Darkness at Noon

Like Part Two, Part Three opens with an excerpt from Rubashov’s diary, in which he theorizes the “swing” of the pendulum of human history. He reframes Bogrov’s death as his falling “out of the swing” (170) of history a hundred and fifty years after the pendulum began its most recent upswing “towards the blue sky of freedom” (170) with the storming of the Bastille. The last fifty years have occurred on the other side of that swing up toward freedom, taking people back “to tyranny again” (170). Rubashov theorizes that the “amount of individual freedom which a people may conquer and keep, depends on the degree of its political maturity” (170), which “does not follow a continuous rising curve, as does the growing up of an individual” (170), and that “every technical improvement creates a new complication” (171) in response to which it takes many years for “a people’s level of understanding” (171) to catch up. Rubashov goes on to compare this process to the “lifting of a ship through a lock with several chambers” (171). This theory suggests that capitalism will eventually collapse and accounts for the brutality of the political machinery in the “Fatherland of the Revolution” (173). The excerpt ends with Rubashov’s theorizing of three options for “the opposition”: to oust the existing leadership by force, to “die in silence,” or to continue with “the denial and suppression of one’s own conviction when there is no prospect of materializing it” (174).