GALINA SEDOVA’S BULGAKOV. LXXIX.

Alexander Semyonovich Rokk Continues.

 

“Dubelt:

‘Judas Iscariot coming to the priests, they promised to give him silver… And these pieces of silver, dear friend, were thirty in number. This is what I pay to all, in his memory.’”

M. A. Bulgakov. Alexander Pushkin.

The time has now come for us to get acquainted with the man whom Bulgakov blames for the catastrophe of yet another foreign intervention, with the codename Anaconda. Bulgakov gives a detailed depiction of Kalsoner’s appearance, but he says little about the appearance of Rokk, except that he is short in stature (“short legs”) and has “small eyes,” which ties these two personages together.

The biography of Kalsoner is obscure, but there is a detailed description of what he has been doing since his arrival to Moscow in 1921. The biography of Rokk is written tongue-in-cheek.---

“Playing the flute was none other than the head of the state farm Alexander Semyonovich Rokk, and to give him his due, he was playing outstandingly. The truth is that once upon a time the flute was the specialty of Alexander Semyonovich. Right until 1917, he had been serving [sic!] in the famous concert ensemble of Maestro Petukhov (petukh means rooster in Russian), every evening gracing with harmonious sounds the foyer of the cozy cinema theater Magical Reveries in the city of Yekaterinoslav (“Glory of Catherine the Great serves here as an indication of supreme power”). However, the great year 1917 which broke the careers of many people, took Alexander Semyonovich too upon new paths. He left Magical Reveries and the dusty star-spangled satin in the foyer, and plunged into the open sea of war and revolution, giving up the flute in favor of the lethal Mauser. He was long battered by the waves, frequently swept ashore now in the Crimea, now in Moscow, now in Turkestan, now even in Vladivostok. It took a revolution to fully reveal the talents of Alexander Semyonovich. It turned out that this man was positively great and surely the foyer of the Reveries was not the right place for him. Not engaging ourselves in lengthy details, let us just say that the last year 1927 and the beginning of 1928, found Alexander Semyonovich in Turkestan, where he, for starters, was editing a huge newspaper, after which he became known as the local member of the supreme economic commission and was celebrated for his amazing works on the irrigation of the Turkestan region. In 1928 Rokk arrived in Moscow and there received a well-deserved vacation. The supreme commission of the organization whose ticket this provincial-old-fashioned man had been so proudly carrying in his pocket, appreciated him and appointed him to a position that was both quiet and highly esteemed. Alas! Alas! To the misfortune of the republic, the bubbly brain of Alexander Semyonovich was hardly extinguished, in Moscow Rokk became acquainted with the discovery of Persikov, and in the suites of [the hotel] Red Paris on Tverskaya Street the idea was born to Alexander Semyonovich of how with the help of Persikov’s beam to revive in the course of just one month the chicken [industry] in the republic. Rokk was listened to at the commission for animal husbandry, he was agreed with, and now Rokk, with a thick piece of paper in hand, went to see the eccentric zoologist.”

The words “concert ensemble,” and especially the name of the ensemble’s maestro: Petukhov (in Russian, named after Rooster), plus the city Yekaterinoslav (in Russian, Catherine’s Glory), where Rokk worked, not even to mention the name of the cinema theater Magical Reveries, all indicate that even if Rokk was indeed a professional flutist (compare this to the thief Miloslavsky in Bulgakov’s play Bliss, calling himself a “soloist of the State Theaters), then his profession, just like the profession of the clock master Bitkov in his play Alexander Pushkin, allowed him to get into contact with people, to get access to their houses (for celebrations, weddings, funerals, etc.), and in this manner and same as Bitkov, he did not necessarily have to be a full-time secret police agent, but at any rate, he could be a part-time informer, earning his Judas’s money.

This may have been the case precisely, judging by Bulgakov’s description of it. The city of Yekaterinoslav points to imperial power of the tsars. Magical Reveries points to a group of ‘magicians’ possessing the art of ‘charming’ people just like Rokk managed to charm the anaconda. The fact that Rokk worked in Turkestan as editor of a large newspaper supports the proposition that the Magical Reveries group was engaged in propaganda among the populace. Rokk’s flute may well be a ‘euphemism’ for Rokk’s propaganda pen.)

Many revolutionaries of yore never deemed it beneath themselves to work as part-time agents of the secret police, which never prevented them from becoming commissars after the revolution, either. This is what probably happened to A. S. Rokk. Bulgakov writes that Alexander Semyonovich “plunged into the open sea of war and revolution, exchanging the flute for the Mauser…” It takes a revolution, no less, to fully reveal the talents of A. S. Rokk. “He was long battered by the waves, frequently swept ashore now in the Crimea, now in Moscow, now in Turkestan, now even in Vladivostok… The last year 1927 and the beginning of 1928 found Alexander Semyonovich in Turkestan, where he, for starters, was editing a huge newspaper… and [later] became known as the local member of the supreme economic commission and was celebrated for his amazing works on the irrigation (obviously, another euphemism for propaganda and indoctrination!) of the Turkestan region.

There can be no doubt here that this is how Bulgakov mockingly describes the nature of the work that Rokk was performing as a commissar.

People working for tsarist Okhrana before the revolution were becoming commissars following the Revolution by the same token as the double-dealing Soviet currency hustlers, fartsovshchiks, of the 1970’s and 1980’s, engaging foreigners in Moscow, were in fact working for the KGB, only to become Russia’s nouveau-riches and oligarchs of the 1990’s and the opposition of the twenty-first century, like today’s celebrated profanity-spouting prostitutes of Pussy Riot, or the notorious anti-Semite Alexei “First-Toast-for-the-Holocaust” Navalny, so much beloved by the West on account of their anti-Putin posturing.

Bulgakov labels the status of A. S. Rokk as “missing, subsequent fate unknown,” but I do not believe that he could really meet some unpleasant fate, although disappear without a visible trace he could, but not in this plain sense. There are three principal arguments against Rokk’s demise. On the one hand, a man with his prodigious communication skills, one who could sweet-talk a deadly anaconda into leaving him alone, successfully targeting his wife instead, a man like this can have no problems getting out of any predicament, having thus escaped the worst imaginable scenario of being embraced and then swallowed by a dread-inspiring, compassion-lacking, rational argument-impervious monster.

Secondly, if ever there existed a danger of being recognized and lynched for the calamity that he unleashed on his countrymen, Bulgakov gives us an indication that this would not be a problem for Rokk either. In fact, A. S. Rokk has become unrecognizable. A dark-haired man in the prime of his life has been transformed into a white-haired trembling old man, who --- what a resilience! --- eventually comes to his senses and “stretching out his hands like a Biblical prophet,” tries to convince the GPU agents that his wife was really-really dead.

But the third and most convincing proof that A. S. Rokk will splendidly blend into the post-NEP Soviet reality of the grandiose Five-Year Plans is his incredible chameleonic biography. Rokk is perfectly adaptable, which fact is very well shown in Bulgakov’s play Adam and Eve in the person of Ponchik-Nepobeda (who is none other than our old acquaintance Shpolyansky from White Guard), who changes his opinions several times back and forth, depending on who in his view is winning the war.