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 Ivanovièovs 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 Èeské Budìjovice [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 Èechoslovan [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 Prùkopník (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."