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Koba the Dread

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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.

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."

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?

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' excellently crafted book is about two things: 1) It builds a strong clinical case of a dictator; and 2) It rightfully equalizes Bolshevik terror to the horrors of Nazism, thus reinforcing the case of guilt Western intellectuals failing to recognize the above must experience. The reviews so far posted here justify his latter point: none of them are able to grasp the non-personal, truly historic message of Amis: unless the Western world does not recognize Bolshevism and the following Eastern European socialism as evil equal to, if not greater than, the Holocaust, the lessons of the horrible 20th century will never be learned properly.

Amis misses the history point in one key aspect. Had he been able to see it and understand it, he would have written a different book. The history of Bolshevik/Soviet-style communism was not the exclusive deed of the dictator; he only made it look more unbelievable, more horrifying, and more brutal. It is an error of judgment to explain this regime solely with the father, the boss, the usurper, the psychopath, the chieftain. This regime was made possible and durable by the Russians (in the hundred millions) who complied with it. There are undeniable proofs of that: 1) All checkists were Russians, brothers of the tormented and murdered innocent victims. Without their voluntary participation, the death machine couldn't have worked as it did; 2) All Russians were able to believe in Stalin's innocence, including intellectuals such as Erenburg and Pasternak (as pointed out by Amis himself). Why? Because they believed in the ideology. Thus, they supported the regime; 3) After Stalin's death Russians did not condemn his regime and did not turn their backs to the idea of socialism. So, we had the lukewarm Khrushchev period and the stagnant Brezhnev times. All this under the highly elevated banner of the construction of communism; ... and many more, among them a personal one: I knew personally Janucz Bardach--even after he had survived Kolyma, he lived his life as a member of the communist party, and in his eighties, as a U.S. citizen, he did not condemn communism as an ideology.

Amis' error is an error of paradigm. He fell prey to the widely held belief that, in contrast to democracy, dictatorial regimes are possible because of the maniacal will of a person. Those who have lived under the communist regimes know all too well that their compliance, usually due to commitment to the regime's ideological goals and to fear, was what kept the dictators afloat. The truth is that responsibility is shared between the dictator and his nation (even in the case of a small dictator like Milosevic). However, no nation can incriminate and punish itself, thus, the dictator becomes the scapegoat both for the justice system and for the commentators of history.

This is a depressing yet brilliantly written book that jumps in your face from page 1 as the brutal history of misery and suffering inflicted on the USSR by Stalin, Lenin and their company of Bolsheviks is laid before the reader. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn explores and describes the soviet system brilliantly in his Gulag Archipelago books, so too Amis explores deep into the psyche of a despotic, hopeless system of government and its deadly effect on the lives of the people it dictated to.

One can only wonder at what kind of bitter, unlucky chance could come upon a people who enjoyed a brief period of inter revolutionary freedom after the overthrow of the imperial system, and with a large range of alternative parties to choose from, ended up with the despotic, psychotic Bolsheviks led by Lenin and co as top dogs at the pinnacle of the pack. Vasily Grossman's words as quoted page 251 is an excellent summation of what freedom is supposed to be. There are so many examples of countless lives destroyed physically, mentally and spiritually in this book that it hits you like a sledgehammer as you wonder thank god l was never born into this insanity. Yet at the beginning the system was built on lies, dictatorship of the proletariat meant dictatorship of all by a handful and if you did not like it then the Soviet govt would say stuff you, you are surplus and you can rot in a concentration camp or be dispatched physically.

Amis maintains his white hot rage against the Bolsheviks, the USSR and of course Stalin for the whole book. The reputations of Lenin and Trotsky also sizzle like sausages on a barbeque on a hot summer's day in the Antipodes as Amis applies his blowtorch of a pen to their revolution and the system of repressive government they created which fell into Stalin's lap. As for Stalin himself, well Amis lays cudgel blows in all directions upon him and leaves no stone unturned in his description of the evil, misery and suffering he created and inflicted upon the Soviet Union. Essentially the book is about Stalin, and Amis is able to capture the evil essence of the man in his personal and public life and lay it all before the reader.

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.

