Koba the Dread: Laughter and the Twenty Million
Koba the Dread: Laughter and the Twenty Million book cover

Koba the Dread: Laughter and the Twenty Million

Paperback – September 9, 2003

by
Price
$17.95
Format
Paperback
Pages
336
Publisher
Vintage
Publication Date
ISBN-13
978-1400032204
Dimensions
5.14 x 0.82 x 7.96 inches
Weight
9.6 ounces

Description

From The New Yorker When the historian Robert Conquest was asked in the post-Gorbachev years to give a new title to a revised edition of "The Great Terror," his classic 1968 account of the murderous Stalin era, he said to his publisher, "How about 'I Told You So, You Fucking Fools'?" Rarely has such smugness been so deeply earned. There had been many fools who dismissed Conquest as a dupe. In this meditation, the novelist Martin Amis sets out to recall the moral and intellectual blindness that allowed so many to ignore the millions of corpses and the camps, and his heroic voices include Conquest (to whom the book is dedicated), Solzhenitsyn, Koestler, and Akhmatova. "Koba the Dread" is a vivid, if often eccentric, rereading of those authors; the frequent instances when the book veers into family memoir and homely analogy, however, are less successful. At one point, Amis writes that the nighttime cries of his baby daughter "would not have been out of place in the deepest cellars of the Butyrki Prison in Moscow during the Great Terror." As it happens, they would have. Copyright © 2005 The New Yorker “ Koba the Dread is filled with passion and intelligence, and with prose that gleams and startles.... This fierce little book...[has the] power to surprise, and ultimately to provoke, enrage and illuminate.” – San Jose Mercury News “Heartfelt.... Amis does not shrink from difficult questions about possible moral distinctions between Lenin and Stalin, Stalin and Hitler.” – San Francisco Chronicle “Riveting...Martin Amis has a noble purpose in writing Koba the Dread . He wants to call attention to just what an insanely cruel monster Josef Stalin was.” – Seattle Times “Martin Amis is our inimitable prose master, a constructor of towering English sentences, and his life…is genuinely worth writing about.” – Esquire From the Inside Flap A brilliant weave of personal involvement, vivid biography and political insight, Koba the Dread is the successor to Martin Amis?s award-winning memoir, Experience . Koba the Dread captures the appeal of one of the most powerful belief systems of the 20th century ? one that spread through the world, both captivating it and staining it red. It addresses itself to the central lacuna of 20th-century thought: the indulgence of Communism by the intellectuals of the West. In between the personal beginnings and the personal ending, Amis gives us perhaps the best one-hundred pages ever written about Stalin: Koba the Dread, Iosif the Terrible.The author?s father, Kingsley Amis, though later reactionary in tendency, was a ?Comintern dogsbody? (as he would come to put it) from 1941 to 1956. His second-closest, and then his closest friend (after the death of the poet Philip Larkin), was Robert Conquest, our leading Sovietologist whose book of 1968, The Great Terror , was second only to Solzhenitsyn?s The Gulag Archipelago in undermining the USSR. The present memoir explores these connections.Stalin said that the death of one person was tragic, the death of a million a mere ?statistic.? Koba the Dread , during whose course the author absorbs a particular, a familial death, is a rebuttal of Stalin?s aphorism. From the Hardcover edition. A brilliant weave of personal involvement, vivid biography and political insight, "Koba the Dread is the successor to Martin Amis's award-winning memoir, "Experience. "Koba the Dread captures the appeal of one of the most powerful belief systems of the 20th century -- one that spread through the world, both captivating it and staining it red. It addresses itself to the central lacuna of 20th-century thought: the indulgence of Communism by the intellectuals of the West. In between the personal beginnings and the personal ending, Amis gives us perhaps the best one-hundred pages ever written about Stalin: Koba the Dread, Iosif the Terrible. The author's father, Kingsley Amis, though later reactionary in tendency, was a "Comintern dogsbody" (as he would come to put it) from 1941 to 1956. His second-closest, and then his closest friend (after the death of the poet Philip Larkin), was Robert Conquest, our leading Sovietologist whose book of 1968, "The Great Terror, was second only to Solzhenitsyn's "The Gulag Archipelago in undermining the USSR. The present memoir explores these connections. Stalin said that the death of one person was tragic, the death of a million a mere "statistic." "Koba the Dread, during whose course the author absorbs a particular, a familial death, is a rebuttal of Stalin's aphorism. "From the Hardcover edition. MARTIN AMIS is the author of 15 novels—among them Zone of Interest, London Fields, Time’s Arrow, The Information, and Night Train —along withxa0the memoir Experience, the novelized self-portrait Inside Story ,xa0two collections of stories, and seven nonfiction books.xa0He died in 2023. Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved. PART I THE COLLAPSE OF THE VALUE OF HUMAN LIFE PreparatoryHere is the second sentence of Robert Conquest's The Harvest of Sorrow: Soviet Collectivization and the Terror-Famine:We may perhaps put this in perspective in the present case by saying that in the actions here recorded about twenty human lives were lost for, not every word, but every letter, in this book.That sentence represents 3,040 lives. The book is 4411 pages long.'Horse manure was eaten, partly because it often contained whole grains of wheat' (1,340 lives). 'Oleska Voytrykhovsky saved his and his family's ...lives by consuming the meat of horses which had died in the collective of glanders and other diseases' (2,480 lives). Conquest quotes Vasily Grossman's essayistic-documentary novel Forever Flowing: 'And the children's faces were aged, tormented, just as if they were seventy years old. And by spring they no longer had faces. Instead, they had birdlike heads with beaks, or frog heads - thin, wide lips - and some of them resembled fish, mouths open' (3,880 lives). Grossman goes on:In one hut there would be something like a war. Everyone would keep close watch over everyone else ...The wife turned against her husband and the husband against his wife. The mother hated the children. And in some other hut love would be inviolable to the very last. I knew one woman with four children. She would tell them fairy stories and legends so that they would forget their hunger. Her own tongue could hardly move, but she would take them into her arms even though she had hardly the strength to lift her arms when they were empty. Love lived on within her. And people noticed that where there was hate people died off more swiftly. Yet love, for that matter, saved no one. The whole village perished, one and all. No life remained in it.Thus: 11,860 lives. Cannibalism was widely practised - and widely punished. Not all these pitiable anthropophagi received the supreme penalty. In the late 1930s, 325 cannibals from the Ukraine were still serving life sentences in Baltic slave camps.The famine was an enforced famine: the peasants were stripped of their food. On 11 June 1933, the Ukrainian paper Visti praised an 'alert' secret policeman for unmasking and arresting a 'fascist saboteur' who had hidden some bread in a hole under a pile of clover. That word fascist. One hundred and forty lives.In these pages, guileless prepositions like at and to each rep-resent the murder of six or seven large families. There is only one book on this subject: Conquest's. It is, I repeat, 4411 pages long. Credentials I am a fifty-two-year-old novelist and critic who has recently read several yards of books about the Soviet experiment. On 31 December 1999, along with Tony Blair and the Queen, I attended the celebrations at the Millennium Dome in London. Touted as a festival of high technology in an aesthetic dreamscape, the evening resembled a five-hour stopover in a second-rate German airport. For others, the evening resembled a five-hour attempt to reach a second-rate German airport - so I won't complain. I knew that the millennium was a non-event, reflecting little more than our interest in zeros; and I knew that 31 December 1999, wasn't the millennium anyway.* But that night did seem to mark the end of the twentieth century; and the twentieth century is unanimously considered to be our worst century yet (an impression confirmed by the new book I was reading: Reflections on a Ravaged Century, by Robert Conquest). I had hoped that at midnight I would get some sort of chiliastic frisson. And I didn't get it at the Dome. Nonetheless, a day or two later I started to write about the twentieth century and what I took to be its chief lacuna. The piece, or the pamphlet, grew into the slim volume you hold in your hands. I have written about the Holocaust, in a novel (Time's Arrow). Its afterword begins:This book is dedicated to my sister Sally, who, when she was very young, rendered me two profound services. She awakened my protective instincts; and she provided, if not my earliest childhood memory, then certainly my most charged and radiant. She was perhaps half an hour old at the time. I was four.It feels necessary to record that, between Millennium Night and the true millennium a year later, my sister died at the age of forty-six. Background In 1968 I spent the summer helping to rewire a high-bourgeois mansion in a northern suburb of London. It was my only taste of proletarian life. The experience was additionally fleeting and qualified: when the job was done, I promptly moved into the high-bourgeois mansion with my father and stepmother (both of them novelists, though my father was also a poet and critic). My sister would soon move in too. That summer we were of course monitoring the events in Czechoslovakia. In June, Brezhnev deployed 16,000 men on the border. The military option on 'the Czech problem' was called Operation Tumour . . . My father had been to Prague in 1966 and made many contacts there. After that it became a family joke - the stream of Czechs who came to visit us in London. There were bouncing Czechs, certified Czechs, and at least one honoured Czech, the novelist Josef Skvorecky. And then on the morning of 21 August my father appeared in the doorway to the courtyard, where the rewiring detail was taking a break, and called out in a defeated and wretched voice: 'Russian tanks in Prague.'I turned nineteen four days later. In September I went up to Oxford.The