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Party. His later emotional engagements included anti-Communist activ–
ity among intellectuals (the Congress for Cultural Freedom), a campaign
against the death penalty in England, and finally a return
to
the inter–
ests of his youth, to the history of science, with sideways leaps, such as
the mystery of the creative mind, or the Khazar roots of East European
Jews.
I read
Darklless at Nooll
(in English) several years before I met the
author. Its theme is an investigation in the Luhianka prison. A true
Soviet, the hard-headed Cletkin, is assigned to interrogate the old Bol–
shevik Rubashov, so that the latter should confess
to
crimes he did not
commit, because in the trial that is
to
take place, he is supposed to
receive the death penalty.
In
other words, the novel is an attempt to
answer the question asked by many people in the thirties: Why did the
old Bolsheviks confess that they were guilty and repent publicly?
It
must
have meant that they were truly guilty, that Stalin was correct to kill
them, because how else could these confessions be explained?
In
the
novel, Rubashov yields to Cletkin's arguments: as a Communist he is
obligated
to
place the Party's interests in first place, above all other
interests, such as his good name or his desire
to
save his friends. The
Party demands that he should publicly admit
to
being guilty and accuse
his colleagues, because that is necessary during the given era. A record
of his dedication to the cause will be preserved in the archives, and after
his death, when the proper time comes, the truth that he was innocent
will be brought to light.
Thus, an explanation in terms of ideology, as befits an intellectual.
It
seemed exceedingly recherche, and later, many people simply insisted
that those people were broken by torture during the trials. Aleksander
Wat, however, cites a conversation with the old Bolshevik Steklov, right
before that dignitary'S death in Saratov prison. According
to
Steklov,
they confessed out of disgust at their own past: they each had so many
crimes on their account, that it cost them nothing
to
demean themselves
once again, and torture was not necessary.
No doubt both Koestler and his critics captured a portion of the
truth. I am writing about him because he provides a link to the period
of the civil war in Spain. People went there
to
fight out of the purest ide–
ological motives, and perished at the front as the result of a sentence
executed by Stalin's agents. Spain was at the center of the "anti-Fascist"
propaganda carried out on an international scale by the Paris bureau,
and one of its closest collaborators was Koestler himself. They made use
of so-called "useful idiots" in many countries, naive people who wanted
to do good. To what extent MLinzenberg, the director of the bureau, was
