The Conscience of Communism
Koestler's 'Darkness at Noon' Depicts
Disillusionment in Stalinist Russia
August 22, 2008
Every year, nature kills millions of people. So if the Communist Party killed a few hundred thousand Russians for the sake of the "most promising experiment in history," why the moral outrage? "Nature is generous in her senseless experiments on mankind," the inquisitor Ivanov declared in Arthur Koestler's novel, "Darkness at Noon." "Why should mankind not have the right to experiment on itself?"
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Ivanov was arguing with Nicholas Rubashov, a long-time Party worker imprisoned during Stalin's Great Purge of the 1930s. Rubashov had risked his life in the revolution and then devoted the rest of it to proselytizing for Communism. He had knowingly and sanguinely sacrificed other people's lives to the cause. Then he was arrested for "political divergencies."
Between interrogations, Rubashov had only memories for company. He had married the movement as a young man, and never had another family. The Party was his infallible conscience. Mr. Koestler himself joined, and quit, the Communist Party in the 1930s, and he later wrote about the period, "The necessary lie, the necessary slander; the necessary intimidation of the masses to preserve them from shortsighted errors; the necessary liquidation of oppositional groups and hostile classes; the necessary sacrifice of a whole generation in the interest of the next -- it may all sound monstrous, and yet it was so easy to accept while rolling along the single track of faith."
But as Stalin began his paranoic culling of hundreds of thousands of "enemies of the people," Rubashov (and his creator, Mr. Koestler) began to doubt. The ideology still struck them as sound, but the execution was flawed. The masses under Stalin's rule were starving to death, and worse, they feared and distrusted their leaders as they had the tsars. "When and where in history had there ever been such defective saints?" Rubashov wondered. "Whenever had a good cause been worse represented?"
Mr. Koestler had knocked around the world studying politics for many years before writing "Darkness at Noon," which was published in 1940. Born in Budapest in 1905, he later recalled that as a boy, he was "lonely, precocious and neurotic, admired for my brains and detested for my character by teacher and schoolfellows alike." He worked as a journalist in Germany for many years and eventually became a British citizen. He loved alcohol, women and danger; one friend said automobile accidents were his hobby. When reporting on Spain's Civil War, he was arrested by the fascists and spent several months in a prison much like Rubashov's.
He joined the Party in 1931, believing that Communism was the utopian alternative to the Western world, which was then "convulsed by the aftermath of war, scourged by inflation, depression, unemployment and the absence of a faith to live for." Like Rubashov, whose character was based partly on the Bolshevik leader Nikolai Bukharin, Mr. Koestler was deeply disturbed when some people he knew to be innocent were arrested for treason and publicly confessed in the Moscow Show Trials.
Mr. Koestler explores the question of why innocent people would sign confessions admitting to ludicrous assassination plots. He imagines not so much physical torture as a psychological bullying to which old Bolsheviks like Rubashov were especially vulnerable.
"I plead guilty to having placed the idea of man above the idea of mankind," Rubashov confessed. "I know that my aberration, if carried into effect, would have been a mortal danger to the Revolution. Humanitarian weakness and liberal democracy, when the masses are not mature, are suicide for a revolution."
Throughout the 1950s, Mr. Koestler was an ardent Cold Warrior, but he also wrote about science and later the paranormal. In 1983, suffering from Parkinson's disease and leukemia, Mr. Koestler, a long-time advocate of voluntary euthanasia, and his third wife, Cynthia, committed suicide with an overdose of drugs. He was 77 years old; she was 55.
When first published, "Darkness at Noon" was denounced by some Western writers who clung to the belief that Communism, even as Stalin practiced it, was preferable to capitalism. Dalton Trumbo, later one of the screenwriters blacklisted in the McCarthy era, publicly boasted that influential Hollywood Communists had helped prevent "Darkness at Noon" from being made into a movie.
But the inquisitor, Ivanov, ever loyal to the Party, gets the final word: "Do you know of a single example of a state which really followed a Christian policy? In times of need -- and politics are chronically in a time of need -- the rulers were always able to evoke 'exceptional circumstances,' which demanded exceptional measure of defense. Their permanent state of self-defense forces them to defer to another time the putting into practice of humanism."
If Stalinist Russia is a time and place you find interesting, try "Child 44," a new novel by Tom Rob Smith about a top government security officer also suddenly under suspicion by his employers. You won't put it down.
Write to Cynthia Crossen at cynthia.crossen@wsj.com
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