Authors

Discussion

This paper will explore one of the foremost examples of a literary sub-genre in the 1920s that Muireann Maguire has aptly termed ‘Cheka Gothic’: novels and novellas that considered the moral dimensions of the Chekist’s world and the psychological effects of the bloodstained nature of this work. Vladimir Zazubrin’s Chip was written in 1923 but rejected for publication. Discovered in the Lenin Library in the 1960s, the original manuscript was first published only in 1989, in the Siberian literary journal that had initially turned it down. In this paper I will analyse the text of Chip in relation to the intellectual context of the NEP era, exploring what the text means and why it was deemed unsuitable for publication - despite Zazubrin’s communist credentials and strong reputation as a write. Three interrelated themes will be explored: the interplay of belief and doubt; the fate of the individual and individual agency relative to the macrohistorical (‘when the forest is cut down, chips fly’); and the imprint of violence upon socialist construction. I will suggest that Chip is a remarkable artefact of Bolshevik awareness that an inherent duality resides in the violence of the revolutionary state: it may be necessary, but it could easily corrupt the Revolution from within.