This was an incredibly good book that brought me closer to understanding the milieu and mindset of Communism as it may have practically existed. The book deals with Stalin’s ‘Great Purge’ in Russia before WWII, although no country or historical character is mentioned by name. We meet our protagonist, Rubashov, in a prison cell where he has arrived as part of a purge of the unnamed country’s Communist party. A dictatorial leader, referred to only as No.1, now presides over the party and is in the process of eliminating his rivals. Now in his 50s, Rubashov was once a general in the revolutionary war and a high-ranking party official. Given these strong credentials, Rubashov and his ‘Old Bolshevik’ contemporaries are seen as threats to No. 1’s power and must be made subservient or liquidated.
The book is divided into four sections - three ‘hearings’ or ‘interrogations’ and a final section entitled ‘The Grammatical Fiction’. The first section finds Rubashov reflecting on the nature of history, as he does throughout the book, and his lifelong involvement with the Communist party. The section begins with the epithet, ‘Nobody can rule guiltlessly’ from Saint Just (p1), which, like most of the epithets in the book, is apposite. Rubashov relates convincingly the power of Communism’s new ideas and the thrill he experiences whilst he believes that his work within the party is making, or at least materially changing, history. He conveys a feeling that much of history up to the revolution has been marred by misplaced sentimentalism and subservience, necessarily rejecting the Christian tradition that came before Communism in Russia. ‘He who understands and forgives - where would he find a motive to act?’ (p25), he wonders and, later on, concludes that ‘the individual was nothing, the Party was all’ (p70). However, there is definitely a sense in which these radical changes are recognised as being foisted upon the masses without their explicit consent:
‘“Certainly,” said Rubashov. “A mathematician once said that algebra was the science for lazy people - one does not work out X but operates with it as if one knew it. In our case, X stands for the anonymous masses, the people. Politics mean operating with this X without worrying about its actual nature. Making history is to recognize X for what it stands for in the equation.”’ (p72)
The first section alternates chronologically between Rubashov’s time in jail and his earlier life in the party. Rubashov tells of his youthful fervor, how he fought and led in the war and how he thought nothing of risking his life for the greater glory of Communism and the positive changes he believed it would bring to history. He also relates how he was sent to Germany after Hitler’s rise to power in 1933 to reorganise and purge the German Communist party. In a poignant scene in an art museum in Germany, he meets with a man called Richard and explains to him that he has strayed from the party line, has become harmful and must be expelled. Richard’s complaints about the party are legitimate and not dissimilar to the reservations Rubashov has later on in the book, but Rubashov betrays him to the gestapo. This is the first indication we get of what the practicalities of, ‘the individual was nothing, the Party was all’ entails. It’s not enough for Richard to simply be ejected from the Party. He must be betrayed, discredited, imprisoned, tortured and maybe killed for his disobedience to the party elite. While still in Germany, Rubashov himself is arrested, imprisoned and tortured but never reveals any information and is eventually released by the Nazis after two years. He returns to a hero’s welcome but is uncomfortable about No.1’s increasingly dictatorial tendencies. He knows No. 1 may see him as a threat, and so requests an assignment abroad rather than a domestic position where he may find himself in opposition. No. 1 is suspicious but sends him to Belgium to enforce party discipline amongst dock workers. Here, Rubashov finds a committed cell led by a German immigrant called Little Loewy, who tells his life story, which includes a lot of sacrifices he has made for the party. According to Wikipedia, this section relates to the 1935 invasion of Ethiopia by Italy. This invasion was condemned internationally and led to an embargo on selling strategic resources to Italy by the League of Nations and the Communist party. However, Rubashov must inform the dock workers that they will secretly break the embargo and supply the facist government in Italy under orders from the party elite. The workers revolt and refuse the instructions, so Rubashov has them denounced by the party by name, all but ensuring their arrest in Belgium. Little Loewy hangs himself and Rubashov moves on to another assignment. This is the second indication of how brutal and dangerous it is to have ideas whose pursuit justify the use of ANY means. It also draws a stark contrast between the party elite, who can bend and manipulate any principles they choose to further Communism, as defined by themselves, and the party rank and file who must display total obedience, even to ideas that are directly contrary to the stated principles of Communism, or risk imprisonment or death. The example is powerful because it is so illogical, hypocritical and inhumane.
