White Army, Red Terror
The life and fate of writer Vladimir Zazubrin
Andrey Filimonov
130 years ago, writer Vladimir Zazubrin was born. He wrote the novella "Shchepka," dedicated to the "Red Terror" and its Chekist perpetrators. The novella begins with a scene of an execution in the basement of the provincial "Extraordinary Commission." It describes in detail the blood-spattered walls, the executioners with glassy eyes, and their victims, who are forced to undress before their execution.
White, raw carcasses of meat collapsed to the floor. The Chekists, their revolvers smoking, quickly ran back and immediately clicked their triggers. The legs of those shot twitched convulsively. V. Zazubrin “Sliver”
The book was written in 1923, hot on the heels of the Civil War. No Soviet publisher dared publish the horrific tale of a slaughterhouse staffed by passionate butchers. Their boss invents the perfect machine for mass destruction, literally grinding people into mincemeat, then goes mad and attacks a mirror with an axe.
"Shchepka" was first published at the end of the Soviet era, in the late 1980s, half a century after its author died in the dungeons of the NKVD as a member of a mythical "counter-revolutionary sabotage and terrorist group."
However, Zazubrin's biography offers something for both investigators and researchers to latch onto. Before the Revolution, the writer was a double agent, allegedly infiltrated by the Bolshevik underground into the gendarmerie department. During the Civil War, he served in Kolchak's army, but defected to the Reds when the regime of the "Supreme Ruler of Russia" began to falter. In the 1920s, he sympathized with Trotsky and disliked Stalin.
Any of these episodes would have been punishable by death in 1937.
An insider in the Okhrana
Zazubrin was a pseudonym. The future writer was born on May 25, 1895, in Penza, to the family of railroad worker Yakov Zubtsov. There were already many socialists among the railroad workers at that time, and their number only increased over the years. In February 1917, a railroad strike prevented the Tsar's train from reaching St. Petersburg. As a result, the Russian autocracy fell at Dno station, where Nicholas II signed his abdication.
But in 1895, the dramatic finale was still far off. Russia's last emperor had just ascended the throne. The Narodnaya Volya terror was a thing of the past, defeated by police methods. The bombers and expropriators of the Socialist Revolutionary Party had not yet entered the historical arena. The times were relatively peaceful, and the authorities were not particularly ruthless.
The young lawyer Vladimir Ulyanov had just visited the émigré Plekhanov in Switzerland and received his blessing to found the "Union of Struggle for the Emancipation of the Working Class." A couple of years later, Ulyanov (not yet Lenin) would be exiled to the Siberian village of Shushenskoye for three years for his involvement in this organization.
The bloody tsarist regime allowed his comrade-in-arms, Krupskaya, to accompany him into exile, on the condition that the young revolutionaries marry in church as law-abiding citizens. Which they did. Shushenskoye was a wonderful place: nature, hunting (his rifle was imported from Belgium), visits from friends, active correspondence with foreigners, reading Marx, and working on revolutionary articles. Overall, it felt more like a writer's residency than penal servitude and exile.
In 1900, Ulyanov and his wife left Siberia and went abroad, where they lived until 1917, with the exception of a couple of secret visits to St. Petersburg during the first Russian Revolution. However, these visits may have been later invented by Lenin's Soviet biographers.
What is certain is that Lenin was bloodthirsty. From the safety of Stockholm, he demanded that the Russian proletariat take up arms more actively in 1905. Ten years later, he called on soldiers in the Russian Army to desert, kill their officers, and fraternize with enemy soldiers.
Lenin wanted the "bad" imperialist war to evolve into a "good" civil war. The carnage and bloodshed within Russia would fertilize the soil for Soviet power.
The most astonishing thing is that everything happened exactly as Lenin intended. This development of events was made possible by the enthusiasm and devotion to "Lenin's cause" of the young revolutionaries, who (unlike their leader) actually risked their freedom and lives.
