The Red Terror Rebrand: How Socialist Outlets Package History for Subscriptions

When Mitchell Abidor’s new biography of Victor Serge hit shelves in November 2025, the Jacobin Foundation was ready. They’ve tied the Pluto Press release to their 'Teen Jacobin' spring subscription drive, using Serge’s life as a hook. But there's a catch. Jacobin’s review skips right over the grim realities of the regime Serge served. They frame his jump from anarchism to Bolshevism as a move toward 'mass action,' which sounds nice, but it ignores the actual state violence Serge helped manage while working for the Comintern.

To understand the stakes, you have to look at what Bolshevism actually was: a movement built on seizing state power and keeping it through a centralized party. Serge, born Viktor Lvovich Kibalchich, didn't just stumble into this. He spent five years in a French prison for hanging around illegalist anarchists before heading to Russia in 1917. Jacobin makes it sound like he was just responding to Western pressure, but the math doesn't add up. By 1919, Serge was a working part of a government that had already started the Red Terror.

The Red Terror wasn't some minor footnote. It was a state-run campaign of mass execution meant to wipe out 'class enemies.' Historians estimate that between 100,000 and 200,000 people were killed during this period, and Serge was right there working for the Communist International while it happened. Abidor’s book uses Serge’s recently opened Notebooks to show a man who was clearly torn by the violence. But the people making money off his name, like socialist magazines and non-profits, prefer to focus on his later years as a dissident. It's easier to sell an anti-Stalinist hero than a man who helped the Cheka grow.

“The romanticization of the 1917 'moment of hope' often ignores the 100,000 to 200,000 estimated victims of the Red Terror during the period Serge served the state.”

The business side of this branding is pretty clear. The Jacobin Foundation is a tax-exempt 501(c)(3) that's pulled in over $4.5 million in revenue in recent cycles. They've got over 75,000 print subscribers who want 'beautiful print quarterlies.' By turning complicated figures like Serge into a lifestyle brand, these outlets find a way to monetize 20th-century history for modern political movements. Pluto Press does the same thing. Their 'Revolutionary Lives' series relies on these pipelines to move academic books to a younger, activist audience.

Then there's the way they talk about Serge’s anarchism. In the world of anarchism, the state is the problem. But Jacobin calls Serge’s anarchist phase 'reactionary.' It's a convenient label that makes his early critiques of Bolshevik power seem like something he just had to grow out of. Abidor’s biography argues the opposite: Serge’s 'unruly' streak never went away. He had a deep belief in 'Personalism,' the idea that individual dignity actually matters. That put him at odds with the Soviet project long before he was officially kicked out.

There's still a lot we don't know about what Serge was doing for the Comintern in the early 1920s. Even with Abidor’s research, plenty of secret police files from the GPU are still locked away or hidden. This silence lets modern writers fill in the blanks with whatever fits their current agenda. We're still waiting for a full count of how many execution orders or decrees crossed Serge’s desk while he was working as a press agent and translator between 1919 and 1921.

For most readers, this isn't just a debate about the past. It's about right now. This is the third time in two years we’ve seen major leftist outlets try to clean up the history of the early Soviet era by blaming everything on Western intervention. They’re ignoring the deep flaws that were there from the start: the same flaws Serge eventually wrote about in 'The Case of Comrade Tulayev.' Media groups are selling a sanitized past to a new generation of activists. They're paying for subscriptions to learn the truth, but they're getting a brand instead.