In ‘The First Hearing / Interrogation’, Rubashov meets his first interrogator, Ivanov. Ivanov is another Old Bolshevik who fought in the revolutionary war. The atmosphere between them is cordial and they reminisce about old times, including when Rubashov convinced Ivanov not to commit suicide after his leg was amputated during the war. The two seem to share some reservations about the direction Communism has taken since the revolution. Ivanov tells Rubashov that if he can convince him to plead guilty to the charges against him, which will probably precipitate a sentence of 5-10 years in a labour camp rather than execution, then he will consider his debt relating to the amputation repaid. Rubashov seems reluctant, or at least undecided, about co-operating, but Ivanov urges him to think rationally and not to be sentimental. Ivanov tells Rubashov that once he has thought the matter through to its rational conclusions he will agree with him and sends him back to his cell for two weeks to think things over.
The second section begins with another wonderful epithet:
‘When the existence of the Church is threatened, she is released from the commandments of morality. With unity as the end, the use of every means is sanctified, even cunning, treachery, violence, simony, prison, death. For all order is for the sake of the community, and the individual must be sacrificed to the common good.’ Dietrich Von Nieheim, Bishop of Verdun, De schismate libri III AD1411 (p81)
This section contains material from Rubashov’s diary and continues his reflections on the nature of history and politics and the significance of his own life and actions. Some of the themes are similar to the first section. For instance, the idea that no one can rule guiltlessly and the uncertainty inherent in trying to direct social progress from a position of central control. He reasons in his diary:
‘The ultimate truth is penultimately always a falsehood. He who will be proved right in the end appears to be wrong and harmful before it.
But who will be proved right? It will only be known later. Meanwhile he is bound to act on credit and to sell his soul to the devil, in the hope of history’s absolution.’ (p81)
In the absence of further hearings with Ivanov, Rubashov interrogates himself about the philosophical schema he has adopted during his life. At points, he seems to still be quite close to Communist orthodoxy, musing, ‘had not history always been an inhumane, unscrupulous builder, mixing its mortar of lies, blood and mud?’ (p104) and reasoning, ‘politics can be relatively fair in the breathing spaces of history; at its critical turning points there is no other rule possible than the old one, that the end justifies the means.’ (p81) However, in other parts, it seems Rubashov is in a state of fundamental confusion over how to interpret his life and how best to respond to the charges he faces. The following ethereal passage seems to indicate an internal struggle that leaves Rubashov totally disorientated:
‘He found out that those processes wrongly known as “monologues” are really dialogues of a special kind; dialogues in which one partner remains silent while the other, against all grammatical rules, addresses him as “I” instead of “you”, in order to creep into his confidence and to fathom his intentions; but the silent partner just remains silent, shuns observation and even refuses to be localized in time and space.’ (p90)
Ideas about how concepts like forgiveness and understanding stand in opposition to social progress reemerge. For instance, when Ivanov says to Rubashov:
‘“Admit,” he said, “that humanism and politics, respect for the individual and social progress, are incompatible. Admit, that Gandhi is a catastrophe for India; that chasteness in the choice of means leads to political impotence.”’ (p128)
Against this, Rubashov reminisces about his secretary, Arlova, when he worked at the Trade Delegation. The two begin a relationship and Arlova becomes Rubashov’s mistress, spending almost every night with him telling him, with macabre significance later on, ‘you will always be able to do what you like with me’ (p95). Suspicions about Arlova’s political trustworthiness begin to appear and eventually her brother and sister-in-law are arrested for ‘treasonable connections’. Rubashov does nothing to save her, believing that it’s more important to the furtherance of the Communist cause that he stays alive instead of her. Perhaps because of the intimate, sexual relationship between the two and the submissive attitude Arlova shows to him, this is the most gratuitous of the three betrayals for the sake of Communism that Rubashov remembers. While Rubashov’s actions towards Richard and Little Loewy could be portrayed as part of doing his job, albeit with highly problematic moral elements, the case of Arlova feels different and far worse. Through his actions, Rubashov appears to deny his connection to Arlova and the feelings he has for her. In a way, this almost seems to me like Rubashov denying his own existence or soul. When personal feelings of sufficient strength to precipitate a sexual relationship are made subservient to furthering the glory of the Communist party, it’s possible to follow the logic but it feels totally wrong. It presupposes a future utopia so wonderful that it’s worth betraying someone with whom you have a personal and sexual connection, which will condemn them to death. Furthermore, Arlova is looking to Rubashov to protect her, professionally and personally, and he totally disregards this duty. I wondered what kind of utopia would have such unnatural and unpleasant beginnings. In the same way some philosophers pondering the problem of evil wonder what kind of God would permit such evil and suffering to exist in his creation. In this case, the choices seem to be - that there is no God and that evil can only be eliminated by the rise of Communism, to which end any means may be justifiably used, or that there is some kind of reason (God, morality, ethics, mental well being etc) why humans should never commit certain acts. We know and feel that certain things are wrong but I don’t think it’s possible to prove that objectively, so the conundrum that Rubashov faces is a very difficult one.
