Word: rubashov
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Kingsley's N. S. Rubashov is, like Koestler's, a fallen intellectual commissar whose own harsh weapons have been turned against him. He will soon be shot, but, because of his importance, he must be made to confess his "crimes." He remains the old-line Bolshevik who does confess, who does die a Communist, though the Communism he dies...
...drama herebeyond the simple one of prisoner and policeis that between one political generation and another. On the one hand are the pre-Stalinist revolutionaries, Rubashov and his cynical inquisitor Ivanovmen who only closed their minds after philosophy had opened them; who abandoned all morality for what seemed to them moral reasons; who were Communists enough to denounce pity, but men enough to understand it. On the other hand, there is the young, completely Sovietized Gletkin whose fanaticism signifies not intensity of feeling but all inability to feel, who is more mechanism than organism...
...Bolshevik Nicolas Rubashov, former People's Commissar, former commander in the Red Army, a fictional composite of the late liquidated Leo Kamenev and Nikolai Bukharin, is broken down by the GPU, induced to sign a false confession and declare at a public trial that he had plotted to murder "No. 1"-Stalin. Penalty: "physical liquidation." The men who succeeded in making old Rubashov confess ("To have laid out a Rubashov meant the beginning of a great career") were GPU Inquisitors Ivanov and Gletkin. Ivanov had been Rubashov's former schoolmate, former battalion commander. He drank, he doped...
Gletkin was a Stalinist, one of those humorless men whom Rubashov called the "Neanderthalers." It took Rubashov some time to find the right words to describe Gletkin's special quality: "correct brutality." He had been a mere boy when the Revolution broke out. "That was the generation which had started to think after the flood. It had no traditions, and no memories. ... It was a generation born without umbilical cord...
Ivanov was against using the "hard method" on Rubashov. "When Rubashov capitulates," Ivanov told Gletkin, "it won't be out of cowardice, but by logic. It is no use trying the hard method with him. He is made of a certain material which becomes the tougher the more you hammer...