Conquered City (New York Review Books Classics) - Softcover

This extraordinary novel, full of twists and turns, giving glimpses of lives under Bolshevik rule, the speedy disillusionment and the increasing betrayals, wastes not a single word as it swoops from universal images of winter city streets to relationships and domestic scenes. (Glasgow Herald)

The paradox of freedom and necessity is thoroughly explored through dialogues and descriptions. Serge and his excellent translator Richard Greeman sympathise with the paradox rather than seeing the outcome as inevitable when the idea of Man is pitted against the actuality of people. If such views seem antiquated or foreign, then all the more reason to read Victor Serge with a degree of sympathy. (Times Literary Supplement)

A remarkable novel, cool, sophisticated, intelligent and reasoned... Read this novel: it teaches so much about history, how it is made and unmade; how humans look to it for answers only to reject them. (Irish Times)

1919-1920. St. Petersburg, city of the tsars, has fallen to the revolution. Camped out in the splendid palaces of the former regime, the new masters of the city seek to cement their control, even as the counter-revolutionary White Army musters its forces. Conquered

City, Victor Serge's toughest and most unrelenting narrative, is structured like a detective story--one in which the new political regime seeks to track down and eliminate its enemies--the spies, speculators, and traitors hidden among the exhausted mass of common people. Conquered City is about terror: the Red Terror and the White Terror. But mainly about the Red, about the Communists who have dared to pick up the weapons of power--police, guns, jails, spies, treachery--in the gamble that wielding them with purity, in a righteous cause, they can put an end to the need for terror, perhaps forever. And yet those who wield these weapons know that they are doomed. Conquered City is their tragedy and testament.