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.

The Assassination of Trotsky

Joseph Losey's film The Assassination of Trotsky (1972) opens with photographs of Leon Trotsky (Lev Davidovich Bronstein) from early childhood until 1932, when be was a "wandering exile." His wandering finally landed him in Mexico in 1937. Just as he was beginning to feel a sense of security (or the closest he could be expected to get to it) agents of Stalin, his great adversary, began to stir up resistance to his presence in Mexico. Communists outside Russia were divided along strict lines either in support of Stalin or against him, Stalinists vs. Trotskyists. As long as Trotsky was alive, his supporters felt, there was still hope for the revolution in Russia that he masterminded. For his enemies, only his death would complete the summation of the revolution in the person of Joseph Stalin.

Before the opening credits, a title appears: "Wherever facts are proven we have attempted to present them accurately. Those unproven we have left open." Which makes one wonder which facts, the proven or unproven kind, one is witnessing. They might as well have shown us a title that said THIS IS A MOVIE.

And before the opening credits are over, the voice of Richard Burton delivers what one assumes is a supertext: "In revolution there is no compulsion except that of circumstances. A revolution takes place only when there is no other way out." It is May Day, 1940 in Mexico City. In the parade that day, according to Isaac Deutscher's monumental three-volume biography of Trotsky, "20,000 uniformed communists marched through Mexico City with the slogan 'Out with Trotsky' on their banners." We have already met the characters Jacson and Sylvia Ageloff (Alain Delon and Romy Schneider), alone in a room. We see them moments later in the street as the parade passes by, Ageloff shouting "Viva Trotsky!" and Jacson conspicuously trying to look inconspicuous.

Isaac Deutscher writes of Trotsky's old friends, Alfred and Marguerite Rosmer, who had come to stay at his home in Coyoacan, Mexico in October 1939. But among these "welcome guests, the Rosmers, an ominous shadow was to creep in, the shadow of Ramón Mercader--'Jacson'. This was the 'friend' of Sylvia Agelof, the American Trotskyist who had attended the foundation conference of the Fourth International at the Rosmers' home ... 'Jacson' posed, plausibly enough, as a non-politically minded businessman, sportsman, and bon viveur; it was supposedly as an agent of an oil company that he went to Mexico City at the time when the Rosmers arrived there. He kept himself in the background, however, and for many months sought no access to the fortified house at the Avenida Viena [Trotsky's home]. But he was getting ready for his dreadful assignment."(1)

Jacson was an agent of Stalin's NKVD. A Spaniard recruited during the Spanish Civil War by Soviet agents, he acquired the stolen passport of a Canadian named Frank Jackson (misspelled 'Jacson' on the passport by the Russians) who had died fighting in the International Brigade in Spain. With it he travelled to the U.S. where he befriended Sylvia Ageloff, a New York radical and Trotsky sympathiser. He then moved to Mexico City and asked Ageloff to join him there. Their relationship in the film is exclusively erotic. In the film, he ingratiates himself with one of Trotsky's bodyguards. He expresses to Ageloff his desire to meet Trotsky, but she wonders what they could possibly have in common. 

Mercader was not just another loser like Lee Harvey Oswald whose life suddenly found a meaning and purpose in the murder of a world figure. In fact, Mercader was everything Oswald wanted to be. Sentenced to 20 years in a Mexican prison for killing Trotsky, his mother Caridad, also involved in the assassination plot, was awarded the Order of Lenin by Stalin. Upon his release from prison in 1960, Mercader travelled from Mexico City to the fledgling socialist state of Cuba, and from thence to the USSR, where he was given a hero's welcome and personally awarded Hero of the Soviet Union by the head of the KGB. He is buried in Moscow.

Losey follows the historical narrative closely, but he leaves little room for his characters to express themselves in anything other than historical terms. Trotsky himself, as performed by Richard Burton, speaks in slogans. Perhaps Trotsky was like that - a walking, talking professor of revolution. It's impossible not to see him as a political prisoner everywhere he goes. Everyone around him is either a Trotskyist or a more or less clandestine agent of Stalin. It's difficult to quite understand the degree to which Stalin's agents were everywhere. Trotsky's physical courage, once he realized what he was up against, had to be astonishing. At one point, Natalya (he calls her Natasha in the film) speaks Trotsky's epigram about Judas: "Of Christ's twelve Apostles Judas alone proved to be traitor. But if he had acquired power, he would have represented the other eleven Apostles as traitors."

