Aleksandr Eiduk

Not to be confused with Alexander Heiduk.

Aleksandr Vladimirovich Eiduk (Russian: Александр Владимирович Эйдук, Latvian: Aleksandrs Eiduks, 1886–1938) was a Soviet Cheka operative and poet of Latvian ethnicity. During the Great Purge, Eiduk was arrested and shot as a part of the so-called "Latvian Operation" by the NKVD on August 28, 1938. He was rehabilitated in 1956.

Early years

Eiduk was born in 1886 in the family of Valdemārs Eiduks, scribe of Vietalva-Odziena parish of the Cēsis district and teacher of Zādzene, and his wife Minna, born Liepa in Kreis Wenden of the Governorate of Livonia, then part of the Russian Empire. He studied at the Riga Commercial School, from which he graduated in 1903, then worked as an assistant to the scribe of Saikawa Parish (1904-1905). He joined the Latvian Social Democratic Workers' Party and participated in the events of the 1905 Russian Revolution. During the punitive expedition in 1906, he fled to Germany through Odessa, where he worked in the Berlin office (1906-1908), then later in the Mintzer brothers' factory in Vienna (1908-1914).

At the beginning of the First World War, he was arrested as a citizen of the Russian Empire and was in a series of internment camps, first in Drosendorf and Grossau in Lower Austria from August 1914 to August 1917, followed by political quarantine in Tyrol in Austria from September to December 1917. After the October Revolution, Eiduks returned to Latvia.

Soviet career

At the beginning of 1918 he was the chairman of the Revolutionary War Tribunal of the 5th Army in Daugavpils. After the German occupation he went to Russia, where he dealt with prisoners of war cases as Commissioner of the People's Commissariat of Military Affairs, then in the fall of 1918 he headed the Revolutionary War Tribunal of the 6th Army in Vologda. From October 1918, he worked in Cheka, was a member of the presidium of the All-Russian Emergency Commission, an investigator, and a member of the collegium of the People's Commissariat of the Internal Affairs of the CPSU (NKVD) (1919-1920).

In 1920—1921 he worked in the People's Commissariat of Foreign Trade of the KPFSR (Наркомвнешторг РСФСР), heading the department of foreign agencies, then cooperated with foreign organizations that provided support to Russian famine victims (1921-1923). In the 1920s, Eiduk served as a Soviet representative to the American Relief Administration, whose agents appreciated him for "moving with a celerity not characteristically Russian".

One of the first Soviet defectors, G. A. Solomon, who worked with Eiduk during this period in the People's Commissariat for Foreign Trade, wrote the following about him in the first volume of his memoirs:

The name was terrifying, and he himself boasted of it. Eiduk, a member of the board of the Cheka, was distinguished, like the famous Latsis (also a Latvian, like Eiduk), with purely sadistic bloodthirstiness and unrestrained ferocity ...

... In conclusion of the description of Eiduk's work, I will give a small episode. Somehow he stayed with me until 11-12 pm. There was something very urgent. We sat at my desk. Suddenly from Lubyanka came (the wind was from there) "Start the car!" And then the truck engine roared. Eiduk froze in mid-sentence. His eyes were screwed up, as if in sweet languor, and in a kind of tender and languid voice he said with satisfaction, looking at me:

- "Oh, ours work ..."

I didn't know then what the sounds of a humming engine meant.

- "Who works?... what is it?" I asked.

- "Ours... at the Lubyanka..." he answered, making a movement with the index finger of his right hand, as if raising and lowering the trigger of a revolver.

A cold horror crept behind me... It became clear and so terrifying from this understanding... Pictures of what was happening and is happening in Soviet dungeons... Here, nearby, a little almost in my room...

- "Didn't you know that?" he asked in surprise. "After all, it’s every evening at this time... they 'take out' who should be..."

- "Horrible!" I couldn't resist.

- "No, it's good... " - languidly, with pleasure in his voice, like a maniac in sexual ecstasy, said Eiduk, - "this brightens the blood..."

And it seemed to me that some terrible, shaggy monster was approaching me... a monster breathing on me the icy breath of death...

It hummed outside the window of my room, where I lived, worked and slept...

Death buzzed...

Similarly in 1919, an American diplomat testified to Congress that Eiduk was, with another Cheka leader, considered the "most blood-thirsty monster in Russia".

On April 23, 1923, he was dismissed from his post and expelled from the Bolshevik Party for "loitering and playing in casinos" and sent to Central Asia, where he served on the Turkestan-Siberian Railway Planning Board (1923-1924). After that, he settled in the Supreme National Economic Council of the USSR, where he worked from 1925 to 1928. In 1928, after the restoration of his Party membership, he continued to work in various economic positions. In 1934, he began to manage the Eastern district of the Gulag camps (Дмитровлаг), whose prisoners participated in the construction of the Moscow-Volga canal.

Arrest, execution and rehabilitation

During the Great Terror, on June 4, 1938, he was arrested by the NKVD as part of the "Latvian Operation" on charges of "espionage and belonging to a counter-revolutionary organization". He was executed at the Komunarka mass grave near Moscow on August 28, 1938. He was rehabilitated in 1956.

Poetry

Eiduk is best remembered for his poetry extolling the political terror of the Soviet secret police. In the early 1920s, soon after the Red Army invasion of 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!"

Works

• Alexander Wladimirovic Eiduck, Die russische Hungersnot 1921-1922 und ihre Bekämpfung im Lichte der Tatsachen, Berlin, Vereinigung internationaler Verlagsanstalten, 1922.

Further reading

• Bertrand M. Patenaude. The Big Show in Bololand. (chapter 22, Comrade Eiduk), Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2002, pp. 346–353.