Rubashov is taken to the barber in the second hearing and receives a tiny slip of paper from someone in the barbershop that says, ‘Die in Silence’.
The second section introduces Gletkin, a younger interrogator, who advocates for the use of harsher tactics, like torture, on Rubashov. Ivanov disagrees with him and tells Gletkin, ‘he is made out of a certain material which becomes tougher the harder you hammer on it’ (p85). This relationship between Ivanov and Gletkin continues the theme of a younger, more ruthless generation overthrowing an older, more sentimental one. Both Ivanov and Rubashov seem to be asking themselves if their hesitancy about the brutal direction Communism is taking during the Great Purge is down to a loss of belief in the socialist utopia or because they don’t approve of the means being used. Gletkin argues that all means are justified by the end and implies that Ivanov must be cynical about the possibility of the end if he is squeamish about using brutal means to bring it about.
During this time, Rubashov witnesses another political prisoner, whom he knew personally, being dragged to his execution. As he passes Rubashov’s cell, the other prisoner cries out to him by name. This has a profound effect on Rubashov. However, Ivanov comes to his cell to tell him that it was all staged by Gletkin with the purpose of making him confess more quickly but that Ivanov believes it will have the opposite effect. Strangely, Ivanov takes the role of defender of means-justify-the-ends Communism in this conversation with Rubashov, whereas Gletkin had been playing this role in the discussion between him and Ivanov about how best to interrogate Rubashov. For me, the passage from pp129-133 is the lodestone of the book, containing all the key themes in their most impassioned presentation and I’ll reproduce it in its entirety here:
‘‘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 denunciation 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 had 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 wanted to answer: "Since then I have heard Bogrov call out my name.' But he knew that this answer did not make sense. So he answered instead:
"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 if it should turn out that big submarines would after all have been the right thing, Comrade Bogrov will not come to life again.'
'And what follows?' asked Ivanov. ‘Should we sit with idle hands because the consequences of an act are never quite to foreseen, and hence all action is evil? We vouch for every act with our heads - more cannot be expected of us. In the opposite camp they are not so scrupulous, Any old idiot of a general can experiment with thousands of living bodies; and if he makes a mistake he will most be retired. The forces of reaction and counter-revolution have no scruples of ethical problems. Imagine a Sulla, a Galliffet, a Kolchak reading Raskolnikov. Such peculiar birds as you are found only in the trees of revolution. For the others it is easier…..’
He looked at his watch. The cell window had turned a dirty grey; the newspaper which was stuck over the broken pane swelled and rustled in the morning breeze. On the rampart opposite, the sentry was still doing his hundred steps up and down.
"For a man with your past,' Ivanov went on, 'this sudden revulsion against experimenting is rather naive. Every year several million people are killed quite pointlessly by epidemics and other natural catastrophes. And we should shrink from sacrificing a few
hundred thousand for the most promising experiment in history? Not to mention the legions of those who die of undernourishment and tuberculosis in coal and quicksilver mines, rice-fields and cotton plantations. No one takes any notice of them; nobody asks why or what for but here we shoot a few thousand objectively harmful people, the humanitarians all over the world foam at the mouth. Yes, we liquidated the parasitic part of the peasantry and let it die of starvation. It was a surgical operation which had to be done once and for all; but in the good old days before the Revolution just as many died in any dry year - only senselessly and
pointlessly. The victims of the Yellow River floods in China amount sometimes to hundreds of thousands. Nature is generous in her senseless experiments on mankind. Why should
mankind not have the right to experiment on itself?'
