|
The Wild Red Commissar
from the original Slovak article
by
Svätoboj Clementis
published in Proti
Prúdu (Against the Flow)
at
http://www.prop.sk/
The Commander of the God-forsaken little Tartar town of Bugulma, a
Communist and a Red Commissar Jaroslav Hašek, treated the murderers of
the Revolution in a truly revolutionary manner: "Since hanging is
forbidden, I order all these traitors, Ivans Ivanovičovs to be shot on
the spot". The author of The Fateful Adventures of the Good
Soldier Švejk, the most famous antiwar novel to have come out of
the war was
a revolutionary judge in the forgotten little Tartar town and admitted
even that when they found a machine gun and several bombs harbored by an
orthodox Russian priest: "When we were taking him to the execution
yard to be shot, the priest wept." Jaroslav Hašek published such
stories in a collection titled When I was the Commander of Bugulma.
When he fulfilled his revolutionary
duties in the Tartar town he dropped his anchor as the
"politruk" of the 5th Army parts of which were pressing
Kolchak deeper into Siberia. Since among Kolchak's allies were counted
the Czecho-Slovak Legions, Jaroslav Hašek fought against his own..
The name Jaroslav Hašek appeared in
the Prague newspaper Národní listy,[The National Pages] for the
first time in 1901. The young author of feulleitons quickly
became known for his feulleitons and gained a following among the
readers many of whom were saddened when in 1915 a notice appeared in
this paper announcing that the author of the popular serial Idiot At
the Company fell on the Russian front. Officially Jaroslav Hašek
became Missing In Action (MIA) - didn't' return from battle. According to the laws of war
such wording was as good as proclaiming him dead.
For the young and talented journalist
World War I began in 1915. Although he tried which ever way to avoid the
draft, in the end he found himself with the 91st Infantry Regiment based
in České Budějovice [Czech Budweis]. There he met his company
commander Lieutenant Lukáš's spotshine [military servant]. The robust
stonemason František Strašlipka enjoyed telling life stories and
jokes. It was this man that became the model for the world-renown Josef
Švejk. Later Jaroslav Hašek left for the front and participated in the
battles for Sokal. In September 1915, near the small Galician village of
Chorupany, along with František Strašlipka, Hašek turned himself in
to the Russians to become voluntarily a Prisoner Of War (POW). As far as their regiment
was concerned they became MIAs and Prague newspapers printed their
obituaries.
Yet, Jaroslav Hašek a František
Strašlipka were alive, and went through several POW camps. When the
Czar's Government began organizing volunteers from among Czechs and
Slovaks to fight Austria-Hungary, Jaroslav Hašek comes to Kiev in June
1916 as the clerk of the Jan Hus Volunteers Regiment's 7th Company. But
the young journalist speaks a very good Russian, language he had learned
back home, so he's earning the trust of his commanders. He begins
publishing in the Čechoslovan [Czecho-Slav] newspaper where he
later becomes the editor-in-chief, visiting the camps and agitating
among his fellow countrymen to join the armed struggle against the hated
Habsburg monarchy. He's swept off his feet by the idea of the Czech
Lands and Slovakia merging with Czarist Russia.
The Bolshevik Revolution changes
Jaroslav Hašek. He receives it with sympathy because he sees in it a
possibility of ethnic and social liberation of nations. However, the
Czechoslovak Legions assumed a negative attitude toward the Bolsheviks
and so Hašek parts company with his fellow countrymen. And he goes to
Moscow where he joins the ranks of the Red Army and becomes also a
member of the party of Bolsheviks. He collaborates with the editorial
offices of the Průkopník (Trailblazer) paper of the
Czechoslovak Communists, but in April of 1918 he leaves on a party
mission to Samara. There he sets himself up in the San-Remo Hotel and
begins to recruit volunteers from among Czechs and Slovaks to join the
ranks of the Red Army fighting with arms in the proletarian revolution.
