Since the United States appears to be in the midst of a socialist-inspired insurrection, history may instruct on the human toll previous communist revolutions have wrought in terms of persecution, suffering, and death. For the past several decades such stories have been censored or stricken entirely from scholarly treatises, education and popular culture. As a result, the American public has little wherewithal to discern the communist revolutionaries’ methods for seizing power and ultimate goals, the foremost of which involves the elimination of anyone suspected of “counterrevolutionary” activities.
Under communism the state, its policies, police and military are elevated to “God-like” status, all countervailing ecclesiastical and political viewpoints are automatically considered thoughtcrimes that carry the death sentence. As a result in post-revolutionary Russia alone several million Christian men, women and children were mercilessly tortured, raped and murdered. The Chekist is an excellent starting point for understanding the barbaric and murderous end game of the Marxist-communist state.-Ed
The film The Chekist (1992), a Russian-French co-production, was directed by well known Russian director Alexander Rogozhkin and based on a short story by Vladimir Zazubrin.
The film takes place during the Russian civil war, following the 1917 Russian Revolution. Andrey Srubov, a revolutionary from a Russian upper class family, heads a local “CheKa” (Lenin’s Soviet secret police) department in a Siberian town recently taken from the anti-communist White Army. Srubov, together with his colleague Isaac Katz and Ian Pepel (the latter based in part on Latvian CheKa leader Martin Latsis) sign the death warrants of countless people who’s main fault is belonging to the “enemy class” of the Soviet regime.
(Warning: Graphic Subject Matter and Visual Content)
Former White officers, priests, “bourgeois” intellectuals, and anyone who stands in the way of suspicion are led into a cold rat infested cellar, forced to undress, and are shot without trial or even the pronouncement of sentence. Their bodies are carried out by truckloads every night, while their clothes are divided up by their executioners. Srubov, who’s own father was executed by his current cohort, Katz, finds ways of morally justifying the murders he is committing in the name of the ‘revolution’.
This film, which is currently no longer in distribution, offers a gristly look at the realities of Lenin and Trotsky era Bolshevism, known as the “Red Terror”. In all fairness to history, the film spares the audience of the full extent of the horrors of the Cheka basement, but it gives enough of an idea. It also reveals the psyche and attitudes of the killers themselves, offering us a peak into their dark world.
The film was based on the short story by Vladimir Zazubrin called Schepka (Wood Chip).
Zazubrin’s short story was released very briefly in a Soviet literary magazine in 1923, then was banned within a year’s time. Copies of the magazine were destroyed. Zazubrin himself ended up becoming a victim of the apparatus he wrote about during the purge of 1937. The story was only published again in 1989, during the Glasnost era.
(Via the film’s Facebook page.)