He paused; Rubashov did not answer. He went on:
"Have you ever read brochures of an anti-vivisectionist society? They are shattering and heartbreaking; when one reads how some poor cur which has had its liver cut out, whines and licks his tormentor's hands, one is just as nauseated as you were tonight. But if these people had their say, we would have no serums against cholera, typhoid, or diphtheria…’
He emptied the rest of the bottle, yawned, stretched and stood up. He limped over to Rubashov at the window, as looked out.
'It's getting light," he said. 'Don't be a fool, Rubashov. Everything I
brought up tonight is elementary knowledge, which you know as well as I. You were in a state of nervous depression, but now it is over.' He stood next to Rubashov at
the window, with his arm round Rubashov's shoulders; his voice was nearly tender. "Now go
and sleep it off, old war-horse; tomorrow the time is up, and we will both need a clear
head to concoct your deposition. Don't shrug your shoulders - you are yourself at least half convinced that you will sign. If you deny it, it's just moral cowardice, Moral cowardice has
driven many to martyrdom.”
Rubashov looked out into the grey light. The sentry was just doing a right-about
turn. Above the machine-gun turret the sky was pale grey, with a shade of red. 'I’ll think it over again,' said Rubashov after a while.
When the door had closed behind his visitor, Rubashov knew that he had already half-surrendered. He threw himself on the bunk, exhausted and yet strangely relieved. He felt hollowed-out and sucked dry, and at the same time as if a weight had been lifted from him. Bogrov's pathetic appeal had in his memory lost some of its acoustic sharpness. Who
could call it betrayal if, instead of the dead, one held faith with the living?
While Rubashov slept quietly and dreamlessly - the toothache had also quietened down - Ivanov, on the way to his room, paid a visit to Gletkin. Gletkin sat at his desk in full uniform, and was working through files. For years he had had the habit of working right through the night three or four times a week. When Ivanov entered the room, Gletkin stood up to attention.
“It is all right,” said Ivanov. “Tomorrow he will sign. But I had to sweat to repair your idiocy.”
Gletkin did not answer; he stood stiffly in front of his desk. Ivanov, who remembered the sharp scene he had had with Gletkin before his visit to Rubashov's cell and knew that Gletkin did not forget a rebuff so easily, shrugged his shoulders and blew cigarette smoke into Gletkin's face. 'Don't be a fool, ' he said. "You all suffer from personal feelings. In his place, you would be even more stubborn.”
“I have a backbone, which he hasn't,” said Gletkin.
"But you're an idiot,” said Ivanov. “For that answer you ought to be shot before him.”
He hobbled to the door and banged it from outside.
Gletkin sat down to his desk again. He did not believe Ivanov would succeed, and at the same time he was afraid of it. Ivanov's last sentence had sounded like a threat, and with him one never knew what was a joke and what serious. Perhaps he did not know himself - like all these intellectual cynics….
Gletkin shrugged his shoulders, shoved his collar and crackling cuffs into place, and went on with his work on the pile of documents.’
During the third hearing or interrogation, Rubashov continues to write in his diary about his theory of history and human progress:
“Now every technical improvement creates a new complication to the economic apparatus, causes the appearance of new factors and combinations, which the masses cannot penetrate for a time. Every jump of technical progress leaves the relative intellectual development of the masses a step behind, and thus causes a fall in the political-maturity thermometer. It takes sometimes tens of years, sometimes generations, for a people’s level of understanding gradually to adapt itself to the changed state of affairs, until it has recovered the same capacity for self-government, as it had already possessed at a lower stage of civilisation. Hence the political maturity of the masses cannot be measured by an absolute figure, but only relatively, i.e. in proportion to the stage of civilization at that moment.
