Milk and Honey

The word “dystopian” is commonly used to describe a narrative work – a novel, play or film – that is set in some terrible, nightmarish but fictitious place. The word is used as the antithesis of utopian – an ideal place. Some critics have called Arthur Koestler’s novel Darkness at Noon dystopian.(1) But Koestler wrote a work of fiction about people and places that are recognizable. He wrote about former revolutionaries, the old guard of Bolzheviks, who were still around at a time, after the death of Lenin and the expulsion of Trotsky, when Stalin was consolidating his absolute control on Russia. Stalin saw that, before he could have total control of where Russia was going, he first had to control the narrative of the revolution. Just as surely as Zeus devoured Athena so that she would sprout from his forehead, thereby making her a part of his own body and a product of his own power, Stalin had to rewrite history and erase the facts that came in conflict with his own, official, version of events. This called for what became known as the Great Purge. The old generation of revolutionaries who had witnessed and helped to shape the revolution had to be liquidated. But first they had to be denounced and as many of them as possible had to be persuaded to confess their own guilt, to apostatize their former views and then be led away to the executioner. 

Arthur Koestler, in the dedication that precedes the text of Darkness at Noon, wrote: The characters in this book are fictitious. The historical circumstances which determined their actions are real. The life of the man N. S. Rubashov is a synthesis of the lives of a number of men who were victims of the so-called Moscow Trials. Several of them were personally known to the author. This book is dedicated to their memory.”

Nicolas Salmanovitch Rubashov is one such victim of Stalin’s (identified as No. 1’s) purges. At the beginning of the novel he is arrested and imprisoned. The exact reasons for his arrest are unknown to him. And though he eventually learns the “reasons” he has been denounced, he also comes to the realization that they ultimately do not matter. He is to be destroyed because he knows the truth about the revolution, the direction of which has somehow gone desperately wrong. On one of his daily walks in the prison yard he is accompanied by a dim-witted farmer. He says to Rubashov, “A day like to-day, when one smells the melting of the snow in the air, takes hold of me. We will neither of us last much longer, your honour. They have crushed us because we are reactionaries, and because the old days when we were happy must not come back ...” 

“Were you really so happy in those days?” asked Rubashov; but the peasant only murmured something unintelligible, while his Adam’s apple slid up and down his throat several times.
Rubashov watched him from the side; after a time he said: “Do you remember the part in the Bible where the tribes in the desert begin to cry: Let us make a captain, and let us return into Egypt”? 

The peasant nodded eagerly and uncomprehendingly ... Then they were conducted back into the building.

Rubashov had referred, cryptically, to the moment in Numbers (14:4) in which the Jews, who had been brought out of captivity in Egypt by Moses, were beginning to doubt that they would ever see the Promised Land of which Moses had told them, a land of “milk and honey.” So they considered returning to Egypt, knowing full well what they were returning to. 

Rubashov is determined, at first, to die in silence, but his confinement and the certainty that he will be killed like all the others weakens his resolve. After days of isolation in his cell, he decides to sign a confession to crimes of which he is not guilty simply to save his neck, wanting only to be left alone, even in confinement. Pacing his cell, waiting for his interrogation, he ponders everything that has placed him in his position, while remaining convinced of the legitimacy of the revolution:

The discussions at the congresses during the Civil War had been on a level never before in history attained by a political body; they resembled reports in scientific periodicals—with the difference that on the outcome of the discussion depended the life and well-being of millions, and the future of the Revolution. Now the old guard was used up; the logic of history ordained that the more stable the régime became, the more rigid it had to become, in order to prevent the enormous dynamic forces which the Revolution had released from turning inwards and blowing the Revolution itself into the air. The time of philosophizing congresses was over; philosophical incendiarism had given place to a period of wholesome sterility. Revolutionary theory had frozen to a dogmatic cult, with a simplified, easily graspable catechism, and with No. 1 as the high priest celebrating the Mass. His speeches and articles had, even in their style, the character of an infallible catechism; they were divided into question and answer, with a marvellous consistency in the gross simplification of the actual problems and facts.

The whole thing was a pretty grotesque comedy, Rubashov thought; at bottom all this jugglery with “revolutionary philosophy” was merely a means to consolidate the dictatorship, which, though so depressing a phenomenon, yet seemed to represent a historical necessity. So much the worse for him who took the comedy seriously, who only saw what happened on the stage, and not the machinery behind it.

