Koba the Dread: Laughter and the Twenty Million

Amis, in writing about Stalin and the horrors of the former USSR took a big chance. He knew he would be excoriated by the Left for daring to break a taboo - silence on the issue of Soviet terror. This is a strange book in many ways, self-reflective (a personal letter to his father comes at the end), historical, asking hard questions that have no answer. Why indeed was/is Soviet totalitarianism a subject for laughter whereas German totalitarianism is an object of contempt? Where are all the seminars, marches, studies, and forums on college campuses about the regime that murdered more people than any on the planet?As noted in Jewish World Review, leftist rhetoric has an appeal: It is phrased so as to demand acceptance. The idea of "social justice", group rights, equality, classless society, elimination of poverty and other such goals is alluring and is what first attracted so many intellectuals. The real question is why they remained faithful and silent long after learning that the USSR was a hell on Earth? More disturbing is that there still exists many - from NPR to college campuses - who find that past as something unworthy of negative comment on a level close to that of Germany or, absurdly, South Africa. People are referred to (an NPR feature) as "former communists" with an equanimity that would never be acceptable for a "former Nazi". Amis shows that the 20 million dead (Bukovsky, the dissident mathematician, states the true number is closer to 50 million) were people, not statistics, and that they endured unbelievable horrors. It is not just whole villages that were uprooted, it is that an entire society froze with fear and suffered in silence as the West smiled. No wonder Stalin had such contempt for us. The individual vignettes are powerful, expository pieces that could affect the most cold-hearted activist still "waiting for the Revolution."

Martin Amis sails through this book on the crest of a valiant wave of anger almost angelic in its intensity. It saturates the entire work as he spits out the now-familiar facts, made fresh through his horror--the countries decimated, the tortured confessions multiplied into the millions, the planned starvation, the conversion of a once-viable nation into a giant slaughterhouse. It's all been said before, but so what? It needs to be said again to a new generation grown soft through ignorance. I loved this particular book for several reasons. Firstly, I can't think of a better introduction to Sovietology for the young, especially those nursed at the breast of American Socialism. Let them try to excuse Stalin away! Amis asserts that Stalin was the result of socialism--not an aberration, but its culminating product. Secondly, Amis says outright that we helped him kill, and he's absolutely right. He despises the left-wing enablers in the West, even his father, Kinsley Amis.Thirdly, he says that it is a crime that Hitler is held up as the quintessential man of evil and Stalin is, well, laughed at. Hitler, despite everything, he asserts, didn't completely destroy the fabric of his society. Lenin most assuredly tried, and Stalin succeeded. It's a bold assertion to make in Western Society, where Hitler is Satan. There are many Satans, Amis says, and Stalin was worse. Fourthly, and most importantly, "Koba the Dread" is excellent starting-point for those who haven't read Solzhenitsyn, Conquest or Grossman, because he quotes whole passages from their work, and cites many others. After I finished "Koba" I ran out and devoured every Vasily Grossman book I could find. Even if you don't do this, you'll be a much better educated person when you're through.Lastly--and unimportant to anyone but me, I know---is Martin Amis' style, his anger, his absolutely beautiful prose. There are many who, along with Solzhenitsyn, are able to compose eulogies for The Twenty Million---Vasily Grossman did in his dreamlike "Forever Flowing". Amis' style has very nearly elevated his into a hymn.

Martin Amis' analysis of Stalin and the Soviet terror begins with a simple yet probing question: Why can people joke about Stalin, the USSR, and their past "flirtations" with communism, while no one can (in acceptable society) make similar jokes about Hitler and National Socialist Germany? In delving into this and related questions, he draws conclusions that make this title, despite its weaknesses, essential reading for anyone who seeks to understand twentieth century history.The bulk of the book is taken up by Amis' chronicle of Stalin and his terror. He challenges Stalin's comment that "one death is a tragedy, a million deaths is a statistic," and draws us into Stalin's bizarre fantasy world -- his war against truth and, indeed, reality. The resultant tens of millions of individual tragedies -- Amis' citations from Solzhenitsyn and other are harrowing -- show how shameful it is that these stories are not as well known as those from the Holocaust.Uncovering why this is true makes up the final, and arguably most important, part of the book. That's because Amis takes aim at the myth -- so often heard even from people who should know better -- that Stalin's "excesses" were not endemic to communism, but rather were a result of the "cult of personality" that undermined true communism. Amis is having none of it. Terror, famine, slavery, and failure, "monotonous and incorrigible failure" (p. 30) are, he argues, the inevitable "Communist tetrarchy."For Amis, the lesson of the twentieth century is what it teaches about Leftism and "revolution." Much of this book is intensely personal, because Amis believes some of his dearest friends -- and, for a while, his father as well -- were duped by Stalin and his mania. In wrestling with the ghost of Stalin, Amis is wrestling too with their demons, and his own. After gazing, in these pages, upon the twenty million, his conclusion that "the Revolution was a lie" (p. 258) is hard to refute.

