Gaston Leval

Gaston Leval(born Pierre Robert Piller, 1895-1978) was the son of a French Communard. He escaped to Spain in 1915 during the First World War, where he met the young firebrand and writer Victor Serge and joined the Confederación Nacional del Trabajo (CNT) anarcho-syndicalist trade union organisation. Travelling in 1921 to Moscow as a CNT delegate to one of the most important organisations of the international communist movement, Leval wrote an influential report and a series of skeptical...See more

Gaston Leval(born Pierre Robert Piller, 1895-1978) was the son of a French Communard. He escaped to Spain in 1915 during the First World War, where he met the young firebrand and writer Victor Serge and joined the Confederación Nacional del Trabajo (CNT) anarcho-syndicalist trade union organisation. Travelling in 1921 to Moscow as a CNT delegate to one of the most important organisations of the international communist movement, Leval wrote an influential report and a series of skeptical articles based on his experiences of the Bolshevik regime and attempted to spearhead action on behalf of imprisoned anarchists and socialists. After living in Argentina for much of the 1920s and '30s, Leval returned to Spain and became a militant fighter while documenting the Revolution and both urban and rural anarchist collectives. See less