In no case, needless to say, has he been accused of any particular crime. First a long stretch in one of Franco’s fortresses, with the sound of firing squads ringing through the walls twenty or thirty times a day then a year or so of internment in France then escape to England, and a fresh internment in Pentonville – from which he has just been unconditionally released, however. Mr Arthur Koestler should know something about prison, for he has spent a respectable proportion of the past four years there. Orwell used his review as an opportunity to chastise the left-wing press in Britain for their refusal to speak up a powerful statement made two years after Kingsley Martin refused to publish his despatches from Spain, fearing they would appear critical of Stalin, and therefore socialism: “What was frightening about these trials was not that they happened – for obviously such things are necessary in a totalitarian society – but the eagerness of Western intellectuals to justify them.” In his review for the New Statesman, Orwell praised Koestler’s “inner knowledge of totalitarian methods”: “The common people,” argues the Party operative Ivanov, “cannot grasp ‘deviation’ is a crime in itself therefore crimes of the sort they can understand – murder, train-wrecking and so forth – must be invented.” Many see Rubashov’s confession as a direct influence upon Winston Smith’s. “Darkness at Noon” (1940) dramatises the Moscow show trials and Stalin’s “Great Purge” of Old Bolsheviks.
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