Interesting, depressing... and unfortunately a necessary book to read right now as our modern liberal democracies begin their "Jacobin cycle": moving from creeping authoritarianism towards totalitarianism-lite, on their way eventually towards something far, far worse.
Read with:
Franz Kafka: The Trial
George Orwell: 1984
Notes:
* The Jacobin cycle is a useful lens to think about how countries in a perpetual state of "progressive revolution" simply eat themselves alive: one group of revolutionaries liquidates those who came before them as "approved" policies and ideas change... only for that next generation to be executed themselves by the generation to come. It's like an ouroboros eating itself in a perpetual cycle of self-annihilation.
* Note that today's cancel culture, the politics-based deplatforming, demonetizing and firings that happen here in the USA are simply Soviet-lite: it's the same type of mechanism at work. Who knows, we may be a bare thread from "progressing" to the real thing.
* The cynicism and nihilism in this book is almost unbearable: the main character knows so much about what it's like to be inside one of these socialist prisons that he can draw all kinds of conclusions from the person in the cell next to him just by how he taps code on the wall. "In all probability he was now sitting on his bunk, writing his hundredth protest to the authorities, who will never read it, or the hundredth letter to his wife, who will never receive it..."
* The psychological aspects of confinement, especially long-term solitary confinement: waking dreams, psychosis, etc.
* Interesting also to ponder the masturbatory version of history that socialist and communist true believers hold: that history is an irresistible river or a tide that sweeps everything in its way--and you just have to play your part in it without conscience, without agency even. It doesn't matter whether "your part" involves killing someone, torturing someone, sacrificing someone so that you get off lightly in a show-trial, etc., none of it matters in the context of this view of history. Even your own torture, your own death does not matter. You're just another egg to be cracked in the making of an omelette.
* On the idea of rule of law or fair play being a laughable joke in the totalitarian era: "We were the first to replace the nineteenth century's liberal ethics of "fair play" by the revolutionary ethics of the twentieth century. In that also we were right: a revolution conducted according to the rules of cricket is an absurdity."
* Doing the right thing (for example, defending your friend or lover from political attacks) is "petty bourgeois morality."
* There's an interesting meta-ethical discussion that happens between the main character Rubakov and his acquaintance and jailer Ivanov over the course of the book: on the ethics of having ethics in an environment where history rolls towards its inescapable conclusion; on the ethics of renouncing violence after living a life of violence and participating in the liquidation of one's own political enemies; the temptation to make peace with oneself when there can be no such thing in this type of regime, etc.
* The author writes a diary articulating his philosophy of the "social maturity" of the masses: it is rhetoric with no moral, logical or ethical core; it's a long winded midwit justification for state-sponsored murder and totalitarianism, nothing more; but the result is it helps the main character himself to die in silence and abase himself at the foot of the machine that he helped put into place..
* Another interesting ethical debate (articulated via tapping on the wall in code between the main character and the inmate in the next cell) whether "honor is to live and die for one's belief" or "honor is to be useful without vanity" (in other words to die for the regime regardless of how arbitrary the reasons).
* On how everyone else who read about or witnessed the various show-trials during this era were confidently certain of the guilt of the accused: "So now you see," said Vera Wassiljovna, "he says himself that he is a traitor. If it weren't true, he wouldn't say so himself."
* A bonus: the reader gets familiarized with certain important figures in the French Revolution: for example Georges Danton and Louis Antoine de Saint-Just, both important players in the Jacobin and Robespierre terror and guillotining of political opponents as the French played ouroboros on their civilization in the mid 1790s.
* "They were all guilty, although not of those deeds of which they accused themselves."