On August 7, 1936, the anarcho-Bolshevik Victor Serge dashed off a letter from Brussels to his old friend and comrade Andrés Nin in Barcelona. There were things of the greatest urgency to discuss with Nin, a leader of Spain’s POUM (Workers’ Party of Marxist Unification). Their friendship went back to the Russian Civil War, when the two radicals had first joined the struggle to defend the Bolshevik Revolution from internal and external enemies and later supported Leon Trotsky and the Left Opposition against Joseph Stalin.
Now 15 scarring years later, Serge communicated to Nin the mixture of apprehension and joy he felt knowing “at last you are inside the great upheaval” unleashed in Spain and wished to learn as much as he could of the situation, so he could breathe once more “the tonic air of the revolution.” In this current moment of decision, he expounded, “it is only the working class that can fight Fascism: it alone can create a republic worthy of the name, a democracy which will not be another ambush. It has the right to govern: it can and must begin to heal and overcome the miseries, to transform society.”
