page_title: Victor Serge
section_title: In Mexico
hierarchical_section_title: Victor Serge / Biography / Later life / In Mexico
caption_attribution_description: English: The soviet anarchist Victor Serge in the studio of the artist Wolfgang Paalen
context_page_description: Victor Serge, born Victor Lvovich Kibalchich, was a Russian revolutionary Marxist, novelist, poet and historian. 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.
context_section_description: After France was invaded by Germany in 1940, Serge, together with his son, Vlady Kibalchich, and his partner, Laurette Séjourné, managed to escape to the Unoccupied Zone in the South. Serge's wife Liuba had long been confined to a mental institution-their daughter was being cared for by a couple in the country. (Liuba remained in France until her death in 1985. Jeannine was brought to Mexico by Laurette Séjourné in 1942 and lived there until her death in 2011). Serge, Vlady and Laurette spent the winter of 1940–41 at the Villa Air Bel in La Pomme (Marseille), which they shared with Varian Fry, of the American Rescue Committee, the Surrealist André Breton and his family, Daniel Bénédite, Mary Jayne Gold and others. With both the Gestapo and the GPU on his trail, Serge was desperate to leave France, but as an undocumented Russian with a Communist past, he faced the nightmare of what Trotsky famously called 'A world without a visa'. At the last possible moment, thanks to the efforts of Dwight and Nancy MacDonald in New York and Julián Gorkin and Wolfgang Paalen in Mexico, Serge and Vlady took the last ship out of Marseille (on which Breton and the anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss were cabin passengers).  After a six-month journey to the Caribbean, they were imprisoned in Martinique and the Dominican Republic, and arrived in Mexico several months after Trotsky's assassination in Mexico City. Vlady and his son Victor, along with Breton and Pierre Mabille stopped at the Dominican Republic in 1940-41. Vlady and his son lived in the capital with the Spanish surrealist painter Eugenio Granell and his wife Amparo. Although the Granell's did not have much money (they were also refugees form the Spanish Civil War where Granell had belonged to the POUM party), Amparo did all she could to get tea and sugar for Victor and his son. When the two parted towards Mexico, Vlady left an important manuscript which now can be found at the Biblioteca Granell in the Fundación Eugenio Granell, Santiago de Compostela. This manuscript, titled and hand written at the time, "L'empire contre le peuple Russe (titre proximaire" -difficult to read the hand written words in French. This book eventually became "Hitler contra Stalin" which was published later on in 1941 in Mexico City.
  The Nazis invaded the Soviet Union during Serge's travels to Mexico, and Gorkin commissioned him to write a book on the subject (Hitler Contra Stalin) which was published in Mexico City. However, agents of the Russian Embassy, furious at Serge's critical analysis, soon bought out the publishing house and made sure that all doors to journalism were closed to Serge, who as a result often had little money for food. He was supported in part by his partner Laurette Séjourné, who arrived from France with his daughter Jeannine, and he developed friendships with some other European exiles including the German Council Communist Otto Ruhle, members of the exiled POUM, the German novelist and hero of the International Brigade, Gustav Regler, the Austrian painter and theorist Wolfgang Paalen, the French Socialist Marceau Pivert, and the Franco-Polish novelist Jean Malaquais. His relations with Trotsky's widow Natalia Sedova were strained at first. He continued to receive support from some American intellectuals, such as Dwight Macdonald and John Dewey, and his writings were published in Partisan Review and the New International in the US; he was also the Mexican correspondent for the New Leader. Wolfgang Paalen and his wife Alice hid Serge occasionally in their house in San Angel and Serge advised Paalen in his planned criticism of the Marxist Dialectics for his review DYN.
  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 P
caption: Victor Serge in Wolfgang Paalen´s Studio in Mexico ca. 1944
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