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Darkness at Noon at Seventy-Five: Reflections on Arthur Koestler’S Anti-Stalinist Classic

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Darkness at Noon at Seventy-Five: Reflections on Arthur Koestler’S Anti-Stalinist Classic 112 Book Reviews Darkness at Noon at Seventy-five: Reflections on Arthur Koestler’s Anti-stalinist Classic Arthur Koestler Darkness at Noon (New York: Scribner, 1941), 288 pp., $26.00 (pb), isbn 9781476785554. There are few novels that survive their times as political masterpieces, as well as solid works of fiction. If one were to count the half dozen or so novels that serve as a testament to mid-twentieth century totalitarianism, it would be a major oversight not to include Arthur Koestler’s Darkness at Noon, written about and during the height of the Stalinist period of the Soviet Union. This novel, originally written in German, influenced the course of political history by serving as a key touchstone of anti-Stalinist and anti-totalitarian thought. Koestler was a key contributor to The God that Failed, Richard Crossman’s powerful 1949 anthology of self-critical reflections by former communists. As a democratic socialist and British Labour Member of Parliament, Crossman realised that the fellow travellers of the ussr were deluded into believing that Stalin’s crimes had been exaggerated. He saw clearly, unlike apologists for Sta- lin such as Walter Duranty and George Bernard Shaw, that Communists were not basically militant but well-intentioned progressives. In joining Koestler’s reflections to those of other prominent former communists, Crossman drew upon Koestler’s international reputation as an anti-Communist writer. Koestler would go on to become a key figure in the Congress for Cultural Freedom, an alli- ance of liberal and socialist anti-Communists that brought together some of the mid-twentieth century’s most distinguished intellectuals, and Darkness at Noon has been republished several times globally. It merits a good film adaptation. Koestler joined the German communist party in 1932, and spend a good part of 1932 to 1933 in the Soviet Union as a feted foreign communist author. There he enjoyed the state-bestowed privileges of an admired artist, even while being troubled by the signs of the massive Ukrainian famine that he witnessed, along with the severe hardships and shortages of Soviet life in both the cities and the countryside. He was especially struck by both the palpable fear he sensed among Soviet citizens, in addition to the uniformly panegyric character of all political discussions that he held with them. In early 1938 he left the Party. Initially published in two versions in 1940–1941, Darkness at Noon has served as both an intellectual diagnosis and a warning concerning the extremes of Joseph Stalin’s Great Terror and its attendant Moscow Trials of the Old Bolshe- viks, or the Yezhovshchina of the 1930s. It is equally, in its philosophical con- tent, a powerful indictment of totalitarianism in general. With it, Koestler also © koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2016 | doi 10.1163/18763324-00001265 <UN> Book Reviews 113 contributed to world literature a first rate prison novel, in which he drew from his own incarceration and near execution in a Falange prison during the Span- ish Civil War. The protagonist, N.S. Rubashov, is a composite character of the accused Old Bolsheviks at the Moscow Trials of 1936–1938, and Koestler states the obvious to this effect in his dedication. Rubashov was close to Lenin during the Bolshevik Revolution and the subsequent Civil War, and served as a Polit- buro member. Like many of the real Old Bolsheviks, such as Nikolai Bukha- rin, Grigori Zinoviev, Alexei Rykov, and Lev Kamenev, he is purged by Stalin (“Number One”) as a counterrevolutionary traitor. Over a series of interroga- tions in a Moscow prison, likely based on Lubyanka, he is worn down to the point of signing a clearly bogus confession and executed in the prison cellar with the nkvd’s standard bullet to the head. Rubashov’s more brutal second interrogator, Gletkin, is younger than Iva- nov and he was therefore only a child in 1917. As such, he is seen by Rubashov as an embodiment of the younger generation of Soviet citizens, who in Koes- tler’s view, held none of the pre-revolutionary scruples or bourgeois prejudices of the older generation. He tells Rubashov that he has refrained from severely torturing Rubashov only because he thinks that it would be ineffective in ob- taining a full confession. His calculations are purely utilitarian and ahistorical, with reference to the party line. He is thus depicted as a more deeply disturb- ing figure in the Communist system than Ivanov, who at least has a real his- torical base for repudiation. It is no coincidence that it is implied by Koestler that Gletkin denounced the senior Ivanov, thus explaining Ivanov’s own arrest. Just as the secret police and grand chiefs Nikolai Yezhov, Genrikh Yagoda, and Laventia Beria were all themselves purged and executed, Ivanov falls prey to his own function. The revolution thus devours its own children, much like the French Jacobins of 1789 who ended up guillotined, and Koestler has Rubashov reflect upon this relevant history. Denunciations of managers by younger and ambitious subordinates were a method of professional advancement during the Stalinist period, and the older generation lived in fear of fanatical indoc- trinated youth. The damage wrought to civil society by this generational war remains tangible in post-Communist society to this day. Over the course of his imprisonment, Rubashov expresses Koestler’s recent- ly acquired ethical and philosophical opposition to Communism, and in par- ticular, to Stalin’s extreme version of it. He no longer believes in what his first interrogator and former army friend, Ivanov, describes as “vivisectionist moral- ity,” i.e. the doctrine that an end can justify a brutal set of means in politics. For Ivanov, true members of the party must accept that a classless and wholly just future utopia requires social engineering experimentation and mass ex- ecutions in the present. Furthermore, contradictory policies in Party policy are the soviet and post-soviet review 45 (2018) 109-128 <UN>.
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