Vladimir Zubtsov was one of them.
He first became involved in anti-government activities while studying at the Syzran Gymnasium, where he published the underground Marxist newspaper "Otgoloski" (Echoes) from 1912 onward. Of course, it was "underground" for a time, because there was no chance of avoiding detection. The gendarmes vigilantly monitored and suppressed attempts to produce illegal literature. Much like FSB officers now monitor VKontakte and initiate criminal cases for comments and likes, their predecessors in the Third Section saw their primary mission as eradicating sedition from the printed word.
The future writer's first stint was short, only three months, but he was expelled from the gymnasium.
What follows is a rather strange episode in his biography. Zazubrin (also known as Zubtsov on paper) is studying at a real school and befriends local Bolsheviks, who arrange for him to work... in the Okhrana. One essay about the writer reports that "the Syzran Committee of the RSDLP(b), alarmed by the frequent arrests of its comrades, sent V. Zubtsov 'to work' in the Okhrana in order to prevent further failures. And right up until March 1917, fulfilling the committee's directive, V. Zubtsov served in the gendarmerie department."
It sounds outlandish. It's as if Navalny's headquarters "sent" someone to work at Center E to receive the most accurate information about upcoming protests against the "non-systemic opposition."
However, Russian revolutionary activity and the Okhrana's activities have long been intertwined in the most bizarre ways. Nikolai Kletochnikov, a member of the Narodovolya (People's Will) from the previous generation of Russian revolutionaries, actually joined the Third Section at the behest of his comrades and informed his comrades of the Okhrana's plans. He was convicted and died in prison.
Although, of course, more common were other cases where revolutionaries recruited by the Okhrana betrayed their comrades, sometimes while simultaneously pursuing enviable revolutionary careers. The most famous cases were Yevno Azef, head of the Socialist Revolutionary Combat Organization, and Roman Malinovsky, Zubtsov's Bolshevik Party comrade and head of the Bolshevik faction in the Fourth Duma.
What really happened to Vladimir Zubtsov, who served time in solitary confinement shortly before joining the Okhrana? The only thing we can say for certain is that his party comrades did not accuse him of serving in the Okhrana immediately after the revolution.
After the February Revolution, the Third Section was abolished, and Vladimir Zubtsov traveled throughout Syzran Province as a Bolshevik agitator, raising money to publish a workers' newspaper. This crowdfunding effort ended with another arrest.
But just a few months later, in August 1917, traces of the Bolshevik Zubtsov were discovered in the cadet school in Pavlovo, near Petrograd. It is unknown whether the cadet took part in the defense of the Winter Palace. This page of his biography is missing. But in 1918, the future writer was already in Siberia, studying at the Orenburg Military School, which had been evacuated to Irkutsk.
Provincial paradise in Kansk
All this time, he writes stories and articles, trying his hand at literature and journalism. Recent history provides him with incredible material for his life. "But who didn't experience incredible adventures during the civil war?" says the hero of "Theatrical Novel."
So, after graduating from military school in the summer of 1919, Vladimir Zubtsov, a warrant officer in the Siberian Army, resorted to extreme depravity, betrayed his oath to Russia's Supreme Ruler, Kolchak, and joined the Red Partisans with his platoon and artillery piece. This gun and this partisan unit would appear a few years later in the first Siberian blockbuster, "Red Gas," written by Vladimir Zazubrin. He no longer used the surname Zubtsov.
In the late autumn of 1919, partisans captured the city of Kansk in the Yenisei province. It was in this city, in fact, that the writer Zazubrin was born. He was born thanks to love and typhus.
Command assigned the "Red Partisan Zubtsov" to billet in the Teryaevs' house, which housed an exclusively female family: mother Anna Romanovna and her six daughters. The three eldest were literature teachers. Moreover, they hosted a literary circle at their home, where they discussed new books. It was a kind of provincial paradise for an aspiring writer.
