Part of BRLSI Democracy Under Threat Series:

Left-wing intellectuals such as Arthur Koestler and George Orwell wrote widely of their bitter disillusionment at the perversion of the ideals and ambitions of Communism and the 1917 Russian revolution as it morphed – perhaps inevitably – into a murderously amoral police state under Stalin.

Koestler personalises all this via the death-cell memories, ruminations and remorse of the “Old Bolshevik” Rubashov, the last of the heroic makers of the revolution and the Soviet state to have survived the purges of the 1930s in which Stalin destroyed all opposition to his rule and cowed a vast country.