Finally, an old comrade, Ivanov, interrogates him in his cell:

Rubashov rubbed his pince-nez on his sleeve, and looked at him short-sightedly. “What a mess,” he said, “what a mess we have made of our golden age.” Ivanov smiled. “Maybe,” he said happily. “Look at the Gracchi and Saint Just and the Commune of Paris. Up to now, all revolutions have been made by moralizing dilettantes. They were always in good faith and perished because of their dilettantism. We for the first time are consequent. ...” “Yes,” said Rubashov. “So consequent; that in the interests of a just distribution of land we deliberately let die of starvation about five million farmers and their families in one year. So consequent were we in the liberation of human beings from the shackles of industrial exploitation that we sent about ten million people to do forced labour in the Arctic regions and the jungles of the East, under conditions similar to those of antique galley slaves. So consequent that, to settle a difference of opinion, we know only one argument: death, whether it is a matter of submarines, manure, or the party line to be followed in Indo-China. Our engineers work with the constant knowledge that an error in calculation may take them to prison or the scaffold; the higher officials in our administration ruin and destroy their subordinates, because they know that they will be held responsible for the slightest slip and be destroyed themselves; our poets settle discussions on questions of style by denunciations to the Secret Police, because the expressionists consider the naturalistic style counter-revolutionary, and vice versa. Acting consequentially in the interests of the coming generations, we have laid such terrible privations on the present one that its average length of life is shortened by a quarter. In order to defend the existence of the country, we have to take exceptional measures and make transition-stage laws, which are in every point contrary to the aims of the Revolution. The people’s standard of life is lower than it was before the Revolution; the labour conditions are harder, the discipline is more inhuman, the piece-work drudgery worse than in colonial countries with native coolies; we have lowered the age limit for capital punishment down to twelve years; our sexual laws are more narrow-minded than those of England, our leader-worship more Byzantine than that of the reactionary dictatorships. Our Press and our schools cultivate Chauvinism, militarism, dogmatism, conformism and ignorance. The arbitrary power of the Government is unlimited, and unexampled in history; freedom of the Press, of opinion and of movement are as thoroughly exterminated as though the proclamation of the Rights of Man had never been. We have built up the most gigantic police apparatus, with informers made a national Institution, and with the most refined scientific system of physical and mental torture. We whip the groaning masses of the country towards a theoretical future happiness, which only we can see. For the energies of this generation are exhausted; they were spent in the Revolution; for this generation is bled white and there is nothing left of it but a moaning, numbed, apathetic lump of sacrificial flesh. ... Those are the consequences of our consequentialness. You called it vivisection morality. To me it sometimes seems as though the experimenters had torn the skin off the victim and left it standing with bared tissues, muscles and nerves. ...” “Well, and what of it?” said Ivanov happily. “Don’t you find it wonderful? Has anything more wonderful ever happened in history? We are tearing the old skin off mankind and giving it a new one. That is not an occupation for people with weak nerves; but there was once a time when it filled you with enthusiasm. What has so changed you that you are now as pernickety as an old maid?” Rubashov answered: “To continue with the same metaphor: I see the flayed body of this generation: but I see no trace of the new skin. We all thought one could treat history like one experiments in physics. The difference is that in physics one can repeat the experiment a thousand times, but in history only once. Danton and Saint-Just can be sent to the scaffold only once."

And Rubashov returns in his thinking to the metaphor of God’s chosen people in the desert:

What happened to these masses, to this people? For forty years it had been driven through the desert, with threats and promises, with imaginary terrors and imaginary rewards. But where was the Promised Land? 

Did there really exist any such goal for this wandering mankind? That was a question to which he would have liked an answer before it was too late. Moses had not been allowed to enter the land of promise either. But he had been allowed to see it, from the top of the mountain, spread at his feet. Thus, it was easy to die, with the visible certainty of one’s goal before one’s eyes. He, Nicolas Salmanovitch Rubashov, had not been taken to the top of a mountain; and wherever his eye looked, he saw nothing but desert and the darkness of night.


(1) The German title of the novel is Sonnenfinsternis, “Solar Eclipse”. It was hurriedly translated into English by Daphne Hardy, Koestler’s girlfriend, just before the Germans invaded France in May 1940.