“The old guard is dead. We are the last. We are going to be destroyed. For golden lads and girls all must, as chimney-sweepers, come to dust…”
Everything begins with in the solitary confinement prison cell No. 404 with its newest inhabitant, Nicholas Rubashov, political prisoner. Rubashov used to be a pretty big wheel at the Party factory; Commissar of the People. In the political environmental of a one-party, totalitarian system, however, those wheels which usually grind can suddenly start moving pretty quickly and before one realizes what’s happening, that big wheel winds up being a small man in a tiny cell already certain of the what, where and how of his fate with the only mystery being when.
“The principle that the end justifies the means is and remains the only rule of political ethics; anything else is just vague chatter and melts away between one’s fingers.”
Ivanov is the prisoner official conducting the official interrogation and examination of Rubashov. He is also an old friend from the ex-Commissar’s better days. The Machiavellian dictum that on the playing field for power any approach to attaining that power is forgivable if the ultimate goal justifies it is the controlling strategic plan for the Party and everyone working for it. Ivanov uses the phrase here in a way that reveals both its meaningless fluidity and its untenable immutability by applying it to the plot of Crime and Punishment with the suggestion that has Raskolnikov committed murder in the name of the Party, he would not suffer any guilt. The reference to guilt is, of course, an allusion to more than just the Dostoyevsky's fiction.
We have thrown overboard all conventions, our sole guiding principle is that of consequent logic; we are sailing without ethical ballast.
Rubashov has reached almost the end when he will finally learn the “when” of his fate before he finally has his epiphany. What destroyed the Revolution and transformed it into the nightmare responsible for his condition and fate is the very same principle upon it was not only founded but dependent. Too late the ex-Commissar of the People has learned that without an ethical dimension to the pursuit of the end, any means taken to attain them is suspect. Call it a case of ideological karma or simply an example of what goes around coming around. A much more appropriate reflection might be, however, that ignoring a fatal flaw in the system is always a sure path to doom.
“The Party’s line was sharply defined. Its tactics were determined by the principle that the end justifies the means—all means, without exception. In the spirit of this principle, the Public Prosecutor will demand your life, Citizen Rubashov.”
Ivanov has joined Rubashov in being a member of that old guard about to be destroyed; his arrest mandates the introduction of a new magistrate charged with interrogation. Gletkin is not a part of that old guard, but instead represents the newest evolution in the Party. The flaw in the system is exposed: those who pursue a policy of justification in the name of the Party can by definition place their loyalty nowhere else. Rubashov thus becomes a victim of his own misplaced trust in a ship of state constructed specifically without any appropriations for ethical ballast.