And when the young man fell ill with typhus, he was nursed back to health by Varvara Teryaeva, who soon married him and lived with him until his arrest in the autumn of 1937.
But in the early twenties, it seemed as if Vladimir and Varvara had drawn a lucky ticket to a bright future. In the Teryaev household, in less than two years, Zazubrin wrote his major books—Two Worlds and The Splinter.
Reading them back to back, you immediately notice the shift in the author's worldview. The first, written in the wake of the Civil War, clearly reveals the trench from which the author writes. The images of the "Whites" and especially the "interventionists" are often caricatured. The author depicts the soldiers and officers of Kolchak's army as merciless monsters who terrorize the captured village, rape women, shoot men, drink, and rob.
"Bullets whistled down the street, shots cracked. Soldiers, on the slightest suspicion, shot the first person they met. Women wept in the houses, chests cracked as they were broken open, and the bolts of barns and storerooms creaked. The victors were making short work of them. Every ten to fifteen minutes, arrested people suspected of Bolshevism were brought to Orlov. The colonel was very drunk. He didn't feel like spending much time on the matter. After two or three questions, his drunken eyes widened and he growled, "Bolsheviks, scoundrels! Send them to Moscow!" The arrested were led out into the yard, quickly stripped, and hacked to pieces with sabers." V. Zazubrin. "Two Worlds"
The ideological meaning of the novel is clearly evident, for example, in the following passage:
"Perhaps not everyone went willingly into battle, perhaps not even the communists, but everyone felt the weight of a force, enormous, pressing, pushing their timid legs forward—the force of the entire multi-million-strong collective, the awakened, rising proletariat, the force of all the oppressed and exploited masses. The enormous, inexorable forward movement of the collective colossus drew into the swirling maelstrom of struggle not only gold and precious stones but also rubble and trash, threatening to crush traitors and the fainthearted." V. Zazubrin. "Two Worlds"
In "Shchepka," however, this admiration for the "weight of a multi-million-strong collective" is no longer noticeable. Born from the author's conversations with Cheka officers, the story frankly and authentically conveys the very essence of the Red Terror:
In France, they had the guillotine and public executions. We have the basement. It's a secret execution. Public executions surround the death of a criminal, even the most formidable, with an aura of martyrdom and heroism. Public executions agitate, giving moral strength to the enemy. Public executions leave relatives and friends with a corpse, a grave, last words, a last will, and a precise date of death. It's as if the executed person isn't completely destroyed. A secret execution, in a basement, without any external effects, without announcing the verdict, sudden, has an overwhelming effect on the enemy. A huge, merciless, all-seeing machine unexpectedly seizes its victims and grinds them like a meat grinder. After the execution, there is no precise day of death, no last words, no corpse, not even a grave. Emptiness. The enemy is completely destroyed. V. Zazubrin. "Sliver"
"Shchepka" was supposed to be published in 1923; the renowned literary critic of the time, Valerian Pravdukhin (who, like Zazubrin, was executed a little over a decade later), even wrote a preface. However, it never saw the light of day. "Shchepka" was only permitted for publication under Gorbachev.
But "Two Worlds," according to Gorky, was a great hit with Lenin. "A very scary, terrifying book; certainly not a novel, but a good, necessary book," the leader allegedly said. After this, Zazubrin's career took off. "This good, necessary book" was read aloud in military units and workers' clubs, read at party meetings and factories. All because Lenin approved!
Lenin as Kolchak
Riding a wave of success, Vladimir Zazubrin and his wife moved to Novonikolaevsk, which was about to become Novosibirsk. From the capital of Soviet Siberia, the vast region was ruled first by the Red Pole Kosior, then by the Red Latvian Eikhe.
In the USSR, almost everything was red, from ties to coffins. The new way of life took on crimson hues.
