(en) France, Alternative Libertaire AL #238 - Classic subversion: Michel Ragon, "The Memory of the vanquished" (fr, pt)

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.