Koba the Dread: Laughter and the Twenty Million [Paperback]

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.

The construction of Amis's book on Stalin is extremely unconventional, which, unfortunately seems to be all the grounds some critics need to trash it. His exploration of why its considered acceptable in many circles (particularly the intellectual left) to joke about Stalin, the USSR, and communism (as opposed to Hitler, Nazi Germany, and National Socialism), begins and ends with very personal sections which bookend an overview of Stalin's rule and his use of the police state bequeathed to him by Lenin to cause the death of some 20 million of his subjects. Amis comes at this in reflection of his recently deceased father, who was himself a communist for some 15 years. The first part of the book is a sort of dialogue with not only his father as he was, but also his good friend Christopher Hitchens, who in Amis's view, is a the embodiment of the problem-a smart public intellectual who refuses to totally denounce the former USSR.

Next, the heart of the book provides a primer on Stalinist terror, cribbed from a number of sources. Here, the critics once again open up, curiously accosting Amis on roughly three points (A) Amis isn't telling us anything we didn't already know, (B) Amis is simply cribbing from other books, (C) Amis's sources are weak. The response to A is that Amis never claims that he's providing new information, quite the contrary. His point is that how could we (Western lefties) know all this and not totally distance themselves from it? Furthermore, I suggest that the argument that people already know is only valid up to a certain age. As a thirty-year-old with an honors degree in international relations, I knew the gist of Stalinist times, but certainly not the level of detail Amis provides. And if you took a survey of people on my phone list, almost all of whom have some kind of Master's degree and are engaged in the world at large, I would bet good money that 90% could tell you who Eichmann was and that maybe 5% could tell you who Dzerhinsky was. As to B, Amis tells you all the way through where his citations are from and never pretends otherwise. C is the sort of specialist sniping that's hard to dispute but seems kind of pointless when you consider that much of Amis's quoting is from first-person accounts.

Finally, the book ends with a rather strange letter to his dead father in which Amis digresses into family talk, including the death of his sister. It's not history and politics, and thus is appears to upset those for whom these topics dare not be contaminated with anything personal. That, in way seems to be the subtext of some of criticism of the book, why is it so personal, and why does Amis write about it all with such a naive wonder and anger. Of course, to criticize it thusly is to utterly miss the book's point.

In any event, the book is filled with keen insight and deadly venom, especially when it comes to the posthumous lionization of Trotsky and Lenin (p 250, "An admiration for Lenin or Trotsky is meaningless without an admiration for terror."). It's the rare piece of writing from the left that refuses to separate the ideological ideal of communism with it's real world totalitarian application and utter dehumanization of those under its rule. Amis's conclusions, such as they are, can best be summarized by the following passage from page 258, "The enemy of the people was the regime. The dictatorship of the proletariat was a lie; Union was a lie, and Soviet was a lit, and Republics was a lie. Comrade was a lie. The Revolution was a lie." This is an important work-not without its flaws and rough edges-that does the valuable service of reacquainting us with the horror of Stalinist rule.

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.

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