Bukharin and twenty of his Soviet government colleagues were accused of a host of fantastic crimes, among them plotting to assassinate Lenin and Stalin, carve up the Soviet empire, and restore capitalism.įew people outside the Soviet Union believed these accusations, but after first denying the charges, Bukharin and his comrades inexplicably pleaded guilty. Soon afterward, the third big Soviet show trial got under way. Koestler also resigned from the Communist Party and delivered a passionate speech to the communist-controlled German Writers’ Association in Paris, in which he explained his reasons, quoting André Malraux: “A life is worth nothing, but nothing is worth a life,” and Thomas Mann: “In the long run, a harmful truth is better than a useful lie,” two aphorisms that directly contradicted communist ideology.
His book was highly praised by Thomas Mann, Walter Benjamin, and George Orwell, who praised it as “of the greatest psychological interest” and “probably one of the most honest and unusual documents that have been produced by the Spanish War,” among others.
He was released after some influential British friends intervened on his behalf and immediately wrote Dialogue with Death about his experiences. One whom Koestler particularly admired was Nikolai Bukharin, a popular and highly intellectual Bolshevik leader, who had been in and out of power since the October Revolution and was regarded as one of Stalin’s most formidable ideological rivals. Koestler had been a loyal member of the party himself until then and on his first and only visit to the Soviet Union in 1932, had met some of the government ministers who were being imprisoned and put on trial. His inspiration for writing his book was the show trials of Soviet Communist Party leaders in the late 1930s, when the world was startled by the news that more than half the Soviet leadership had been charged with treason. There are several allusions to Nazi Germany, but the names of the characters are mostly Russian and the political system he describes is obviously the Soviet one. Koestler doesn’t identify the country where the story is set.
After a public trial, he is sentenced to death and summarily executed in the prison basement. After repeated interrogations by his two prosecutors-Ivanov, a veteran revolutionary and former colleague of Rubashov’s, and Gletkin, a younger, more ruthless party apparatchik-Rubashov is forced to confess to a series of crimes he has not committed. Arthur Koestler’s Darkness at Noon is an intellectual and political thriller about the life and death of a fictional revolutionary leader, Nikolai Salmanovich Rubashov, told as he languishes in prison accused of treason.
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