Finished reading
Darkness At Noon by Arthur Koestler. A very
1984-ish read in its forceful warnings against totalitarianism, specifically the suffocation of the individual under Soviet Communism. Published in 1940,
Darkness At Noon was very impactful in swinging much of Western Europe’s communist sentiments the other way. For example, in wake of the novel’s widespread reading across France, the national Communist Party lost a 1946 constitutional referendum it was favored to win. French journalists and academia agreed that the popularity of
Darkness At Noon turned enough of France’s public against communism to the point its movement permanently lost credibility at a time most needed during Europe’s turbulent 1940s political scene.
The novel’s introduction highlights the key event Koestler, a defector of the Stalin’s Soviet Union, was driven to write
Darkness At Noon – the Soviet show trial of prominent
Bolshevik revolutionary Nikolai Bukharin:
“Bukharin and his 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. Few people outside the Soviet Union believed these accusations, but after first denying the charges, Bukharin and his comrades inexplicably pleaded guilty. Koestler was electrified by these confessions. How could such a large portion of the Soviet establishment have spent months plotting against the government and Stalin without being discovered? How had powerful leaders such as Bukharin been transformed into impotent defenders and manipulated to confess to crimes they had clearly not committed? And why had the victims played their parts so willingly and gone so obediently to their deaths?”My reaction to the novel is to resign it to the pile of how truly awful Russia’s history and Soviet Communism is, so awful it spawns its own vocabulary:
Gulag, Collectivization, Cheka/NKVD, The Great Terror/Purge, Show Trials, Holodomor…
