WAS ČAKS A COMMUNIST (AT HEART)?

Abstract

At the outbreak of World War I, Aleksandrs Čaks, then still Aleksandrs Čadarainis, together with Riga Alexander-Gymnasium, where he is a student at the time, is evacuated to Russia. During the Civil War, the young man ends up in Saransk, a city in the remote Russian province, where he gets actively involved in politics. He becomes a member of the All-Union Communist (Bolshevik) Party; works as the editor-in- chief of the local newspaper “Коммунистический Путь” (The Communist Road); publishes articles of political nature in it about the current moment, signing them with his initial (A); takes the position of the director of the Agitation and Propaganda Department of the Saransk District Party Committee; organises a celebration of the Anniversary of October Revolution; in a politics study group, presents a report about the Fourth International. So far, Čaks’s publications in the Saransk periodicals have been mentioned in the public space but have not been analysed; moreover, his report, the text of which has been luckily found in the collection of the Literature Museum, has never been mentioned before. In her paper, the author will analyse these sources and focus on the link between the left-wing political views of the young poet and his art. In addition, for the first time in Čaks scholarship, it has been established that the so called Antonov’s gangs, the fight against which the poet joined with a weapon in his hand, was in fact a mass uprising of the farmers in Tambov gubernia against the heavy tax in kind imposed by the soviet power. It has been hypothesised that young A. Čadarainis was informed about the suppressing of the farmers’ insurgency, led by M. Tuhachevsky, by using a particularly inhumane means – poison gases, which, for the first time in the human history, were used to fight civilian population.