As a dramatization of historical events that are more or less ironed out by the time the film was made, 30 years later, The Assassination of Trotsky acquits itself rather well. It even muddies some of the details that the Mexican authorities fudged in their investigation so that conclusions that might be drawn by the viewer become a trifle perilous. The facts remain clear today, nearly 50 years after the film was made. Leon Trotsky, the brains behind the 1917 Bolzhevik Revolution, came into direct opposition to Joseph Stalin upon the death of Lenin. Even with Trotsky out of Russia for good, Stalin knew that the great polemicist of revolution would remain a threat to his hold on communists abroad. After he had completed his biography of Lenin, Trotsky was at work on a biography of Stalin when the assassin struck.

If all this seems painfully academic by now, The Assassination of Trotsky does nothing to make us care about any of the principal figures in the story, except perhaps Natalya, Trotsky's extremely long-suffering wife, gracefully if thanklessly played by Valentina Cortese. Richard Burton is charismatic as always but wasted in a role that never seems to breathe on his own, unassisted by the historical bulwark. Alain Delon is wasted, too, in the part of the silent assassin, who occupies himself looking for an opportunity to strike. It was five years since Delon played the far different, inhumanly cool hired killer, Jef Costello, in Melville's Le Samouraï. Romy Schneider does her best in the role of a neurotic American socialite-turned-revolutionary. The sound recording is a godawful mess, with much post-dubbing due to all the heavy (mostly French) accents, and even a few strange voice-overs that would seem to be Trotsky's and Jacson's thoughts. When Jacson finally attacks him, Trotsky's scream is terrifying. But within seconds, as he Jacson being beaten nearly to death by Trotsky's bodyguards, it is hard to distinguish his screams from Trotsky's. (Perhaps that was Losey's point, but it's hard to tell.)  

Nicholas Mosley wrote the non-fiction book on which the film was ostensibly based and he wrote the screenplay. He had also written the novel Accident that Losey had turned into a creditable film in 1966 (with a script by Harold Pinter). Mosley, who died just last year, was, of course, the son of Oswald Mosley, founder of the British Union of Fascists and one of the most reviled Britons of the 20th century. How intriguing that his son was drawn to telling the story of one of history's greatest revolutionaries. Joseph Losey's involvement in the project made better sense. In 1946, Losey had joined the Communist Party. He didn't know it at the time, but he and his wife, the actress Elizabeth Hawes, were already under FBI investigation. In fact, the FBI suspected that Losey had become an agent of Joseph Stalin in 1945! Eventually, Losey was brought to the attention of the dreaded House of Un-American Activities Committee and was blacklisted. He went to Europe to work in films, first under an assumed name, since some actors didn't want their names associated with a named communist. He managed to emerge from intentional obscurity with the superior sci-fi The Damned (1960), but it was The Servant (1963), also scripted by Harold Pinter, that brought Losey international attention.

Shot on location in Mexico (by the excellent Pasqualino De Santis), with period production design by Richard Macdonald, and a brooding, mostly electronic musical score by Egisto Macchi, the film seems to keep itself aloof from events that it is helpless to prevent. There is not even a sense of the terrible waste of it all, even when the film itself is a waste. The insertion of a horrifically botched bullfight (followed by the butchering of the bull) is gratuitous rather than symbolic. The torero failed to kill the bull outright with his sword - get it? Just as Jacson failed to kill Trotsky outright with the ice axe. The moment he delivers the blow, Jacson closes his eyes - only to see an enraged Trotsky getting up to fight him when he opens them.

How did the makers of this film (including its producer) think audiences would respond to the careful reconstruction of events surrounding the death of one of the principal architects of the Russian Revolution? Trotskyism did not die, as Stalin perhaps hoped, with Trotsky. Trotsky emphatically believed, as did many socialists, that the end of the war would bring about the last great cycle of the revolution. The story of Trotsky's murder has a tragic dimension that the film doesn't even hint at. Some critics have commented on the total lack of suspense in what could be mistaken for a suspense thriller. But the way the film is laid out deliberately mitigates whatever suspense or thrills it might have had. Because it's history, we already know everything. Why should we care for anyone in the drama? The film fails to give us an answer because it doesn't convince us that Trotsky was anything more than the loser in a power struggle involving millions of people we never knew. Jacson is presented to us as nothing but a sinister creep whose sole function in life was to carry out Trotsky's execution. Whatever built-in pathos the killing of the old Bolzhevik may have for people who still give a damn for the socialist cause (and I am one of them) is completely missing.