When the level of mass-consciousness catches up with the objective state of affairs, there follows inevitably the conquest of democracy, either peaceably or by force. Until the next jump of technical civilization - the discovery of the mechanical loom, for example - again sets back the masses in a state of relative immaturity, and renders possible or even necessary the establishment of some form of absolute leadership…The peoples of Europe are still far from having mentally digested the consequences of the steam engine. The capitalist system will collapse before the masses have understood it.” (p136-7, Rubashov’s diary)
The interrogation continues, now under the sole direction of Gletkin. Gletkin favours more extreme methods than Ivanov and uses sleep deprivation and exposure to a blinding light to wear Rubashov down. Rubashov begins to show signs of physical exhaustion, “The idea of death had a long time ago lost any metaphysical character; it had a warm, tempting, bodily meaning - that of sleep.” (p177) He also begins to show a more general weariness of the life he has led in pursuit of Communist ideals. Speaking of his comrades in the older generation, he reflects, “Worn by years of illegal struggle, eaten by the damp of the 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, which each had to deal with alone - for years, for tens of years. 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?” (p175) The strong impression is that Rubashov is about to confess and he confides this to his neighbour in cell 402 via their system of morse code tapped out on the prison’s internal piping. His fellow prisoner scolds him and the two argue about the nature of honour before breaking off contact.
During the interrogation, Gletkin makes the practicalist arguments that run right through the book, ‘“Experience teaches,” said Gletkin, “that the masses must be given for all difficult and complicated processes a simple, easily grasped explanation. According to what I know of history, I see that mankind could never do without scapegoats.”’ (p181) He refers to Ivanov in the past tense and reveals that he has been executed. Rubashov, in his state of physical and existential exhaustion, begins to see an inexorable logic to his confession. He will be sacrificed to the party, just like Richard, Little Loewy and Arlova. Perhaps, in his worn out state, Rubashov reverts to the mode of thinking he has used throughout his life and returns to it as a default. He no longer has the will or the energy to resist or argue with himself about which course of action to take. He even begins to think of the emergence of a more ruthless generation, like Gletkin, in evolutionary terms and writes in his diary:
“With what right do we who are quitting the scene look down with such superiority on the Gletkins? There must have been laughter amidst the apes when the Neanderthaler first appeared on earth. The highly civilized apes swung gracefully from bough to bough; the Neaderthaler was uncouth and bound to the earth. The apes, saturated and peaceful, lived in sophisticated playfulness, or caught fleas in philosophic contemplation; the Neaderthaler trampled gloomily through the world, banging around with clubs. The apes looked down on him amusedly from their tree tops and threw nuts at him. Sometimes horror seized them: they ate fruits and tender plants with delicate refinement; the Neaderthaler devoured raw meat, he slaughtered animals and his fellows. He cut down trees which had always stood, moved rocks from their time-hallowed place, transgressed against every law and tradition of the jungle. He was uncouth, cruel, without animal dignity - from the point of view of the highly cultivated apes, a barbaric relapse of history. The last surviving chimpanzees still turn up their noses at the sight of a human being…” (p184)
The final section, ‘The Grammatical Fiction’ begins with a quote from the Prussian-German polymath Ferdinand Lassalle’s ‘Franz von Sickingen: A Tragedy in Five Acts’:
“Show us not the aim without the way.