first two items in The Letters of Kingsley Amis form the only occasion, in a book of 1,200 pages, where I find my father impossible to recognize. Here he is humourlessly chivvying a faint-hearted comrade to rally to the cause. The tone (earnest, elderly, 'soppy-stern') is altogether alien: 'Now, really, you know, this won't do at all, leaving the Party like that. Tut, tut, John. I am seriously displeased with you.' The second letter ends with a hand-drawn hammer and sickle. My father was a card-carrying member of the CP, taking his orders, such as they were, from Stalin's Moscow. It was November 1941: he was nineteen, and up at Oxford.1941 Kingsley, let us assume, was sturdily ignorant of the USSR's domestic cataclysms. But its foreign policies hardly cried out for one's allegiance. A summary. August 1939: the Nazi-Soviet Pact. September 1939: the Nazi-Soviet invasion-partition of Poland (and a second pact: the Soviet-German Treaty on Borders and Friendship). November 1939: the annexation of Western Ukraine and Western Belorussia, and the attempted invasion of Finland (causing the USSR's expulsion, the following month, from the League of Nations). June 1940: the annexation of Moldavia and Northern Bukovina. August 1940: the annexation of Lithuania, Lativa and Estonia; and the murder of Trotsky. These acquisitions and decapitations would have seemed modest compared to Hitler's helter-skelter successes over the same period. And then in June 1941, of course, Germany attacked the Soviet Union. My father rightly expected to participate in the war; the Russians were now his allies. It was then that he joined the Party, and he remained a believer for fifteen years.How much did the Oxford comrades know, in 1941? There were public protests in the West about the Soviet forced-labour camps as early as 1931. There were also many solid accounts of the violent chaos of Collectivization (1929-34) and of the 1933 famine (though no suggestion, as yet, that the famine was terroristic). And there were the Moscow Show Trials of 1936-38, which were open to foreign journalists and observers, and were monitored worldwide. In these pompous and hysterical charades, renowned Old Bolsheviks 'confessed' to being career-long enemies of the regime (and to other self-evidently ridiculous charges). The pubescent Solzhenitsyn was 'stunned by the fraud-ulence of the trials'. And yet the world, on the whole, took the other view, and further accepted indignant Soviet denials of famine, enserfment of the peasantry, and slave labour. 'There was no reasonable excuse for believing the Stalinist story. The excuses which can be advanced are irrational,' writes Conquest in The Great Terror. The world was offered a choice between two realities; and the young Kingsley, in common with the overwhelming majority of intellectuals everywhere, chose the wrong reality.The Oxford Communists would certainly have known about the Soviet decree of 7 April 1935, which rendered children of twelve and over subject to 'all measures of criminal punishment', including death. This law, which was published on the front page of Pravda and caused universal consternation (reducing the French CP to the argument that children, under socialism, became grownups very quickly), was intended, it seems, to serve two main purposes. One was social: it would expedite the disposal of the multitudes of feral and homeless orphans created by the regime. The second purpose, though, was political. It applied barbaric pressure on the old oppositionists, Kamenev and Zinoviev, who had children of eligible age; these men were soon to fall, and their clans with them. The law of 7 April 1935, was the crystallization of 'mature' Stalinism. Imagine the mass of the glove that Stalin swiped across your face; imagine the mass of it.**On 7 April 1935 my father was nine days away from his thirteenth birthday. Did he ever wonder, as he continued to grow up, why a state should need 'the last line of defence' (as a secret reinforcing instruction put it) against twelve-year-olds?Perhaps there is a reasonable excuse for believing the Stalinist story. The real story - the truth - was entirely unbelievable.* The millennial moment was midnight, 31 December 2000 This is because we went from B.C. to A.D. without a year nought. Vladimir Putin described the (pseudo) millennium as 'the 2000th anniversary of Christianity'.** It will be as well, here, to get a foretaste of his rigour. The fate of Mikhail Tukhachevsky, a famous Red commander in the Civil War, was ordinary enough, and that of his family was too. Tukhachevsky was arrested in 1937, tortured (his interrogation protocols were stained with drops of 'flying' blood, suggesting that his head was in rapid motion at the time), farcically arraigned, and duly executed. Moreover (this is Robert C. Tucker's précis in Stalin in Power: The Revolution from Above, 1928-41): 'His wife and daughter returned to Moscow where she was arrested a day or two later along with Tukhachevsky's mother, sisters, and brothers Nikolai and Aleksandr. Later his wife and both brothers were killed on Stalin's orders, three sisters were sent to camps, his young daughter Svetlana was placed in a home for children of "enemies of the people" and arrested and sent to a camp on reaching the age of seventeen, and his mother and one sister died in exile.' Read more

