N S Rubashov, an old guard Communist, falls victim to an unnamed totalitarian government. With outstanding psychological insight, Koestler traces his story through arrest, imprisonment, and trial in a classic novel which, when first published, famously drew attention to the true nature of Stalin’s regime. Despite the loss of the original German text, Daphne Hardy’s English translation of the novel, published in London in 19940, has become an international classic and has profoundly affected how history remembers the Moscow Show Trials.
