Alexander Ignatyevich Tarasov-Rodionov (; October 7, 1885 – September 3, 1938) was a Russian/Soviet writer and revolutionary, best known for his novel ''Chocolate'' which at the time of publication was acclaimed as a tale of heroic self-sacrifice but has since been criticized as a justification for the

Red Terror The Red Terror () was a campaign of political repression and Mass killing, executions in Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic, Soviet Russia which was carried out by the Bolsheviks, chiefly through the Cheka, the Bolshevik secret police ...

Biography

Tarasov-Rodionov was born in

Astrakhan Astrakhan (, ) is the largest city and administrative centre of Astrakhan Oblast in southern Russia. The city lies on two banks of the Volga, in the upper part of the Volga Delta, on eleven islands of the Caspian Depression, from the Caspian Se ...

, where his father was a surveyor. He studied law at the

University of Kazan Kazan Federal University (; ) is a public research university located in Kazan, Russia. The university was founded in 1804 as Imperial Kazan University, which makes it the second oldest continuously existing tertiary education institution in Rus ...

and joined the

Bolshevik The Bolsheviks, led by Vladimir Lenin, were a radical Faction (political), faction of the Marxist Russian Social Democratic Labour Party (RSDLP) which split with the Mensheviks at the 2nd Congress of the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party, ...

party in 1905, taking an active part in the

1905 Revolution The Russian Revolution of 1905, also known as the First Russian Revolution, was a revolution in the Russian Empire which began on 22 January 1905 and led to the establishment of a constitutional monarchy under the Russian Constitution of 1906, t ...

. In 1908, he received his law degree. He was drafted in 1914, and he became a second lieutenant. Later, he participated in the

1917 Revolution The Russian Revolution was a period of political and social change in Russia, starting in 1917. This period saw Russia abolish its monarchy and adopt a socialist form of government following two successive revolutions and a civil war. It ...

and was involved in taking

Pyotr Krasnov Pyotr Nikolayevich Krasnov (; – 17 January 1947), also known as Peter Krasnov, was a Russian military leader, writer and later Nazi collaborator. Krasnov served as a lieutenant general in the Imperial Russian Army during World War I and la ...

prisoner during the Kerensky-Krasnov uprising. He also fought with the

Red Army The Workers' and Peasants' Red Army, often shortened to the Red Army, was the army and air force of the Russian Soviet Republic and, from 1922, the Soviet Union. The army was established in January 1918 by a decree of the Council of People ...

during the

Civil War A civil war is a war between organized groups within the same Sovereign state, state (or country). The aim of one side may be to take control of the country or a region, to achieve independence for a region, or to change government policies.J ...

. After being demobilized, he worked as a magistrate and was involved in setting up the literary organizations ''

Kuznitsa Kuznitsa (English: Forge or Smithy) was a Soviet literary association which existed from 1920 to 1932. Biography The Kuznitsa association consisted of proletarian writers who emerged from Proletkult in January 1920. Among them were Sergei Obrado ...

'' (The Smithy) and RAPP.The Soviet Union, A Biographical Dictionary, Macmillan, NY, 1990. At this time, he also began writing. His works were printed in

proletarian The proletariat (; ) is the social class of wage-earners, those members of a society whose possession of significant economic value is their labour power (their capacity to work). A member of such a class is a proletarian or a . Marxist philo ...

magazines such as '' Oktyabr'' and '' Young Guard''. His novel ''Chocolate'' was published in 1922. His troubles began in 1931 when, on a business trip to Berlin, he met

Vladimir Nabokov Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov ( ; 2 July 1977), also known by the pen name Vladimir Sirin (), was a Russian and American novelist, poet, translator, and entomologist. Born in Imperial Russia in 1899, Nabokov wrote his first nine novels in Rus ...

and persuaded him to return to Russia for a visit. Nabokov's family had supported the

White Army The White Army, also known as the White Guard, the White Guardsmen, or simply the Whites, was a common collective name for the armed formations of the White movement and Anti-Sovietism, anti-Bolshevik governments during the Russian Civil War. T ...

and he was disdainful of what he saw. After that, Tarasov-Rodionov fell out of favor with the communist party and was under suspicion. On 27 April 1938, he was arrested on charges of espionage and

Trotskyism Trotskyism (, ) is the political ideology and branch of Marxism developed by Russian revolutionary and intellectual Leon Trotsky along with some other members of the Left Opposition and the Fourth International. Trotsky described himself as an ...