Features & Highlights

  • A brilliant weave of personal involvement, vivid biography and political insight,
  • Koba the Dread
  • is the successor to Martin Amis’s award-winning memoir,
  • Experience
  • .
  • Koba the Dread
  • captures the appeal of one of the most powerful belief systems of the 20th century — one that spread through the world, both captivating it and staining it red. It addresses itself to the central lacuna of 20th-century thought: the indulgence of Communism by the intellectuals of the West. In between the personal beginnings and the personal ending, Amis gives us perhaps the best one-hundred pages ever written about Stalin: Koba the Dread, Iosif the Terrible. The author’s father, Kingsley Amis, though later reactionary in tendency, was a “Comintern dogsbody” (as he would come to put it) from 1941 to 1956. His second-closest, and then his closest friend (after the death of the poet Philip Larkin), was Robert Conquest, our leading Sovietologist whose book of 1968,
  • The Great Terror
  • , was second only to Solzhenitsyn’s
  • The Gulag Archipelago
  • in undermining the USSR. The present memoir explores these connections. Stalin said that the death of one person was tragic, the death of a million a mere “statistic.”
  • Koba the Dread
  • , during whose course the author absorbs a particular, a familial death, is a rebuttal of Stalin’s aphorism.

Customer Reviews

Rating Breakdown

★★★★★
30%
(71)
★★★★
25%
(59)
★★★
15%
(35)
★★
7%
(16)
★
23%
(54)

Most Helpful Reviews

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Damning indictment of Communism and the 'Soviet Experiment'

The modern world still has yet to come to grips with the awfulness and sadistic darkness that was the so-called 'Soviet Experiment' during the 20th century. We freely damn Hitler and his Reich, and you'll be hard-pressed to find any academic, political, or cultural admirers of the Nazis. Yet across the free world, too many people are still writing love letters to Lenin. This book focuses mainly on the Stalin period, but Stalin could not have existed if Lenin and the other Bolsheviks had not constructed their diseased political and social Soviet architecture; which Stalin would later use to slaughter millions.
It is a sick, sad joke that we still have intellectuals--sometimes tenured in our most prestigious universities--mouthing apologia for the Experiment and either ignoring or explaining away all the dreadfulness that went with it. Like the Platonists of old, these intellectuals prefer the imagined world of ideas to the harshness of reality. For all the grand rhetoric about the Workers Paradise and a utopia of equality, the Soviet Union was a horrific exercise in barbaric tyranny which makes the Third Reich look amateurish. Nobody in the Soviet Union was safe. Especially when Iosif Vissarionovich Dzhugashvili was at the helm.
Amis does much to impress upon us the madness of Stalin's reign. Iosif sent his enemies to die, he sent his friends to die; he sent their mothers, fathers, sisters, brothers, children, and neighbors. He sent their associates, and all of their families and friends and acquaintences. Everyone was in danger of implication, and everyone was expected to confess once hauled in for trial-free conviction and sentencing. The ones given a swift bullet were lucky. For the rest, it was Gulag, a concept that I did not truly understand until reading this book. I thought I knew what a gulag was, but through Amis the gulag becomes not a mere place, nor a concept, but a sort of feasting demon, devouring the countless bodies and souls hurled into its frozen, jagged maw by a government that is still looked upon wistfully by many an academic.
If history chooses to gloss over or forget the Soviet horror, then it is an academic crime of the greatest possible proportion. Countless innocent perished for the fever dreams of the Communists. Unless that toll is properly reckoned with, I fear that at some future point the human race is doomed to repeat this evil. Especially since we have an actively employed cadre of would-be armchair socialist and communist proponents who still grouse about 'imperial capitalism', the 'plight of the proletariat', and the need for an overarching, strong, one-world government capable of resolving all disputes, curing all ills, and leveling every playing field.
Was 20 million too small a figure? How much blood is the Experiment worth?
14 people found this helpful
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Excellent, brief, literary survey of a horrific regime

