THENEWYORKER,SEPTEMBER30, 2019 81
Unlike other critics of Communism, Koestler took Marxist theory seriously.
BOOKS
ASSASSIN’S CREED
A new translation of Arthur Koestler’s “Darkness at Noon.”
BYADAM KIRSCH
ERICH HARTMANN/MAGNUM
O
n December 1, 1934, Sergei Kirov,
the head of the Communist Party
in Leningrad, was shot and killed in the
hallway outside his office. The assassin,
an unemployed man who had been ex-
pelled from the Party and bore a grudge
against its leadership, was apprehended
on the spot, but the case still raised ques-
tions. How did the killer get his pistol?
Who had called off the bodyguards who
usually surrounded Kirov at all times?
Today, most historians agree that it
was Joseph Stalin himself who ordered
the murder, in order to eliminate a po-
tential rival. But the official investiga-
tion came to quite different conclusions.
During the next four years, it metasta-
sized into a conspiracy-hunt that claimed
to expose shocking villainy at the high-
est levels of Russia’s government, mili-
tary, and industry. In a series of trials
that were publicized around the world,
some of the oldest and most trusted
Bolshevik leaders—men who, with
Lenin, had led the Russian Revolu-
tion—were accused of being traitors.
Supposedly, acting on orders from Sta-
lin’s exiled rival Leon Trotsky, they had
plotted to murder Stalin, to hand So-
viet territory over to Nazi Germany, and
to restore capitalism in Russia. Their al-
leged methods included not just assas-
sinations but also industrial sabotage,
or “wrecking”—even putting ground
glass in the nation’s butter supply.
At the conclusion of the trial of two
veteran Party leaders, Lev Kamenev and
Grigory Zinoviev, the state prosecutor
general, Andrey Vyshinsky, denounced
the defendants with florid Stalinist rhet-
oric: “These mad dogs of capitalism tried
to tear limb from limb the best of the
best of our Soviet land.... I demand that
these dogs gone mad should be shot—
every one of them!” There was never any
doubt about the verdict or the sentence.
And the Party leaders who were con-
demned, in what came to be known as
the Moscow Trials, were only the most
prominent of the victims. Stalin’s Great
Purge, of 1936-38, ultimately took the
lives of a million Soviet citizens, and sent
millions more to the Gulag.
By the late nineteen-thirties, Western
intellectuals who sympathized with Com-
munism had already proved themselves
capable of accepting a great deal of kill-
ing in the name of the cause. Such “fellow-
travellers” usually justified Stalinism’s
crimes as the necessary price of building
a socialist future, and of defending it
against a hostile capitalist world. Walter
Duranty, the Times’ correspondent in
Moscow, excused the three million fam-
ine deaths that were caused by the push
to collectivize Soviet agriculture, writing
that, “to put it brutally—you can’t make
an omelet without breaking eggs.”
The Moscow Trials, however, pre-
sented a different sort of challenge to
the Communist faith. It was one thing
to unleash the power of the state against
kulaks, the wealthy peasants who were
key villains in Soviet mythology. But
how could it be that Old Bolsheviks,
who had, until the day before yester-
day, been the rulers of the Soviet Union,
were secret counter-revolutionaries?
On the other hand, if the charges were
false, why did the defendants confess?
Zinoviev, who had been a member of
the first Politburo, in 1917, and the head
of the Comintern, said, “My defective
Bolshevism became transformed into
anti-Bolshevism, and through Trotsky-
ism I arrived at Fascism.” Kamenev con-
cluded his statement by addressing his
children: “No matter what my sentence
will be, I in advance consider it just.
Don’t look back. Go forward together
with the Soviet people, follow Stalin.”
Did such men simply give in to pro-
longed interrogation—the so-called “con-
veyor,” whereby prisoners were questioned
for days on end by a team of agents work-
ing in shifts—or to outright torture? Were
they trying to protect their wives and
