Midnight In The Century by Richard Greeman

Midnight In The Century by Richard Greeman

In 1933, Victor Serge was arrested by Stalin's police, interrogated, and held in solitary confinement for more than eighty days. Released, he spent two years in exile in remote Orenburg. These experiences were the inspiration for Midnight in the Century, Serge's searching novel about revolutionaries living in the shadow of Stalin's betrayal of the revolution.

Among the exiles gathered in the town of Chenor, or Black-Waters, are the granite-faced Old Bolshevik Ryzhik, stoic yet gentle Varvara, and Rodion, a young, self-educated worker who is trying to make sense of the world and history. They struggle in the unlikely company of Russian Orthodox Old Believers who are also suffering for their faith. Against unbelievable odds, the young Rodion will escape captivity and find a new life in the wild. Surviving the dark winter night of the soul, he rediscovers the only real, and most radical, form of resistance- hope.

Victor Serge (1890-1947) was born in Brussels to Russian anti-Tsarist exiles. Victor was imprisoned to five years in a French prison as a young anarchist firebrand in 1912. Serge joined the Bolsheviks in 1919. Serge was purged from the Communist Party and jailed in 1929 after being an outspoken critic of Stalin. Despite this, he was able to finish three novels (Men in Prison, Birth of Our Power, and Conquered City) as well as a history (Year One of the Russian Revolution), all of which were published in Paris.

In 1933, he was arrested again in Russia and transported to Central Asia, but after international protests by militants and notable writers such as André Gide and Romain Rolland, he was allowed to leave the USSR in 1936. Serge lived in dangerous exile in Brussels, Paris, Vichy France, and Mexico City, where he died in 1947, after being pursued by Stalinist operatives.