The Tale of Ak and Humanity by Yefim Zozulya (1918),1 translated by Alex Shvartsman, begins with an announcement of the formation of the Board of Supreme Determination, an organisation that will decide who has the right to live. Those deemed to be unnecessary will be required to leave life within twenty-four hours:
For those unnecessary people who cannot leave life, because of their love thereof or due to their weak character, the judgment of the Board of Supreme Determination is to be carried out by their friends, neighbors, or special armed squadrons.
This announcement causes panic amongst the populace until they learn that the highly respected Ak is one of the Board’s members.
The next part of the story sees a family interviewed: the son gets a five year deferment; the mother and father do not. The supervisor mentions to the guard that the couple will probably be unable to leave life themselves.
We subsequently see records of other assessments—then Ak starts to have doubts about the process, and stops it before he disappears. When AK later returns at the end of the story he appears to have changed his mind (or has gone mad), but the officials ignore him and continue with their new task describing their joyous observations of the populace. The latter continue living their lives as if Ak had never existed.
I thought this might be an allegory about Stalin’s purges, but it is actually, according to the introduction2—and I would have guessed from the date had I known—about the Bolsheviks shortly after the Russian Revolution.
It’s not a bad piece given its age, but the back and forth ending is weaker than the rest.
**+ (Average to Good). 3,800 words. Story link.
1. There is also a 1919 publication date for this story, and a 1922 one, too (this may be for the story’s subsequent book publication).
2. The introduction also states that the story “helped establish the anti-utopia genre, and directly inspired and influenced Zamyatin’s We, which was finished a year later.”