The film doesn't tell us that Trotsky was cremated and his ashes buried beneath a white stone within the compound of his house in Coyoacan and that his wife lived there another twenty years, according to Isaac Deutscher, "and every morning, as she rose, her eyes turned to the white stone in the courtyard."

With the exception of Mr. Klein, I was never all that impressed by Losey's work. To his enduring credit, however, he told an interviewer in 1983 that being forced to give up a career in Hollywood had saved him: "Without it I would have three Cadillacs, two swimming pools and millions of dollars, and I'd be dead. It was terrifying, it was disgusting, but you can get trapped by money and complacency. A good shaking up never did anyone any harm."


(1) Isaac Deutscher, The Prophet Outcast: Trotsky 1929-1940 (London: Verso, 2003).

The End of the Beginning

Whatever your political leanings, the rise and fall of communism in 20th century Russia is a fascinating subject. So many historical forces were aligned against it from the very beginning, from within and without, that its survival for seventy years is astonishing. Perhaps Lenin himself would have doubted the survival of the State he helped to create when he died a little more than six years after the revolution. (1) The two principal players who were left, Stalin and Trotsky, fought, or at least believed they were fighting, for the "soul" of the revolution. But the power struggle that followed, culminating in Trotsky's exile from Russia in 1929, have favored Trotsky's legacy only because he lost to Stalin. In an epigram quoted in Isaac Deutscher's great biography of Trotsky, he summed up his fate: "Of Christ's twelve Apostles Judas alone proved to be traitor. But if he had acquired power, he would have represented the other eleven Apostles as traitors and also all the lesser Apostles whom Luke numbers as seventy." Power was to be the ultimate undoing of Stalin, whose abuses snuffed out what was left of Bolzhevism in Russia and elsewhere, as Trotsky's assassination in Mexico in 1940 seemed to demonstrate. In college I wrote a poem for Sergei Eisenstein, a legendary filmmaker who was among those whom Stalin put under such rigid creative limitations that his last film, Ivan the Terrible, had become an obvious allusion to Uncle Joe, and was consequently butchered and suppressed. Eisenstein died at the unripe age of fifty - my age. The first part of the poem went like this:

In your fleabag communist cubbyhole
Where the rat shit belongs to the state
You lie on your cot and rot.
While Stalin snores
With his Trotskyite whores
And dreams of the Marxist he's not.


The following paragraph from Deutscher's biography encapsulates the principal reasons that the communist revolutions in Russia and China became corrupted. (2)

Socialist revolution made its first, immense conquests not in the advanced West but in the backward East, in countries where not the industrial workers but the peasants predominated. Its immediate task was not to establish socialism but to initiate 'primitive socialist accumulation'. In the classical Marxist scheme of things revolution was to occur when the productive forces of the old society had so outgrown its property relations as to burst the old social framework; the revolution was to create new property relations and the new framework for fully grown, advanced, and dynamic productive forces. What happened in fact was that the revolution created the most advanced forms of social organization for the most backward of economies; it set up frameworks of social ownership and planning around underdeveloped and archaic productive forces, and partly around a vacuum. The theoretical Marxist conception of the revolution was thereby turned upside down. The new 'productive relations' being above the existing productive forces were also above the understanding of the great majority of the people; and so the revolutionary government defended and developed them against the will of the majority. Bureaucratic despotism took the place of Soviet democracy. The State, far from withering away, assumed unprecedented, ferocious power. The conflict between the Marxist norm and the reality of revolution came to permeate all the thinking and activity of the ruling party. Stalinism sought to overcome the conflict by perverting or discarding the norm. Trotskyism attempted to preserve the norm or to strike a temporary balance between the norm and reality until revolution in the West resolved the conflict and restored harmony between theory and practice. The failures of revolution in the West were epitomized in Trotsky's defeat.

(1) Trotsky always claimed, from personal knowledge, that Stalin had poisoned Lenin.
(2) Deutscher, The Prophet Outcast: Trotsky 1929-1940 (London: Verso, 2003)