Ordinary people wore "Red Triangle" galoshes, celebrated "Red Easter," smoked "Red Bogatyr" cigarettes, and went to the cinema to see "Red Devils." It's no surprise that the first feature film shot in Soviet Siberia, dedicated to the fifth anniversary of the victory over Kolchak, was called "Red Gas."
Stills from the film "Red Gas"
Director Ivan Kalabukhov and screenwriter Vladimir Zazubrin created this image to express the totality of the communist idea. A volatile substance, permeating everything, reaches every corner of the country. For its own people, this gas is amusing; for its enemies, deadly.
After World War I, the use of poison gas became a hot topic in contemporary art. In the film "Arsenal" (directed by Alexander Dovzhenko), a German soldier, gassed, dies laughing, a terrifying sight. In the drama "A Fragment of an Empire" (1928), the hero, lying on the battlefield, has a vision of the crucified Christ, whose face is hidden by a gas mask.
There's no chlorine, no mustard gas, no apocalyptic atmosphere in the film "Red Gas." The film's heroes are ordinary fighters for Soviet power. Arrested by Kolchak's counterintelligence, they revolt, seize a steamship on the Ob River, and defeat the White Guards, joining forces with a partisan detachment armed with a homemade wooden cannon.
A simple adventure plot with the obligatory ideological payoff. In one scene, Bolshevik leaflets scatter from the ship like a cloud. This, according to the filmmakers, is the invincible weapon of mass destruction—red gas.
They say the idea for the film came from Stanislav Kosior himself, the all-powerful ruler of Siberia from 1922 to 1924. In fact, Kosior acted as the film's producer. He decided on the theme—the victory over Kolchak—and chose the screenwriter—who hasn't heard of Vladimir Zazubrin, whose book Lenin himself admired?
All Siberian institutions were ordered to comply with all filmmakers' wishes. When the strike scene was filmed at the railway depot, the railway actually stopped operating in that area.
The film crew was given full control of a riverboat, with the inscription "Admiral Kolchak" painted on its side. When the boat docked at the pier of the provincial town of Berdsk, the local militia took up arms, and the surviving counterrevolutionaries prepared icons and bread and salt to greet the liberators.
Almost everything in this film was real. Kolchak's officer, Georgy Pozharnitsky, played the role of Kolchak's officer. Alexander Kolchak himself, for obvious reasons, was unable to take part in the filming, so his role was played by a Maly Theater actor… Mikhail Lenin, born Mikhail Frantsevich Ignatyuk.
There was no bending to the new government here. Ignatyuk performed under this pseudonym on the stage of the Korsh Theatre long before 1917.
Incidentally, the actor, unlike the film's author Kosior, screenwriter Zazubrin, and director Kalabukhov, who were later executed, survived the Great Terror. Which "troika" would dare condemn Lenin?
"Red Gas" was a legendary film from start to finish. Sergei Eisenstein, intrigued by the naive yet exotic Siberian material, helped edit it.
Both audiences and critics received the film with flying colors. Huge box office receipts and rave reviews in the capital's press seemed like sure signs of the birth of Siberian cinema.
And then, suddenly, it all ended. The "gas attack" ceased. This happened in 1927, when Stalin defeated Trotsky and initially exiled him to Almaty.
What's the connection, you might ask? It's very simple. At the end of the film, the main character delivers a monologue while standing on a podium beneath portraits of the revolutionary leaders, Lenin and Trotsky. The scene was final, the monologue crucial—it couldn't be cut. So the film was pulled from theaters.
For many Soviet intellectuals of the 1920s, Trotsky, a charismatic orator, was far more appealing than Stalin, a dull, pockmarked administrator. And many paid for it, including Zazubrin.
In the year of Trotsky's fall and the first triumph of Stalinism, he wrote a column for the magazine "Siberian Lights" in which he wrote: "Today is a shallow day, a day of petty calculations."
