A-Infos (en) France, Monde Libertaire - Literary Chronicle: The Chekist (ca, de, fr, it, pt, tr)[machine translation]

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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