Among the best known of the show-trial defendants was Nikolai Bukharin (1888-1938), former editor of Pravda, the official newspaper of the Soviet Union and a member of the Politburo, the highest policy-making body of the Soviet government. Bukharin is widely considered to be the model for the protagonist of Arthur Koestler's novel Darkness at Noon (1940). Arthur Koestler (1905-83), a prototype of the 20th-century author, activist, and thinker, was a Hungarian Jew who emigrated to Palestine at the age of 18, later joined the German Communist Party, was imprisoned by Francisco Franco's forces in the Spanish Civil War, and barely escaped the Nazis after the fall of France in 1940. Koestler recounted his disillusion with, and defection from, the Communist Party in a celebrated collection of essays by former communists, The God That Failed (1950).

Darkness at Noon uses the purges as a case study of a tragically flawed ideal. Acknowledging that the Russian Revolution was betrayed by the arrogance of power and implacable will of Joseph Stalin, Koestler nevertheless argues, through his main character Rubashov, that Stalin's thought processes were consistent with one principle that emerged from the revolution--the justification of the means by the end. Once that idea gained acceptance among the ruling Communist elite, a cancer cell was introduced into the Soviet system. Stalin was a uniquely effective carcinogen, but the disease would have emerged in any case.

Rubashov is one of the founding fathers of the revolution, totally dedicated to the cause. He has learned early on to subordinate any humane and compassionate instincts to the demands of the party. Arrested as a spy by the Nazis in 1933, the year of Adolf Hitler's assumption of power, he was tortured and imprisoned before being returned to the Soviet Union. But he discovers that the country he has returned to is not the one he left. Although his criticism of the regime is muted and indirect, he is arrested and charged with plotting to assassinate "Number One," as Stalin is referred to in the novel. Most of the story focuses on Rubashov's imprisonment and interrogations. Finally benumbed by a ruthless interrogator, one of the "new men" of the Soviet system, he confesses to deeds he did not commit and is executed.

One feature of the purge underscored by the novel with bitter irony is the description of the old revolutionaries, drained of physical and moral energy, unable to mount any sort of challenge to the new order: "Worn by the years of illegal struggle, eaten by the damp of prison walls, between which they had spent half their youth, spiritually sucked dry by the permanent nervous strain of holding down the physical fear, of which one never spoke . . . Worn by the years of exile, the acid sharpness of factions within the Party, the unscrupulousness with which they were fought out; worn out by the endless defeats and the demoralization of the final victory."

But the heart of the novel is the transformation of Rubashov from the cool, rationalist, Marxist machine into a recognizable human being. Although the cause to which he devoted his life now appears to have been fatally flawed, he does not succumb to despair or to self-defense. Instead he dies with the dignity of a man who committed himself to a corrupted ideal of human betterment, a classic example of a tragic hero.

The Yugoslavian novelist Danilo Kis's (1935-89) A Tomb for Boris Davidovich (1976) is a collection of seven interconnected stories, most of which relate to the terror. The title story deals with a figure strongly resembling Koestler's Bukharin-inspired Rubashov. Boris Davidovich (his party name is Novsky) is a brilliant, ruthless, true believer in communism. All of his interrogator's efforts to induce him to confess are futile. Finally, he is told that for every day he holds out, some other prisoner will be executed in his presence. To save the lives of others, he confesses to his alleged crimes, but, to his dismay, instead of being executed, he is sent to a gulag. He escapes, is tracked down by dogs, and commits suicide rather than let himself be taken, but his image, a man who represents the dignity of the individual, survives.

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