Everyone who needed to know understood the writer's intentions. Just six months later, Zazubrin was fired from his post as literary editor of Sibogney, and then from the party. His works were criticized at a meeting of the Siberian Regional Committee of the All-Union Communist Party (Bolsheviks):
In his stories "The Pale Truth" and "The Dormitory," V. Zazubrin depicted bourgeois life as an invincible force capable of destroying those who heroically fought during the Civil War. The life of Soviet people under the NEP, judging by these works, is a tangled web of the base, filthy vices of capitalist society. The White Guard émigré press was quick to exploit "The Dormitory" to slander the Soviet regime. Foreign ideological influences in "The Pale Truth" also manifested themselves in the assertion that "revolution is a force of nature. Revolution is a powerful, turbid, creative and destructive torrent. Man is a splinter in it."
Gorky's favorite
It was clear that the writer had no further prospects for a literary or journalistic career in Siberia. Fortunately for Zazubrin, his books were admired not only by the late Lenin but also by the living Gorky, an undisputed authority of the time.
With Gorky's help, Stalin planned to create a synthesis of literature and propaganda, which soon became widely known as "socialist realism." To promote the ideas of socialist realism, Gorky created numerous newspapers, magazines, and book series. Some of them still exist, such as "The Life of Remarkable People," "Literary Newspaper," and "Literary Studies." Others, such as "Our Achievements" and "Kolkhoznik," are long forgotten.
Gorky invited Zazubrin to become the editor-in-chief of Kolkhoznik. No one dared argue with the great proletarian writer, who, at Stalin's personal invitation, visited the Soviet Union in 1928. Thanks to Gorky's patronage, Zazubrin was able to move to Moscow, obtain one of the first writers' dachas in Peredelkino, and take over the editorship of the thick magazine.
It seemed his fascination with Trotsky had gotten away with it. Moreover, Zazubrin wrote "Mountains," a novel about collectivization in Altai, in which he portrayed a divine Stalin, the arbiter of the world's fate.
A lean man of above-average height stepped onto the podium of the Fifteenth Congress. He wore a khaki jacket, gray trousers, and boots. His black hair, untouched by time, hung in strands. The ends of his mustache drooped. His eyes were dark and stern. His face, illuminated by the sun, was pale. The entire country and millions abroad listened to him. He never raised his voice, never made a single sudden movement. He was calm. He saw how, amidst the avalanches of wars and revolutions, as if in primordial chaos, mountain-forming processes unfolded, and the continents of a new world emerged. V. Zazubrin. "Mountains"
God knows, the writer tried his best to fit into his era. But he failed. Stalin didn't like "Mountains." Zazubrin's days were numbered. He was left alone as long as Gorky lived. But Alexei Maksimovich didn't have long to live either. Stalin knew exactly how long.
The last arrest
In September 1937, a car pulled up outside the Zazubrins' house in Peredelkino, and two armed men emerged. Many years later, the writer's niece, Lidia, recalled how they politely greeted Vladimir Yakovlevich and "invited" him into the car.
"Grandma immediately fainted. He approached her, he loved her very much. And when she came to, he said, 'Mom, this is a misunderstanding. I'll be back.' One of the armed men said, 'Take your coat with you.' He replied, 'Absolutely not. I won't take it,' and left. And I never saw him again," Lidiya Ziedinnia told Vladimir Yarantsev, a journalist with Sibirskie Ogni.
He departed into eternity, coatless. On September 28, 1937, Zazubrin found himself at the slaughterhouse he described in "The Shchepka." They say he himself was afraid of this work, so prescient was his vision of humanity's near future:
"In the future, 'enlightened' human society will rid itself of superfluous or criminal members with the help of gases, acids, electricity, and deadly bacteria. Then there will be no basements or 'bloodthirsty' Chekists. Gentlemen scientists, with a learned air, will fearlessly immerse living people in enormous flasks and retorts and, using all sorts of compounds, reactions, and distillations, begin to convert them into shoe polish, Vaseline, and lubricating oil."
V. Zazubrin “Sliver”
