Aleksandr Eiduk

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Not to be confused with Alexander Heiduk.

Aleksandr Eiduk (d. 1938) was a Soviet Cheka operative and poet of Latvian origin. In the 1920s, he served as a Soviet representative to the American Relief Administration, whose agents appreciated him for "moving with a celerity not characteristically Russian".[1] He was executed in 1938 during Stalin's Great Purge.

Eiduk is best remembered for his poetry extolling the political terror of the Soviet secret police. In Moscow, Eiduk reportedly admitted to a friend, with 'enjoyment in his voice like that of an ecstatic sexual maniac', how pleasing he found the roar of truck engines used at the Lubyanka to drown out the noise of executions.

In the early 1920s, soon after the Red Army conquered Georgia, he published the following poem in an anthology entitled The Cheka's Smile:

There is no greater joy, nor better music
Than the crunch of broken lives and bones.
This is why when our eyes are languid
And passions begin to seethe stormily in the breast,
I want to write on your sentence
One unquivering thing: 'Up against the wall! Shoot!'[2]

[edit] References

  1. ^ David C. Engerman (2003). Modernization from the Other Shore: American Intellectuals and the Romance of Russian Development. Harvard University Press, 107. ISBN 0674011511. 
  2. ^ From Gosudarstvo i revoliutsii by Valerii Shambarov (2001), translated in Stalin and his Hangmen by Donald Rayfield, 2005, p. 76. Reproduced here under the terms of fair use.
 This article about a poet is a stub. You can help Wikipedia by expanding it.