorly organized. The workers had failed to co-ordinate their movement with groups in other parts of Spain, and were (with the possible exception of Seguí) so anarchistic that they had no idea what they would do if they actually managed to win.
    What is most remarkable in these half-forgotten pages of history is the extent to which the Spanish workers were inspired by the February Revolution in distant Russia, and the fact that the demands of the
Comité Obrero
in Barcelona actually prefigured those of the Soviets in October 1917. On the basis of this historical “coincidence,” Serge develops his theme of power in complex counterpoint. The two cities, Barcelona and Petrograd (the setting for the last part of the novel), at opposite ends of Europe, complement one another. In the first, “that city that we could not take,” the accent is on the revolution in expectation, and on the sudden discovery by the masses that they possess power—a victory