When I was a kid, one of my favorite television programs was “Foreign Intrigue.” James Daly, as “Michael Powers,” would emerge from some clinging Cold War fog, his trench coat loosely belted and his features grim, to introduce the action. The grainy black-and-white television screen seemed perfectly suited to the murky atmosphere of Berlin or Vienna or Warsaw, as I imagined them. The Cold War struck me as a thrilling game. I secretly vowed that one day I, too, would become a spy, prowling the back alleys of some gritty Stalinist metropolis.

Arthur Koestler’s “Darkness at Noon” (Bantam, 224 pages, $6.99) was the first sobering antidote I encountered to those mystifications of the tube. Re-reading it, many years later, I find it’s lost none of its naked punch; if anything, it reads more powerfully. The novel, which Koestler dashed off in German (while his mistress was simultaneously translating it into English at the other end of the room), appeared in 1940 and is unquestionably the most coruscating indictment of communist rule, and particularly Stalinist terror, ever written. Koestler’s analysis of the suffocating logic of the Soviet system remains surprisingly pertinent.

There are two reasons for this. First, Koestler’s novel is a superb work of art. Though he borrows narrative devices from sources as disparate as “The Count of Monte Cristo” and “The Trial,” he makes them all his own. The tale moves with ruthless economy from the arrest of Nicolas Salmanovitch Rubashov, “ex-Commissar of the People,” to his interrogation, show trial, and execution. (The fact that Rubashov, as his patronymic indicates, is a Jew adds a more sinister frisson.) Rubashov’s arrest is on trumped-up charges. But it is intrinsic to the novel’s brilliance that, along with Rubashov, we come to see that in fact he is supremely guilty, even if not of the crimes he’s charged with. Guilt and innocence are ultimately immaterial in the Soviet system: Rubashov the man, the living, suffering prisoner in his solitary confinement, is only a logical figment, a fallacy with an accidental heartbeat.

This is the second factor that gives “Darkness at Noon” its still-vibrant pertinence. The book exposes the disastrous implications of a deformed logic still with us today. The past century has taught us that the logic of terror, especially when state-sponsored and systemic, can become a killing machine of unparalleled efficiency. Fed into the maw of a syllogism, with its apodictic gears, what mere person can hope to emerge unmangled? The Party, which Rubashov has served all his life, occasionally fine-tunes its syllogisms; what matter if millions are annihilated in the calibration?

Another classic novel of the period – and one that, I think, is ultimately superior as literature to Koestler’s – also pursues the consequences of Marxist logic and shows in unforgettable detail how relentlessly glittering abstractions turn into freezing prison yards and acres of mass graves. This is Victor Serge’s “The Case of Comrade Tulayev” (NYRB Classics, 326 pages, $14.95), written on the run in the years 1940-42. Cast as a thriller, the case springs from the random murder of a brutal party functionary. Comrade Tulayev is shot down on a snowy nighttime street, almost on a whim, by an unemployed drifter who has come into the unexpected (and illegal) possession of a pistol. The murder sets the awesome apparatus of the Stalinist state into ponderous but terrifying motion, and no one involved in the investigation is spared.

Victor Serge himself was a drifter, an inspired one. Born in Brussels to Russians-in-exile parents and fluent in five languages (though he wrote only in French), he spent his restless life shuttled between countries – Belgium, France, Spain, Mexico, and Russia itself. He proved himself a fiercely truthful reporter and novelist, which guaranteed him exile and intellectual ostracism (he was booted out of Russia, in the end luckily, in 1936). As with “Darkness at Noon,” “The Case of Comrade Tulayev” is lifted above mere indictment, however justified, by artistry.

The whole of Russia is in his book, from the dreary Communist Party offices of the capital to the wind-torn steppes of banishment in the east. Through uncanny ability to slip into the skins of others, Serge brought his characters appallingly to life; not only Stalin himself (referred to only as “The Chief”) but sleazy prosecutors, embittered dissidents, members of the discarded Old Guard, peasants and priests, farmers on starving collectives, bureaucrats and apparatchiks of every stripe.

Each of these characters, all of whom in some way feed the machinery of the state and are themselves fed into it, retains some grimy shred of humanity, and it is this vestigial humanity that gives the novel almost unbearable force. Even more poignantly, Serge manifests throughout a piercing sense of the immeasurable Russian landscape; the stars, cold witnesses to atrocity, preside over some of the most moving episodes, as does the all enveloping snow that falls, like a strange, impersonal benediction, on both the supremely wicked and the helplessly innocent. For these reasons and because of his uncompromising truthfulness, Serge stands in the grand tradition of Russian letters, an heir of Tolstoy, Turgenev, and Chekhov.

Both these novels expose the logic of the lie. Other Cold War classics, such as Orwell’s incomparable “1984” and “Animal Farm” or John le Carre’s “The Spy Who Came In From the Cold” of 1963, do so brilliantly, but from outside. Koestler and Serge had both lived – and nearly died – on intimate terms with terror. Terror, which stops people’s mouths, is hardly conducive to art of any sort; somehow, through cold courage and the fury of truth, both Serge and Koestler found a way to give its victims voices, and they still reverberate.