Birth of Our Power

Serge's tale begins in the spring of 1917, the third year of mass slaughter in the trenches of WWI. When the flames of revolution suddenly erupt in Russia and Spain, Europe is "burning at both ends." Although the Spanish uprising eventually fizzles, in Russia the workers, peasants and common soldiers are able to take power and hold it. Serge's "tale of two cities" is constructed from the opposition between Barcelona, the city "we" could not take, and Petrograd, the starving, beleaguered capital of the Russian Revolution besieged by counter-revolutionary Whites.