Orwell's twin

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BRIAN Inglis did the 'Everyman' portrait of Arthur Koestler (Sunday 19th), firmly claiming Koestler for the mystics and the credulous devotees of the paranormal.

Fair enough, since Koestler's will endowed a chair for research into the paranormal and much of his writing over the last decades attacked science, or the conventional wisdom about science.

Someone in the programme thought that these writings of Koestler's "may be a catalyst for a new era in science"

I wouldn't know. But I've always found the political Koestler very interesting.

He is George Orwell's twin, the one who personally wallowed in all the horrors that Orwell turned up his fastidious truthseeking nose at, and recoiled from, poisoned for life.

A Hungarian Jew in Germany, Koestler joined the Communist Party in 1931, and remained a member for seven years. He went to spain as a jouralist during the civi war, was captured by the fascists, and spent months in jail awaiting execution.

Liberal

Koestler, who worked for the British Liberal paper the News Chronicle, was eventually released. He broke with the Communist Party in 1938, at the time of the third Moscow Trial, in which Bukharin was the chief defendant.

In fact he remained a Stalinist for a long time after he broke with the CP. His first novel, 'The Gladiators' , published in 1939, tells the story of the great slave revolt associated with the name of Spartacus which shook the Roman world in the year 73 BC.

His version of the story is a parable on the experience of the Soviet Union. Spartacus is Stalin. The gladiatorial school inmates whose revolt triggers the great movement of slaves are the Bolshevik party.

The slaves found I a 'Sun City' and those who rule it are forced more and more to live as the ruling classes around them do. They rt fuse to aid other slaves.. To maintain discipline, Spartacus/Stalin becomes a tyrant • He is forced to crucify his old i comrades, including the de arlyloved Oenamus, who Bukharin...

Finally, Spartacus and the slave army abandon their 'Sun City' and go out to defeat and slaughter at the hands of the Romans.

It is a disgusting travesty, awash with sentimental romanticism, devoid of even the notion that the material interests of the Stalin-led bureaucracy were central to such things as the Moscow trials.

Yet Koestler's great claim to fame is as the novelist-psychologist of Stalinism.

In his 1940 novel 'Darkness at Noon', he plausibly answered the question, 'Why did they confess?' They confessed, says Koestler, because they believed in Stalin's party.

The novel is as awash with pseudo-dialectical goobledygook about the Bolsheviks' alleged philosophy of history as "The Gladiators' is with romanticism. The hero, 'Rubashov', a compound figure with much of Bukharin in him, an old revolutionary who confesses.

As an explanation of why men like Zinoviev, Rykov, Rakovsky, and others confessed, it is idiocy. We now know that they were tortured, demoralised over many years, and blackmailed. (Bukharin had a young wife and a baby son...)

Yet history was to do a strange thing to Koestler's travesty: it imitated it. Koestler had anachronistically attributed rained apparatchiks he knew in he psychology of the Stalinthe 1930s Comintern to the old Bolsheviks who confessed in the Moscow Trials. In 1948-52 there were purge trials of loyal Stalinists in the East European states. Some of them did confess fo: (in part, anyway) the reasons Koestler attributed to the old Bolsheviks. For example, Lazlo Rajk, former secretary of the Hungarian CP, shouted 'Long live the party' on the scaffold.

In the 1940s Koestler became a hysterical anti-Stalinist, and a very influential one. In the early '50s, he left politics for science and pseudo-science.

Murk

Much of the driving force that led him to mysticism seems to have been horror at the pseudo-Marxist, pseudo-materialist certainties associated with Stalinism. He himself truly said that he had moved 'from specious certainty to groping in the murk' . He could have shed the specious certainty without sinking as far into the murk as he did.

For me Koestler's political are an impordit pait of else al t spiritual, intellectual and psychological record of a generation who went to Stalin and the USSR for communism, and found such horrors there as maimed them for the rest of their lives.

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