Uncouth communism

The Soviet writer Alexander Fadeyev is most known for his novel "The Young Guard", about a Communist resistance group in Nazi-occupied Ukraine during World War II. However, Fadeyev wrote a famous novel already in 1926, "The Rout".

The plot of "The Rout" is set in Eastern Siberia during the Russian Civil War. The main characters are a group of Communist partisans, led by a party veteran named Levinson. They are originally based in a mining town, but are soon forced to cross the Siberian wilderness, hunted by counter-revolutionaries. In plain English, the novel is a piece of Communist propaganda.

And yet, it's a fascinating work.

"The Rout" is a very uncouth and realistic piece of literature. Although pro-Communist, it never idealizes or prettifies the Communist regime or the Russian revolution. The mineworkers are hard-boiled and sexist, the few women are lightfooted and anything but feminist, idealist revolutionary intellectuals are depicted as cowardly and confused, and the main hero of the novel is a Jewish party commissar! War is hell, and at one point, the partisan leader Levinson orders his soldiers to confiscate the pigs of a starving Siberian farmer, knowing very well that the farmer will probably die.

It's this realism that makes "The Rout" such an interesting book, and it also marks it out from another revolutionary novel published at the same time, Nikolai Ostrovsky's "How the steel was tempered", which reads like a propaganda pamphlet, and sometimes borders on the ridiculous. Fadeyev probably imagined that uncouth realism would serve the cause of the revolution better than silly idealization. Stalin had different ideas about the matter, and later made "socialist realism" (read prettification of the Stalinist dictatorship) the only legal form of literature. Ironically, Fadeyev made his peace with the Stalinist regime, while Ostrovsky, according to popular rumour, died under suspicious circumstances...

Be that as it may, I recommend "The Rout" for those who want to time-travel to the revolutionary Russian Far East.