84 THENEWYORKER,SEPTEMBER30, 2019
his guilt, and his loss of belief in the in
fallible justice of Communism. Early in
the book, a flashback shows Rubashov
on a mission in Nazi Germany in 1933,
just after Hitler seized power and banned
the Communist Party. In a thrillerlike
scene, Rubashov covertly meets with a
German Communist named Richard,
who pours out his grief to this repre
sentative of the socialist fatherland: his
comrades have been mur
dered, he is living in hiding,
and he is losing faith in the
cause. Rather than sympa
thize with him or promise
help, Rubashov tells Richard
that he is being expelled from
the Party because he dared
to distribute pamphlets that,
as he coldly says, “contained
wordings that the party con
siders politically inadmissi
ble.” By the end of the scene, it’s clear
that Richard has been marked for death.
“The party cannot be wrong,” Ru
bashov says. “You and I can make mis
takes—but not the party.” Anyone who
disagrees with the Party’s dictates is on
the wrong side of history, and so de
serves to be eliminated. The Moscow
Trials, Koestler suggests, were just the
latest example of a tendency toward
selfcannibalism that had been there
from the start.
It is no accident—to use a phrase fa
vored by Communist writers of the time—
that Koestler found the Party’s treatment
of foreign comrades to be the most con
spicuous example of its injustice, since
he had spent most of the thirties as one
of those comrades. Born into a Jewish
family in Hungary in 1905, Koestler had
already lived several professional and ideo
logical lives by the time he joined the
Party, in 1931. As a teenager, he had been
a committed Zionist who moved to Pal
estine to work on an agricultural settle
ment. Quickly realizing that this austere
existence was not for him, Koestler trans
formed himself into a journalist, work
ing as a stringer for German newspapers.
After two years, he returned to Europe,
and by the end of the twenties he had a
precociously successful career in Berlin,
working as an editor and writer for one
of Germany’s biggest liberal dailies.
In the essay that he contributed to
“The God That Failed” (1949), a collec
tion of six memoirs by exCommunist
writers, Koestler recalled how conditions
in Weimar Germany turned him into a
Communist. “Germany lived in a state
of latent civil war, and if one wasn’t pre
pared to be swept along as a passive vic
tim by the approaching hurricane it be
came imperative to take sides,” he wrote.
If the future was a struggle between Na
zism and Communism, then Commu
nism was the only possible choice. But
Koestler emphasized that he
did not become a Commu
nist “by a process of elimina
tion.” Rather, he compared
the experience to a religious
conversion. “The whole uni
verse falls into pattern like the
stray pieces of a jigsaw puz
zle,” he wrote. “There is now
an answer to every question.”
For the next seven years,
Communism was at the cen
ter of Koestler’s life and work. “I served
the Communist Party for seven years—
the same length of time as Jacob tended
Laban’s sheep to win Rachel his daugh
ter,” he wrote, in “The God That Failed.”
(In the Biblical story, Jacob finds out, at
the end of that time, that he’s been
tricked and given the wrong bride.) In
1932, after losing his highly paid job—
because, he claimed, his employers
learned that he had joined the Party—
Koestler made a pilgrimage to the So
viet Union, where he spent eighteen
months travelling around in order to
write a propagandistic book praising the
Soviet experiment. By the time he left
Russia, in 1933, Hitler was in power and
he couldn’t return to Germany. Instead,
he went to France, where he worked for
a series of Partyfunded publications
and agencies until 1938.
Throughout this period, Koestler later
wrote, he was well aware of the gulf be
tween Communist ideals and the real
ity they produced. He had seen the vic
tims of famine in Ukraine, and he had
gone along with the Party’s ruthless im
position of the official line. But he still
felt that the only way to improve the
Party was from within. Indeed, he was
willing to risk his life for it: in 1937, Koest
ler went to report on the Spanish Civil
War for the News Chronicle, a British
daily, knowing that if he was captured
by Franco’s Nationalists his life would
be in danger. In February, he was caught
in the city of Málaga, as it fell to Franco’s forces, and taken prisoner. For the
next three months, he lived in a cell not
unlike Rubashov’s, as his fellowprison
ers were executed and he waited for his
turn. But, because he had been on as
signment for an English newspaper, the
British government and press took an
interest. The public attention meant that
Koestler was spared; in the end, he was
released as part of a prisoner exchange.
This experience, which Koestler wrote
about in his memoir “Dialogue with
Death,” could have strengthened his
Communist convictions—after all, he
had been imprisoned as a rojo, a Red. In
stead, his imprisonment awakened a new
sense of the preciousness of freedom.
“Strangely enough,” he wrote, “I feel that
I have never been so free as I was then.”
This was an existentialist kind of free
dom, cold and clear, the last possession
of someone with nothing left to lose.
Once he was released, Koestler found
it impossible to retreat back into the
intellectual orthodoxy of Party life.
Events in Russia—including the news
that three of his closest friends had
been arrested in Stalin’s purge—only
confirmed his disillusionment. In 1938,
the year he resigned from the Party,
Koestler gave a speech to an audience
of refugee intellectuals in Paris, in which
he affirmed that “a harmful truth is bet
ter than a useful lie,” and that “no move
ment, party or person can claim the
privilege of infallibility.” His listeners,
he remembered, were split in their re
actions: “The nonCommunist half of
the audience applauded, the Commu
nist half sat in heavy silence, most of
them with folded arms.”“
D
arkness at Noon,” which Koest
ler began writing the following
year, in the South of France, was his at
tempt to work through the intellectual
and emotional reasons for breaking with
the Party. Rubashov is a better Commu
nist than Koestler ever was, and the pu
rity of Rubashov’s faith allows the novel
to lay bare its contradictions. How did
Communism, with its dream of a per
fectly just society, result in Stalinism, with
its paranoia, persecution, incompetence,
and cruelty? “Our principles were all cor
rect, but our results were all wrong,” Ru
bashov muses. “We brought you the truth,
and in our mouths it sounded like a lie.”
Koestler’s reckoning with Commu