He manages well and the contingent of internationalist volunteers led by
Jaroslav Hašek consists of l20 men who participate in the battles
against the "white Cossacks" and successfully suppressed the
takeover of the government in Samara. However, when they took Samara
over, the Czecho-Slovak Legions were nearby. Jaroslav Hašek found
himself in a peculiar situation. That is to say, the Czecho-Slovak
Legions' Court Martial issued an arrest warrant for the traitor Jaroslav
Hašek. And so he had to keep hiding. When he ran into Legionnaires
performing random checks, he pretended to be feeble-minded. He'd start
telling them how he rescued an officer of the Legions who had fallen
into a latrine and would ask the patrol what decoration did he earn. He
spoke Russian, of course, so the patrol would actually take him for an
idiot and let him go. In the end he managed to get to the Red Army in
Simbirsk where they put him in charge of a contingent of Chuvashs. He
leaves with the contingent for Bugulma, the seat of the 5th Army's Staff
Headquarters with Marshall Tukhachevskyi in command. A mere month later
he becomes the commander of the town.
After this particular episode of his
life he found himself in the little town of Ufa where he started
publishing the Naše cesta (Our Path) newspaper. Then followed Chelyabinsk,
Omsk, and
Krasnoyarsk. In Krasnoyar he married Alexandra
Gavrilovna Lvova. Shura - the diminutive of Alexandra - as Hašek called
her doesn't even know that her husband has a legal wife in Prague and an
eight-year old son Richard.
In Irkutsk, where he and his Shura
cast their anchor, he becomes a deputy of the metropolitan Soviet (i.e.
Council in Russian), publishes the Muster newspaper in German and
Hungarian, and the Political Worker Bulletin in Russian. There he also
had great honor bestowed upon him - he was put in charge of publishing
the JUR (Blooming), the world's first newspaper in the Buriat
language which Hašek also quickly learned. He bought a house on the
bank of the Angara River in Irkutsk and becomes the Deputy Political
Leader of the 5th Army.
The "Dry Law" in force in Siberia at that time was a heavy
burden for Jaroslav Hašek. The law was radical. Anyone caught drunk
could be mercilessly shot. And Jaroslav Hašek enjoyed very much gazing
at the bottom of an empty stein. His liberation from this
"crucible" came when he was offered to return to
Czecho-Slovakia [created after WWI by joining the Czech Lands and
Slovakia, formerly part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire]. He was tasked
to support the Communist movement there.
The Prodigal Son returned to
Pardubice. After several weeks of quarantine he's already back in
Prague, with his Shura of course who didn't know a word of Czech. After
several days in Prague he forgot Shura, he also forgot his Communist
past and threw himself into a carefree life in the atmosphere of the
pubs of Prague. He drinks a lot and writes even more. Now he is with
Shura, at other times at Jarmila's. It is in this stormy life period
that the first pages of The [Fateful Adventures of the] Good Soldier
Švejk appear. Certainly a fate par excellence. One of the best-known
antiwar novel in the history of literature was written by "a red
commissar" who had several dozen people executed.
On the advice of his friends who saw
how Hašek "suffered" in the pubs of Prague he leaves for the
small town of Lipnice nad Sázavou (Bluegrass on the Sázava River). But
his health, marked by the "revolutionary life-style" keeps
calling for attention ever more urgently. Jaroslav Hašek passes away on
January 3rd 1923 and the continuation of The Fateful Adventures of the
Good Soldier Švejk in revolutionary Russia planned by the author are
never written. It is a pity as Jaroslav Hašek's writing was indeed
extraordinary, his stormy life and all his Russian or Bolshevik
adventures notwithstanding. Perhaps what he said in the novel through
his Švejk holds true:
"Not everybody can be smart, the dumb ones must make the exception,
because if everyone were smart there would then be so much reasoning
power in the world that every other man would be totally stupefied on
account of it." |
