Sunday, September 20, 2026

The Soviet anarchist with Sisyphis

 Morten Høi Jensen, Against the Tide — Sidecar

‘The right to live implies the right to kill whoever prevents me from living’, Serge argued at the time. ‘The will to live imposes on me the duty (the necessity) of killing whoever wants to rob me of freedom, without which there is no life’.

In 1911-12, the Bonnot Gang, a group associated with l’anarchie, committed a string of high-profile bank robberies. Serge was arrested along with his first wife, Rirette Maitrejean, after police raided the newspaper’s offices and uncovered two stolen revolvers. Refusing to cooperate, he was tried along with the rest of the gang and sentenced to five years in prison. 

Abidor offers a careful reconstruction of the trial, which is illustrative of his approach. Quoting liberally from police reports and contemporaneous accounts in the daily press, he shows how the police took pains to frame Serge as the gang’s chief ideologue, putting him in the difficult position of protesting his innocence without compromising himself in the eyes of his fellow anarchists.

His subsequent cheating of death earns him eternal punishment . Release the Basilisk!

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