"Koba" is an affecting, concise, and well-written "author's encounter" with the primary literature of the Lenin and Stalin years.

If Amis had not personalized the narrative and also attempted to make it a literary effort, it could have been a deadly dull recitation of a period of horror. Fortunately, he writes about not just the historical facts, but also about what it is for a modern person to learn about these events, and compares the large-scale tragedy to relevant events in his own life. He also draws many perceptive conclusions.

For example, he suggests that it's socially acceptable to laugh at Stalinism but not at Nazism. The reason for this, he argues, is not the mere gap between propoganda and reality (a problem for any government, it seems), but the perfect opposition of Stalinist propoganda and Soviet reality. The Nazis were, to a large extent, candid about what the evil was that they were trying to commit. Stalin was claiming the triumph of a workers' paradise (the high-minded ideal of Communism), while at the same time very intentionally doing everything possible to destroy human solidarity in order to maintain and increase his own power (the triumphant apex of the reactionary low-brow). Amis calls it "negative perfection". It's hard not to have an ironic laugh, though in full solidarity, with citizens who are told that utopia has finally arrived while their children are starving to death. The horror makes all the cheerleading instantly risible, or too absurd perhaps to deserve even a jeer.

But this is not to say that "Koba" lacks for factual matter. In fact it is above all a history text, with as many names and dates and specific events as most readers could possibly desire. It is simply fortunate for us that Amis doesn't leave it there, but also provides ironic, penetrating commentary, and stories and events from his own life that resonate with the grand narrative.

If you don't know much about this core piece of 20th Century history, Amis's survey could be the best available place to start learning, and I think that his thoughtful insights, high-minded though fluid and energetically terse style, and meticulous care for the English language are all very impressive.
13 people found this helpful
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A great work. Martin Amis at his best

A great work. Martin Amis at his best. A chilling portrait of Stalin, sometimes a baffoon sometimes a genius. Successful politicians tend to be ruthless, but in a grim survival of the fittest milieu of the Bolshevik state it seems that a man of Stalin's ability and Machiavellian brilliance would rise to the top. The amazing thing is that even today there are those among us who still deny the Ukrainian famine and the Great Famine or worse yet try to justify them.
10 people found this helpful
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Propagating black myth of "giant prison"

Wonderful question in editorial review: "when 20 million died under a Bolshevik regime that ruled as if waging war against its own people. Why?" Well, I hate to break it to you, silly but this is because it never happened. Not a single serious historic account of such an idiotic claim yet it continues to persist in the Western discourse. Why? Well, it feels better when the only true country of the people and for the people is painted all black. And whenever people in this country try to even think of uniting for the better living and greater fairness in distribution of wealth, they are immediately checked by images of "evil Stalin" and "20 million dead". But why the heck it is only 20 million? Amis's rival in anti-Sovetizm Mr. Solzhenitsyn claimed it was 60 million! Come on, Amis, don't be shy! If you are writing a lie, make it audacious, loud! Remember what your teacher, Dr. Goebbels said about lying and drop your inhibitions!
7 people found this helpful
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Stalin -- Direct Progression from Lenin and Trotsky

While there is an impressive array of scholarship, personal memoirs and stark evidence of the horrors of Stalin, there still remains the refrain that he was somehow an aberrant, abomination different from the ideological inheritance of Lenin and Trotsky. A promise of revolution only gone awry. Martin Amis reminds us that Stalin was in direct lineage to the horrors of millenial cults that was Marxism ( I use the word "was" on the presumption that no one on the right side of the walls of an state mental health institution would believe that Marxism is a viable political system).

