The Principle That The End Justifies

Spoken by Ivanov, the interrogator and former friend of the imprisoned commissar Rubashov, in Darkness at Noon (1940). Koestler's novel fictionalises the Soviet show trials of the 1930s and dissects the logic that drove Old Bolsheviks to confess to crimes they did not commit. Ivanov presents this Machiavellian principle not as cynicism but as the Party's official ethics — the cornerstone of a rationalist politics that subordinates the individual entirely to the collective goal. By the novel's end Rubashov recognises the same principle as the fatal flaw that destroyed both himself and the Revolution.