1919–1920: St. Petersburg, city of the czars, 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 by 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.