This subject has always been one that vexes me. Why do so many people revile Nazism to such an extent, yet Communism is often seen as a bad joke or "a well meaning system hijacked by bad people"? Amis hits on this theme time and time again, while summarizing the mind boggling crimes committed by Stalin, Trotsky, and Lenin.Amis paints one of the best pictures of Koba I've ever read. It's short, but it's very effective. In my mind, this book solidifies Stalin's place as the most evil person the world has ever seen. I can't even think of the right adjectives to describe the horrible things he ordered, as described in this book. Amis brings in tons of stories, told by people such as Solzhenitsyn and Conquest. He decries the lack of knowledge concerning the deaths of so many, and how leftist apologists worked so hard to explain or ignore the crimes. Amis also attacks the popular fallacy among many on the far left that Trotsky and Lenin were good guys. What a lie. Their own words are used to indict them, such as the "enlightened" Trotsky saying that state terror is just another glorious attribute of a communist society. I wonder if he felt the irony when Stalin's henchmen stuck a pick axe into his skull.Just a great book by Amis that will leave you with a bad taste in your mouth.

That this book has already caused consternation, and more significantly a somewhat neverous puzzlement as to why it even had to be written at all, has vindicated the thesis. Nowhere does the author claim to have undertaken original scholarship, and nor was such his point. He could quite possibly be the first English language novelist to bring any kind compelling imagination not only to life under the Soviet state but to the workings of the minds of Stalin and those Bolsheviks who left him a blueprint for a police state, minds defined by an "unpunctuated self-righteousness", to borrow Amis's absolutely perfect phrase. Yes, many Western intellectuals distanced themselves from the Great Terror and the Show Trials, some begrudgingly when reality was irrefutable, and there were certainly Western leaders who opposed Communism because they knew first-hand what was eminating from the Kremlin. But the opposition to Communism in the West, though official policy, was never given any intellectual credibility. And still isn't, although the tag Marxist or Trostkyite can still today summon up an aura of social conscience and intellectual rigor. Meanwhile Robert Conquest was a rightwing "Cold Warrior" for having been honest and accurate. And this is because much of the Western world continues to see its intellectual history through a leftist lense. It's still considered reactionary to dwell for too long on the ideological roots of the Soviet union. Yes, we know Stalin was awful, the assumption seems to be, but the ideals remain intact. And yet the ideals, to remake society and perfect human nature, could only preclude humanity in order to achieve fufillment. The police state, as Amis says, was inherent in the ideals. When every application of the theory leads to calamity one would think then that the theory would need to be restructured. But nope. The theory remains intact. Reality failed the theory. Meanwhile, the Robert Conquests of the world, who acknowledged the reality from the very beginning, are still suspected of some kind of agenda or bias. The left eschewed the Soviet government in practice after the show trials, and have never been able to defend any real manifestation Communism ever since. But they are still, as one astute observer recently noted, committed "anti-anti-communists". After the fraudulent posturings of Wells, Shaw, Wilson, Sartre, entire legions of the French left, the still-living Eric Hobsbawm, the Italian publisher Feltrinelli in the 1960s, and of course the Moscow correspondent for The Nation during the 1930s, there was no way anyone of this intellectual heritage could still be FOR Communism. But at least they could be AGAINST the anti-communists. And to think that prestige still clings to these people. That a writer of Amis' talent has really tried to think and feel his way into this history will go a long way towards restoring the balance.