Why is communism funny? Personally, I find Marxism and its blood soaked application in countries around the world about as amusing as a sledgehammer to the crotch, but novelist Martin Amis makes a good argument in "Koba the Dread: Laughter and the Twenty Million" that we're far more likely to giggle over a jape about the red menace than we would if someone cracked a funny about National Socialism. Why is that? Why is the gulag archipelago less tragic than a National Socialist death camp? When comparing the records left behind by Uncle Joe Stalin and his counterpart in Germany, there is little to laugh about. Both men killed millions of people in their quest for the perfect ideology. Stalin, however, killed far more people and operated for a far longer period of time. We never launched a full-scale war to bring down the Soviet Union, and we haven't insisted that museums honoring the gulag dead pop up across the landscape to teach future generations about the evils of communism. "Never again!" has never been a rallying cry applied to what went on in the Soviet Union from roughly 1917 to 1954. Instead, we laugh when we ought to weep. What went wrong?

In the course of finding an answer to these questions, as well as trying to reconcile his father's once staunch support of Stalin, Amis digs deep into the worst stages of Soviet communism. Thanks to the inestimable research of Robert Conquest, Alexander Solzhenitsyn, Richard Pipes, Dmitri Volkogonov, and other historians of the Soviet era, Amis weaves a horrific indictment of the Russian regime under its most egregious captain, Joseph Stalin. Ahhh, the Man of Steel, the wise leader of the Supreme Soviet State who industrialized a largely agrarian nation in record time, helped guide his people through the worst war in human history, and served as a sterling statesman of the communist cause to the rest of the world. Yep, good old Koba was certainly a memorable figure. He's also the worst criminal in human history. Well read anti-communists will quickly recognize many of the facts and anecdotes Amis brings to the fore in the course of his book--the mass murders, the reigns of terror, the torture, the crushing of the human spirit in the name of utopianism, the cosmic hypocrisy of the communist state, the unquestioning acceptance by western intellectuals of communism's frauds--and will appreciate how Amis adeptly presents the material.

His take on Stalin's personality and its relation to the communist ideology is incredibly well done. The dictator, contrary to some claims written by idiotic apologists, was not an aberration in the communist system. Amis believes, as do several of the scholars he quotes, that Stalin was in fact the logical extension of an ideology that thrived on terror, murder, and sheer hatred of humanity. Communism IS terror, murder, and sheer hatred of humanity. It was Lenin and Trotsky, not Stalin, who first implemented the use of these nightmarish methods as state policy. This Koba, this man of steel, merely picked up these techniques from a decade earlier and used them to wider effect. Stalin did differ substantially from his fellow comrades, however, when it came to personality. Lenin was a monster and liar, as was Trotsky, but at least these two men occasionally had to give way to reality, had to compromise to keep their beliefs alive. Amis contends that reality to Stalin was something far different. Reality possessed a fluidity that one could manipulate into whatever shape the situation required. Thus Stalin soon crafted an alternate reality in which he controlled all the levers of life, a reality in which science, language, and economics were malleable concepts accompanied by the applause of frightened followers.

The book is less successful, in my opinion, in the sections where Amis banters with his fellow writers (Christopher Hitchens is one of them) and tries to come to terms with his father's one time embrace of Soviet communism. It's nice to know Kingsley Amis eventually came to his senses, but it's not necessary to know this information to appreciate the book. In fact, I found the parts where Amis discusses his childhood and the interactions between himself and his red friends rather pretentious. Amis is definitely a patrician intellectual type, with all of the vanity attendant to such an identification, and this makes for unpleasant reading in spots. After documenting a hundred plus pages of atrocities committed by dedicated communists, one wonders how Amis could even speak to his red pals with anything approaching civility. Your "friends" helped these atrocities go unchecked for so long because their ardent admiration of communism kept that regime in power, at least in an indirect sense, by forcing the West to debate the merits of this flawed ideology. There should have been no debate. We should have wiped communism from the face of the earth back in 1917, and definitely should have done so at the end of World War II.

A final note on the structure of "Koba the Dread." Amis writes in a sort of roundabout way about his topic--I'm almost tempted to say he uses stream of consciousness--moving from one point to another almost by whim. In any other author's hands this would make a book like this one unreadable, but here it works. Perhaps it's the author's way of trying to create an alternate reality in tribute to his subject? Whatever the case, the very pretentiousness I took issue with in the personal sections of the book works wonders when dealing with the hypocrites of communist Russia circa 1917-1954. The wit on display here is scathing, eminently quotable, and appropriate for a topic in which language often fails to convey the full depths of terror experienced by the actors involved. I recommend "Koba the Dread," and I also recommend moving on to Conquest, Solzhenitsyn, and other scholars of Soviet atrocities immediately after finishing this book.