‘The most terrible laboratory of the Revolution’: Dialectical Violence and Transformation in Vladimir Zazubrin’s “Shchepka” (1923)

In an article on the historic parallels between the use of terror in the French Revolution and in the Bolshevik consolidation of power after the October Revolution in 1917, a certain G. Shklovskii was able to write in the weekly journal of the first Soviet secret police organisation, the Cheka, that although ‘No one can rejoice at the shedding of blood […] a critical analysis of historical events will make it clear to everyone that the French people were forced to resort to this terrible means.’ If the spectre of communism was haunting Europe, then, so too did the historical legacy of the French Reign of Terror haunt the Bolsheviks in the implementation of their own Red Terror, with debates about the morality of revolutionary violence ricocheting in all directions.

This paper explores the ideological contexts for the Cheka's use of 'dialectical' revolutionary violence and argues in light of this for a new reading of Vladimir Zazubrin's 1923 novella "Shchepka" ("The Chip"). Zazubrin's tale sees the progressive descent into madness and then death of provincial Cheka boss Andrei Srubov as he oversees the torture, interrogation, and execution of enemies of the revolution - a descent which scholarship has understood as tragic, and proof of the failures inherent to the Chekist system.

However, taking the aforementioned ideological contexts and Valerian Pravdukhin's unpublished 1923 preface to the novella as evidence, this paper puts forward that for the Chekist, violence and bloodshed were in fact valued for their transformative potential. Indeed, if we read "Shchepka" through this lens, Srubov's death takes on a positive light: Pravdukhin argued that it is through learning from his failure that the early Soviet reader might "burn out" the remaining vestiges of bourgeois morality and accept the moral necessity of the Red Terror. Those subjected to the violence of the 'most terrible laboratory of the Revolution', then, are not only the Cheka's victims, nor the Chekists themselves - but the reader as well, transformed from a state of doubt to one of socialist self-actualisation and certainty.