April 8, 1938
A 38-year-old writer was shot at the Kommunarka firing range near Moscow. Artem Vesely. Revolutionary, Chekist. Author of the novel "Russia, Washed in Blood."
It's a pity for our whole orphaned peasant life. You're born—you're guilty; you live—you're afraid of everyone; you die—you're guilty again.
Born in 1899 Samara, into a poor family of a loader. Real name - Nikolay Kochkurov.
From the age of 13, he worked part-time in fishing cooperatives, as a clerk, and as a drayman. At 16, he dropped out of secondary school and found work as a laborer in a factory.
After the February Revolution of 1917, he joined the Bolshevik Party. He participated in the October Revolution and the Civil War, helping to establish Soviet power locally. He was wounded during the suppression of one of the "White" rebellions.
Worked as a secretary of the district party committee in Melekesse (now Dimitrovgrad, Ulyanovsk Oblast) and editor of the newspaper "Banner of Communism." He exposed corruption among local Cheka officers who were confiscating livestock from peasants. Along with other members of the commission investigating these crimes, he sentenced them to death. He joined the new district Cheka and advocated for glasnost.
If the press remains silent about such people, then we can expect the same kind of work bacchanalia that was observed before.
He worked in newspapers and, in his own words, was often forced to “trade the journalist’s pen for a rifle” (he returned to the Civil War as a volunteer).
At 20, he wrote his first play, "Razryv-grass," and at 22, the drama "We" and the short story "Maslenitsa." He wrote in an ornamental prose style: the plot is secondary, and the focus is on metaphors, images, and leitmotifs.
After the end of the Civil War, he enrolled in the Literary and Artistic Institute, then Moscow State University. He dropped out of both and remained in Moscow.
He was one of the founders of the Young Guard, a group of Komsomol poets and writers. He was a member of the Russian Association of Proletarian Writers. In 1932, his epic book, "Russia, Washed in Blood," was published. He spent about ten years writing it but never finished it.
One fine morning, on the stretch from Tikhoretskaya to Yekaterinodar, I rose at dawn, looked out the compartment window, and gasped. Against the breaking dawn, in clouds of crimson dust, a [captive] Cossack army, about ten thousand strong, was moving. A few seconds passed, and the train flew by, but the image of a grandiose book about the Civil War rose to its full height in my mind.
(about the concept of the novel)
In the 1930s, along with other writers, he fell victim to the Yezhov repressions. It all began with criticism of his folklore collection, "Ditties from Kolkhoz Villages."
I go out and sing,
I look down.
I don't feel like having fun
And you can't be sad
In May 1937, Komsomolskaya Pravda published an article calling his novel "Russia, Washed in Blood" a "slanderous book." He was accused of leading an anti-Soviet terrorist organization and sentenced to death.
He expressed his hatred for the leadership of the All-Union Communist Party (Bolsheviks) and his terrorist sentiments by declaring, "I would place a cannon in Red Square and fire point-blank at the Kremlin." He intended to write a poem praising the executed members of the Trotskyist-Zinovievist Center ("The Death of the Glorious"), which they intended to publish abroad.
(from Yezhov's report to Stalin)
According to his cellmate, Vesely was taken away for interrogation every night and returned beaten only in the morning.
He was a passionate revolutionary, and when he was arrested in 1937, he could not imagine what he was accused of, he attacked the investigator with his fists, and he was flogged during interrogation.
(writer Ivan Shchegolikhin)
A few days after the execution of his third wife, Lyudmila Borisevich, sentenced to 8 years in the camps. Later, in 1948, his first wife also fell victim to the repressions. Gitya Lukatskaya. A year later, their daughters, Zayara and Gayra, were arrested and sentenced to five years in prison camps.
Rehabilitated in 1956.
Only dreamers and those deeply devoted to their cause blaze new trails for humanity. True, they wander endlessly, fall, but still, as if enchanted, they move forward, sometimes breaking their hearts and heads on the obstacles they encounter, yet still, relentlessly, like the waters of a great river, they move forward and forward.