For ends and means on earth are so entangled
That changing one, you change the other too;
Each different path brings other ends in view.” (p193)
It opens in the house of Vasily the porter, who served under Rubashov in the revolutionary war, lying in bed, old and unwell, while his daughter reads the report of Rubashov’s trail from the paper ‘for educational reasons’ (p193). He’s turned away from her and mutters extracts from the bible inaudibly. Before Rubashov’s conviction, he had a bible secreted in his mattress but his daughter found it and threw it away. A picture of No.1 hangs ominously over the room and beside it a nail where Rubashov’s picture once hung before he was arrested. His daughter has registered herself to be married to a man who shares a room with other factory workers and the prospect of them receiving their own house is years away. Vasily is already under suspicion for his close connection to Rubashov and the threat of his own daughter denouncing him to the Secret Police to get his house for herself and her fiance hangs over the scene balefully. It’s a truly horrible scene - menacing, unnatural and ugly. The daughter produces a paper for her father to sign, presumably censuring Rubashov. He asks if those who fought in the war must also sign. She tells him no one is required to sign it but makes a thinly veiled threat about his connection to Rubashov. He signs the paper without reading it or hearing what is written on it. His daughter says Rubashov’s confession disgusts her and he replies:
‘“Don’t imagine that you understand,’ he said. ‘God knows what was in his mind when he said that. The Party has taught you all to be cunning, and whosoever becomes too cunning loses all decency. It’s no good shrugging your shoulders,’ he went on angrily. ‘It’s come to this in the world now that cleverness and decency are at loggerheads, and whosoever sides with one must do without the other. It’s not good for a man to work things out too much. That’s why it is written : ‘Let your communication be Yea, yea; Nay, nay; for whatever is more than these cometh of evil.”’ (p198)
The cunning cruelty of the daughter plotting to denounce her father made my skin crawl but I suppose it’s viewed as a logical consequence of abandoning what Rubashov refers to as ‘the silent partner’.
The action returns to Rubashov awaiting his execution in his cell, experiencing an unexpected calm. “He still did not understand why it had become so quiet, within and without. But he knew that now nothing could disturb this peace any more.” (p200) His confession is couched as an inevitably in a similar way to Tolstoy’s analysis of history in the epilogue of ‘War and Peace’:
“They were too deeply entangled in their own past, caught in the web they had spun themselves, according to the laws of their own twisted ethics and twisted logic; they were all guilty, although not of those deeds of which they accused themselves. There was no way back for them.” (p201)
Rubashov struggles with the meaning and consequences of his career in the party and where they’ve led him, perhaps also wondering why he is confessing at all and not dying in honourable silence as his fellow prisoners have urged him. Perhaps guilt about everything described in his career forces him to realise he has no right to complain about being purged for the good of the party:
“For 40 years he had lived strictly in accordance with the vows of his order, the Party. He had held to the rules of logical calculation. He had burnt the remains of the old, illogical morality from his consciousness with the acid of reason. He had turned away from the temptations of the silent partner, and had fought against the ‘oceanic sense’ with all his might. And where had it landed him? Premises of unimpeachable truth had led to a result which was completely absurd; Ivanov’s and Gletkin’s irrefutable deductions had taken him straight into the weird and ghostly game of the public trial. Perhaps it was not suitable for a man to think every thought to its logical conclusion.” (p205)
The ‘oceanic sense’ seems to describe a oneness in the universe and an end to the ego and perception of individuality. As death approaches, Rubashov reflects on the the metaphysical nature of the universe in one of the book’s more beautiful passages:
“And, indeed, one’s personality dissolved as a grain of salt in the sea; but at the same time the infinite sea seemed to be contained in the grain of salt. The grain could no longer be localized in time and space. It was a state in which thought lost its direction and started to circle, like the compass needle at the magnetic pole; until finally it cut loose from its axis and travelled freely in space, like a bunch of light in the night; and until it seemed that all thoughts and all sensations, even pain and joy itself, were only the spectrum of lines of the same ray of light, disintegrating in the prisma of consciousness.’ (p203)
Finally, Rubashov seems to arrive at some kind of epiphany about the importance of ‘the silent partner’ and feels a sense of quietude amidst the incomprehensibility of his life:
“What had he once written in his diary? ‘We have thrown overboard all conventions, our sole guiding principle is that of consequent logica; we are sailing without ethical ballast. Perhaps the heart of evil lay there. Perhaps it did not suit mankind to sail without ballast. And perhaps reason alone was a defective compass, which led one on such a winding, twisted course that the goal finally disappeared in the mist.” (p206)
The book ends with Rubashov being marched to his execution and shot in the head. The final four sentences are, ‘’Then all became quiet. There was the sea again with its sounds. A wave slowly lifted him up. It came from afar and travelled sedately on, a shrug of eternity.’ (p211)
This was an amazing book and one I would recommend to anyone. It really helped me to understand the mindset of Stalinism and the dangers of believing in anything with fanatical certainty. It’s a masterpiece and among the best books I’ve ever read.
