Paris, early twentieth century, a young orphan, Fred Bartholomew roams the streets then
quickly picked up by a couple of anarchists Belleville. Fred will his political education
from Delesalle a bookseller anarchist and learn Russian with emigrants from Czarist
repression. ---- This knowledge will save him the slaughter of the trenches of 1914-1918.
It is sent by the army as an observer of the Russian Revolution. Contact Lenin, Zinoviev,
Kamenev, Trotsky and Stalin, Fred participate in the propagation of the Bolshevik model in
other European countries. Witness tensions within the party and authoritarian excesses and
Bonapartist Trotsky, dubbed by some as the "Feld Marshal," he continues, albeit critical,
authentic ideyni name given to these anarchists earned the Bolshevik cause. Arrests and
disappearances of his fellow Russian anarchist, the repression of Kronstadt and the tragic
end of Makhnovism opened his eyes. Fred then approaches revolutionary Socialist Left and
the Workers' Opposition before finally fleeing Russia. Nothing keeps him on this earth
where the revolution turned into barracks in the open.
Returned to France at the time of the Popular Front, be actively involved in the Spanish
Civil War and will witness the terrible Stalinist repression. He spent the Second World
War in France prisoner in the concentration camp of Gurs and will be released in 1945. At
the end of his life he exercised the profession of bookseller on the quays of Paris.
An exceptional destiny, a life that contains ten and allows Michel Ragon us paint an
exhilarating fresco on the libertarian movement. Blend of history and myth and
autobiography, this romantic narrative takes us deep breath in the footsteps of his hero
that intersect Prince Kropotkin, Nestor Makhno in Paris he finds miserable forsaken all,
Spanish and Durruti Pestana but Rosmer, Monatte, Victor Serge and many other activists
anomymes. It portrays all these "losers" who helped the advent of the Soviet regime in
Russia and many were not rewarded for their zeal by a bullet in the neck in the cellars of
the Lubyanka loss or deportation to snow Gulag. Idealists who played by the naivety proxy
on all fronts and were merely "useful idiots" of the Bolsheviks, like the bourgeois
intellectuals of the time.
A useful book, exciting, indispensable. Almost a century of world politics for the losing
side, the forgotten and forbidden. A book that tells the story of this strange tribe who
believes that freedom and equality are not contradictory, refusing all the right lines,
which is wary of orders and discipline, which spits on the dictatorship was she of the
proletariat. A book about our history.
Jeremiah (AL Gard)
Michel Ragon, Memory defeated, Pocket, 1992, 559 p., 7 euros.
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