What Every Radical Should Know about State Repression: A Guide for Activists

By Victor Serge

This classic manual on repression by revolutionary activist Victor Serge offers fascinating anecdotes about the tactics of police provocateurs and an analysis of the documents of the Tsarist secret police in the aftermath of the Russian revolution.

With a new introduction by Howard Zinn collaborator, Anthony Arnove.

"Victor Serge is one of the unsung heroes of a corrupt century." --Adam Hochschild, author of King Leopold's Ghost

As we approach the 100th anniversary of Victor Serge's (1926) classic expos of political repression, the specter of fear as a tool of political repression is chillingly familiar to us in world increasingly threatened by totalitarianism. Serge's expos of the surveillance methods used by the Czarist police reads like a spy thriller. An irrepressible rebel, Serge wrote this manual for political activists, describing the structures of state repression and how to dodge them--including how to avoid being followed, what to do if arrested, and tips on securing correspondence. He also explains how such repression is ultimately ineffective.

"Repression can really only live off fear. But is fear enough to remove need, thirst for justice, intelligence, reason, idealism...? Relying on intimidation, the reactionaries forget that they will cause more indignation, more hatred, more thirst for martyrdom, than real fear. They only intimidate the weak; they exasperate the best forces and temper the resolution of the strongest." --Victor Serge

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1644213672
• ISBN13: 9781644213674
• Release Date: May 2024
• Publisher: Seven Stories Press
• Length: 160 Pages
• Weight: 0.73 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.4" x 5.6" x 8.5"

Customer Reviews

As valuable a read for activists today as it was nearly a hundred years ago

What Every Radical Should Know About State Repression: A Guide For Activists is a manual written by an outspoken Russian activist Victor Serge, born in 1890 and forced into exile for opposing Stalin's rule. His discussion of the government's tools of harassment, and his methodologies for dodging state repression are as vital to today's era of racial profiling and abuses of the Patriot Act as they were in Czarist Russia. Chapters discuss the abuses of Russia's secret police and the methods they employed, practical means to protect oneself from being followed, what to do if arrested, an overview of the lessons of history, and more. "In social conflict there is no truth in common between the exploited classes and the exploiters," warns Serge, decrying impulses to denounce the system when one is under arrest or on trial; his fiery opinions do not detract from the solid advice on how to comport oneself when fomenting political change. As valuable a read for activists today as it was nearly a hundred years ago.