There is still this historical distance that and feeling, sometimes felt and less often, propounded by false academics, that Trotsky and Lenin were somehow holier than that Judas, Stalin. Amis tells us that nothing could be further from the truth and that while the terror of Stalin was at least as bad anything Lenin dreamed up -- from Lenin's horrible famine in the early 20s to Trotsky's prediliction for mowing down Reds as well as White soldiers. The Soviet revolution was really hell on wheels where the death of innocents not only made no impression on the old bolsheviks but terror was something to be positively encouraged -- a means towards the sterilised world of percieved Marxian perfection.

Amis ranges wide and freely, and I could cite the quirky writing style, the fact that the book is a sort of swan song goodbye to his Father and Sister, or I could revel you with facts of the terror and inverted moralism that Stalin unleashed on his people (in the fashion of Mao waging war on his own country, destroying culture, arts and people in equal measure. I could also cite Amis' reoccurent theme of laughter... how is it that Jokes about the 20 Million Russians who died are viewed as funny, and yet no one laughs (rightly) at jokes about the Jewish Holocaust?

It is all there in the above. I mention the part of the moral decriptude of Trotsky and Lenin merely because it was one of the central lessons I took away from this book. While some of the world was duped by Stalin at the time that travesty has been long revealed. That people are still willing to believe that Lenin and Trotsky were any better than Stalin still inflicts the minds of many -- I should know, I was one of the minds who used to believe such folly.
6 people found this helpful
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Stalin: Butcher and Maniac

The 20th century was both the world's brightest and bleakest hundred year term. Brightest in so far as the ingenuity that was applied to raising living standards in large parts of the world; bleakest in so far as the manner in which various dictators practiced human carnage on a grand scale. It was a century of great paradoxes.

Martin Amis has done a great service to history and its interpretation with his slim work, "Koba the Dread: Laughter and the Twenty Million." This book is part history and part a personal treatise on the corruption of the Soviet Union under the reign of Stalin.

In analysing the 20th century, we too often only think of the Jewish holocaust when we consider mass carnage. Bad though the holocaust was, it had no monopoly on depravity and death. In the decade before Hitler pursued his final solution, Stalin was working assiduously to manufacture his own hell on earth. An estimated 20 million souls were put to death by firing squad, torture or deliberate famine. While there were no gas ovens, Stalin was still able to terrify a nation.

In writing this review I am in no way seeking to downplay or deny the horrors of Nazi Germany. Nor, for that matter, is Amis. Instead, Amis is simply trying to place the maniacal ideas of Stalin into a broader perspective. Stalin was a butcher plain and simple. He was deluded and dangerous. His mindless politics scarred the world.

No reader should be deterred from reading this book on the grounds that they may be horrified by a cold analytical writer. Amis is a writer of great depth and this work should be read by all those persons seeking an insight to the contradictions and evil that and was Stalin.
6 people found this helpful
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Nausea

In looking at the other reviews, I'm stunned at how anyone could even conceive of downplaying the content of this book for their own ideology. Absolutely contemptible and sick.
The manner in which Amis wrote this book was interesting enough to help get through the gruesome, nauseating content. One of the saddest things I've read in ages. Everyone should have to read this book to see the results of philosophy gone awry. As tired as it may sound, "Be careful what you wish for."
6 people found this helpful
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Excellent Analysis of the Psychology of Authoritarianism

Amis' little tome is a splendid anlaysis of the psychology of authoritarianism. If you are looking for a book about the Soviet Union in World War II, the Gulags, the Russian Revolution, and the like -- look elsewhere. In short, "Koba the Dread" examines the utter banality of the autocratic mindset, the often twisted, cruel, and irrational thought processes utilized by dictators (in this case, Stalin): Paranoia, hate, hypocrisy, cruelty, self-aggrandizement, fear, and murder. This book is disturbing because it is filled with endless quotes, ancedotes, and snippets about death, torture, sadism, and slavery in Stalin's Russia. Amis tries to find some deeper, existential meaning to "the twenty million" who died under Stalin against the backdrop of the literary career of his (once) pro-Stalinist father Kingsley Amis, on one side, and the death of his young and innocent sister, Sally, on the other (One recommendation is in order: If you have no familiarity with the overall history of the Soviet Union or the life of Stalin, it might prove beneficial to read an introductory text, first...). In the end, Amis' work is one man's eloquent cry against the barbarity of modern authoritarianism...
5 people found this helpful
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Part self-indulgent ramble, but hauntingly effective