. He was sentenced to death the same day and, five months later, was executed at the

Kommunarka shooting ground The Kommunarka firing range (), former dacha of secret police chief Genrikh Yagoda, was used as a burial ground from 1937 to 1941. Executions may have been carried out there by the NKVD during the Great Terror and until the war started; altern ...

. In 1956, he was rehabilitated. A number of his other works, including ''Grass and Blood'' (1924) and his unfinished autobiographical trilogy ''Heavy Steps'' (begun in 1927), were long considered to be ideologically incorrect, along with ''Chocolate'', which was also burned by the

Nazis Nazism (), formally named National Socialism (NS; , ), is the far-right politics, far-right Totalitarianism, totalitarian socio-political ideology and practices associated with Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party (NSDAP) in Germany. During H ...

during the extensive

Nazi book burnings The Nazi book burnings were a campaign conducted by the German Student Union (, ''DSt'') to ceremonially Book burning, burn books in Nazi Germany and First Austrian Republic, Austria in the 1930s. The books targeted for burning were those viewed ...

in 1933.

"Chocolate"

The work was first published in December 1922 in the journal "Young Guard." It tells the story of Zudin, a chairman of the local

Cheka The All-Russian Extraordinary Commission ( rus, Всероссийская чрезвычайная комиссия, r=Vserossiyskaya chrezvychaynaya komissiya, p=fsʲɪrɐˈsʲijskəjə tɕrʲɪzvɨˈtɕæjnəjə kɐˈmʲisʲɪjə, links=yes), ...

, who is accidentally implicated in and finally executed for a bribery scandal involving, among other things, some chocolate that his wife accepted as a gift from his secretary. It was reprinted in the USSR five times (1925, 1927, 1928, 1930, 1990), and translated into several languages, including Hungarian, where it was read by young revolutionaries such as

Imre Lakatos Imre Lakatos (, ; ; 9 November 1922 – 2 February 1974) was a Hungarian philosopher of mathematics and science, known for his thesis of the fallibility of mathematics and its "methodology of proofs and refutations" in its pre-axiomatic stage ...

. A review, published in the Petrograd "Red Student", was enthusiastic, saying that the death by execution of Zudin, though an unfortunate turn of events since he was innocent, revealed a real pattern: Communists and specifically the Chekists are first and foremost merciless towards themselves. The main character is purportedly based on the recollections of

Felix Dzerzhinsky Felix Edmundovich Dzerzhinsky (; ; – 20 July 1926), nicknamed Iron Felix (), was a Soviet revolutionary and politician of Polish origin. From 1917 until his death in 1926, he led the first two Soviet secret police organizations, the Cheka a ...

, as cited in the memoir of V. V. Ovsienko, about the real person D. Y. Chudin, a member of the board of the

Petrograd Saint Petersburg, formerly known as Petrograd and later Leningrad, is the second-largest city in Russia after Moscow. It is situated on the River Neva, at the head of the Gulf of Finland on the Baltic Sea. The city had a population of 5,601, ...

Cheka, shot on August 23, 1919.''А. В. Тишков.'' Дзержинский. — М., 1974. (Гл. XII)
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English translations

*
Chocolate, a novel by Alexander Tarasov-Rodionov;translated from the Russian by Charles Malamuth
', Doubleday, Doran & company, inc., 1932. *''Chocolate'', from ''Fifty Years of Russian Prose'', M.I.T Press, 1971. 'Chocolate' was dramatized for BBC Radio 4 in 1988 by Peter Thomson, with Ian Hogg as Zudin. Directed by Matthew Walters.

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Tarasov-Rodionov, Alexander 1885 births 1938 deaths Old Bolsheviks Russian male novelists Russian male short story writers Russian military personnel of World War I Soviet novelists Soviet male writers Executed writers Soviet rehabilitations Writers from Kazan Great Purge victims from Russia People of the Russian Revolution

Biography

"Chocolate"

English translations

See also

References