The Chekist, by Vladimir Zazubrin, Christian Bourgois, Satellites No. 26, 2002 ---- "These too were dragged by their feet into the dark part of the cellar, using ropes. All of them, in their own way, had dreamed of living and being someone. But is it really worth talking about when all that remained of each of them was one hundred to one hundred and fifty pounds of fresh meat?" ---- Andrei Pavlovich Srubov is the head of the Gubcheka, the local provincial branch of the Cheka, the dreaded political police, the precursor to the KGB, created by Lenin in one of his first decrees after the military coup of October 1917 in which the Bolsheviks seized power. In this small Siberian town, Srubov has his work cut out for him, or rather, he has counter-revolutionary dogs to shoot. In a chain, five at a time, in a cellar... It is 1923, and the Revolution needs zealous defenders whose arms, or rather their fingers
on the triggers, never waver. Srubov oversees the executions, investigates bourgeois conspirators, and manages his executioners. He loses his wife, his soul, his health, and soon, one suspects, given how the Soviet regime fed, wave after wave, on his executors, his life.Zazubrin was born in 1895 and was assassinated during the Stalinist terror in 1937. This Siberian proletarian, son of a revolutionary, had a turbulent destiny. A clandestine Bolshevik, he infiltrated the Okhrana (the Tsarist political police), served as secretary to the commissar at the State Bank, and was then drafted into the White Army as an officer, from which he quickly defected with two training units. He began writing novels after overcoming typhus in 1920. The Chekist, written in 1923, was not published until 1989.
A gripping and chilling tale, written only six years after the "revolution," The Chekist recounts, with a brutal realism that is both raw and hallucinatory, the birth of the totalitarian machine of destruction. In it, Srubov dreams, fifteen years before Nazi Germany, of "an enlightened human society, which will rid itself of its superfluous or criminal members with the help of gases, acids, electricity, and deadly bacteria.[...]Learned gentlemen, with an air of authority, will fearlessly immerse living men in retorts and giant balloons, and, using all sorts of combinations, reactions, and distillations, will transform them into shoe polish, petroleum jelly, and lubricating oil."
The critical apparatus cites Orwell and Kafka, but one could also mention Évariste Gamelin, the painter who finds himself a ruthless and bloodthirsty juror at the Revolutionary Tribunal in Anatole France's *The Gods Are Thirsty*, published in 1912. The Revolution, embodied in the demented daydreams of this industrial executioner, in the form of "She," a decaying, bloodthirsty babushka, devours her own children like Saturn. In the manner of Zamyatin, who used science fiction in *We*, but here without even attempting to cloak himself in a fictional veneer, Zazubin paints a portrait of a political police force that, having completely forgotten that the ends do not justify the means, leads an entire terrified people into a deadly dead end. It is no wonder that the manuscript remained for seventy years in a storeroom of the Lenin Library, and that its author did not survive the Stalinist purges. Of note are two afterwords: one contemporary, evoking the historical context, and the other-from the period-a veritable balancing act, a triple somersault attempting to pass the novel off as an ode to state bureaucracy.
"Only one centimeter separates the name of the last condemned man from Sroubov's signature. One centimeter higher, and he would be among those condemned to death."
Julien Caldironi, individual, Maine-et-Loire
https://monde-libertaire.net/?articlen=9182
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Source: A-infos-en@ainfos.ca
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