Koba the Dread is a self-indulgent ramble of a book in parts, yet as a whole, hauntingly effective. Part 1, 'The Collapse of the Value of Human Life', sets the scene and the mood - an eclectic yet somehow logically organized collection of short points, anecdotes, reminiscences. Part 2, 'Iosif the Terrible: Short Course', explores the life, times and crimes of Stalin, from childhood to deathbed encompassing famine, collectivization, terror, invasion and the camps.
But this is no dull history nor plodding biography. Bite-sized mini-topics hold your interest, yet combine in a devastating picture of ... 'a madman' is far too simplistic a term for a tyrant who, unlike the oft-compared Hitler, does not always seem aware of the nature of evil. Part 2 is an excellent 'quick study' of the major Soviet commentators (lots of Robert Conquest and of course Solzhenitsyn) if you don't have the stomach to read them, and a good humanizing of events if you have read them. Had you ever wondered why we all know what the Holocaust is, yet there is no word to cover the many more millions murdered by the Terror-Famine, or in the Gulag?
While Stalin saw the Soviet Union as a reflection of himself, in major ways he and his tragic country took different paths, and this is partly why it is pointless to ask, as this and many other authors do, 'why do people instinctively revile Hitler and Nazism but not Stalin and Bolshevism?' The most chilling page in the book is the discussion that if Stalin had strengthened and properly prepared his military, they could have defeated the invading Germans in weeks, thus perhaps saving 40 million lives, including the majority of Holocaust victims. Instead, Stalin purged his army officers, ignored evidence of the imminent Nazi invasion and made huge military tactical blunders; yet despite him and the evil he did them, the Red Army and Soviet citizens defeated Hitler through their own determination for revenge, physical toughness and sheer willingness to endure. This, Mr Amis, is quite simply why you can wear a hammer and sickle t-shirt but not a swastika.
5 people found this helpful
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Learn about Stalin

British novelist Martin Amis ponders the question, `why is it that one never laughs about Hitler's Holocaust which claimed the lives of 11 million, while members of the left are able to laugh about Stalin's rule, which claimed the lives of over 20 million?' This is an examination of the socio-historical-political facets that underlie Soviet style communism, and seeks to provide explanation for its broad support among the European intellectual elite of the 1950's, including Amis' father Kingsley. It is also a fairly rigorous, though often unoriginal forensic portrait of Stalin's particular breed of tyranny, which Amis attributes both to his insanity as well as the totalitarian nature of the Marxist-Leninist system which he inherited.

This book might be though of as a letter to those of the old left such as Christopher Hitchens, who continue to derive a fair amount of laughter and enjoyment for their past follies. Amis breaks from his historiography in these moments, and he imposes his own anti-communism on Hitchens' work; he contrives dicey judgments such as,

"although I always liked Christopher's journalism, there seemed to me to be something wrong with it, something faintly but pervasively self-defeating: the sense that the truth could be postponed. This flaw disappeared in 1989, and his prose made immense gains in burnish and authority. I used to attribute the change to the death of Christopher's father, late in 1988, and to subsequent convulsions in his life. It had little or nothing to do with that, I now see. It had to do with the collapse of Communism" (pg. 47).

This is painting with a broad brush; one could easily make the case that Hitchens' journalistic authority diminished after his stance on Iraq in 2003. Still, Amis does a competent job of presenting the facts to the members of the hard left such as Hitchens, who have always taken a flippant tone in evaluating the USSR.

Amis' historical work is fine, though it is generally unvaried and unoriginal; he relies mostly on Alexander Solzhenitsyn's standard historical accounts in the Gulag Archipelago Volumes, which are more than competent and standard. There are also some interesting looks at the correspondence between Nabokov and Edmund Wilson during this period. However, Amis' occasionally bizarre political oversimplifications, i.e. "[a]s in Germany, this was the birth of mass-media propaganda; people were unaware, then, that propaganda was propaganda-and propaganda worked" (pg. 213). Such declarations are less then insightful, and fail to provide adequate explanations as to Stalin's popularity. Koba the Dread is still a fairly competent evaluation of Stalin's life and politics, and it provides a fair and brief overview of the Soviet Union for readers who desire a quick blow-by-blow, even if it is derivative of Solzhenitsyn.
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