1890-1947
"Originally an anarchist, he joined the Bolsheviks five months after arriving in Petrograd in January 1919 and later worked for the Cominternas 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." Wikipedia.
Memoirs of a revolutionary (1901-1941)
Ch. 3
https://www.marxists.org/archive/serge/1945/memoirs/ch03a.htm
On Second Congress of Comintern[]
Lenin was bending every effort to convince the ‘Left Communists’ — Dutch, German, or (like Bordiga) Italian — of the necessity for compromise and participation in electoral and Parliamentary politics; he warned of the danger of their becoming revolutionary sects. In his discussion of the ‘national and colonial question’, Lenin emphasized the possibility, and even necessity, of inspiring Soviet-type revolutions in the Asiatic colonial countries. The experience of Russian Turkestan, seemed to lend support to his arguments. He was aiming primarily at India and China; he thought that the blow must be directed to these countries in order to weaken British imperialism, which then appeared as the inveterate foe of the Soviet Republic. The Russians had no further hopes for the traditional Socialist parties of Europe. They judged that the only possible course was to work for splits that would break with the old reformist and Parliamentary leaderships, thereby creating new parties, disciplined and controlled by the Executive in Moscow, which would proceed efficiently to the conquest of power.
the growth of intolerance and servility among many officials and their drive towards privilege
they began to be enclosed within all the tricks and tomfooleries of servility
the spectre of future war would raise a question-mark over the existence of civilization itself, unless the social system of Europe was speedily transformed
A New International[]
(1944)[]
It is true that the Second International lacked socialist spirit, revolutionary foresight and energy. It is true that the Third has, on the other hand, fallen into the grossest opportunism, authoritarian centralisation, extreme doctrinal vulgarisation, and has also completely become the vassal of the Soviet state.
the usually bourgeois psychology of the working-class aristocracies of Western Europe