Victor Serge: The Macedonians, proud, penniless and dumb, were just Macedonians

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 Serge also recorded encounters with Macedonians in his work "Memoirs of a Revolutionary". He described the Macedonians as "proud, destitute and dumb, who are simply Macedonians and were ready to fight against the whole world for their primitive mountain freedom ...".

His work "Memoirs of a Revolutionary" was published in 2012 as an English translation, translated by Peter Sedgwick in cooperation with George Paizis. The original, which was published in French in Paris in 1951, was called "Mémoires d'un révolutionnaire, 1901–1941".

About the author:

Victor Serge, real name: Wiktor Lwowitsch Kibaltschitsch, born on December 30, 1890 in Brussels; died November 17, 1947 in Mexico City, was a Russian journalist, writer and radical left-wing revolutionary.

Kibaltschitsch's parents were political refugees from Russia who belonged to the revolutionary organization Narodnaya Volja. First, the young Viktor Kibaltschitsch joined the Belgian socialist youth organization Jeunes Gardes, which he soon left because of his aversion to reformism.


At the age of 19, Kibaltschitsch moved to Paris, where he joined the anarchist scene and became co-editor of the magazine L'Anarchie. For his support of the so-called Bonnot gang, an anarchist group that also carried out expropriations and attacks, he was sentenced to five years in prison in 1912.

After his release in 1917, he moved to Barcelona (here he took the name Serge), where he worked for the anarcho-syndicalist newspaper Tierra y Libertad and took part in the uprising in July 1917.

The Belgians and Alsatians were vaguely pro-German; the Macedonians, proud, destitute, and silent, were just Macedonians, ready to fight the whole world for their primitive mountain liberty.



 page 65

During the epidemic we continued to assemble and conduct our studies. During one of the meetings, which I was holding purposely on that particular evening to distract the guards’ attention, one of our group tried to escape, under cover of a storm. He fell in the camp’s perimeter, under the livid glare of searchlights: “Twenty years old, and six bullets in his body,” it was remarked. On the following day we summoned the camp to revolt. The Starost, or Elder of the Macedonians, came and told us that they would support us.




Page 180

There we would meet a young stranger in an outsize overcoat, whom I immediately classified as a bodyguard; I thought I could see the enormous Browning revolver, the favorite weapon of Macedonians (who do not trust small bullets), bulging through his coat pocket.

the old leader of IMRO (Internal Macedonian Revolutionary Organization), Todor Aleksandrov, had been killed at the end of a conference in the mountains, in which he had advocated cooperation with the Communists.

Page 210

Much of what I saw and learnt cast such tragedies in an unpleasant light. A whole group of fighters from our Civil War, now powerful in the secret services, was advocating “diversions in enemy territory,” especially in Poland because a Polish attack against Russia was considered likely. At the same time, the authoritarian regime within the party fostered angry or desperate responses. Furthermore, the numerous Macedonian revolutionaries in Vienna, divided among themselves and corrupted by at least three governments (Russian, Bulgarian, and Italian), were people who would stop at nothing. Following each attack in Sofia, several little gangs would be demanding rewards from various secret services attached to three different embassies.



Source: Victor Serge - Memories of a Revolutionary 1901-1941

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