Koba the Dread: Laughter and the Twenty Million

On the surface of "Koba the Dread" Amis is asking two not-very-interesting questions: why does the Soviet Union still have its admirers and, who was worse, the Nazis or the Communists? The first question is never really answered -- we're told what is obvious, that there is a lingering nostalgia for a set of ideals never realized, or even approximated. The second strikes me somewhat like asking if you would rather be set fire to or set on fire. The Soviets clearly managed to kill more people than the Nazis: they win in quantitative measures. Amis decides however that the Nazis were worse, for qualitative reasons. Stalin wins again -- style points. But there is, of course, much more here. His writing on the "negative perfection" achieved by Stalin is priceless. Even more, his writing on the almost lunatic laughter brought about by Stalin's policies are perhaps the most illuminating aspect of the book. In his description of an election, seen through the journal of a woman who lived during the Terror, we are also reading a close parallel to Amis's own ideas about humor. In early essays, Amis has been very clear that only the blackest humor will do, a humor he achieves to remarkable effect in novels such as "Dead babies" "Money" "London Fields", "The Information" and others. But this humor is real, and it provides a component of discomfort about what the fiction does accomplish, in a way that fiction cannot (is this an experiemnt in form?). Death is also real, on a continental scale. Humor and death -- death after all is "The Information" -- imbue virtually all his fiction. His interest in real death, real humor, must have provided some of the impetus for this book. Read this way, "Koba the Dread" probably tells us more about Amis than Stalin. After all, the stories and facts presented in "Koba" are drawn from widely known, still readily available sources. While they are masterfully selected, arranged and presented, I think they serve only one main purpose, and that is to take us from the incomprehensible magnitude of Soviet lies and crimes down to a fully comprehensible one-on-one experience. By closing with a letter to his friend Christopher Hitchens and another to his one-time party-member deceased father, Amis transforms this observation of history into something infinitely closer to the bone. Through this personal familiarity, death now takes on a color different from his fiction. It is frankly, damply, intimate. We are allowed a glimpse of the other struggle, the struggle of intellect facing its own end. Here, Amis seems rounder and more humbled by experience, by real life. "The Information" is no longer abstract and confined to the printed page, it is in the air he's breathing. And because of this transformation, there passes between author and reader, a sense of something sacred. Which brings us to the final question of the book. "Zachto?", "what for?". For the Soviet experiment, there is no answer able to justify such a grotesque and utterly failed exercise of power. For the rest of us, the answer is, obviously, in recognizing the profound value of life.

This is one of the better works I have read on Stalin and the "Great Terror". Apart from the "Gulag" a work of infinite greatness, this is a grand essay on a moment in time. The personal touch, is almost name dropping, but it surves well when trying to demonstrate the truth of Stalin's quote, "The death of one is tragic, the death of millions is a statistic." One cannot comprehend millions of people slaughtered, but individual stories cut to the core. Who was worse, the NAZIs or Stalin? It is not just an academic question. It needs to be answered. Do we rely soley on the head count of the dead? Stalin wins. Do we rely on the brutality of the idea? Stalin wins! Do we rely solely on who was more inloved with power, self and control? Stalin wins again. It should be noted that the killings by Stalin are more random and focused on class and not solely on religion, but millions, more than 6 million Russian Christians died. A great short introduction for the neophite into the reality of Communism and why it is so important NOT to allow tyrants the chance to gain control of nations.

"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.

I chose this book for two reasons: (1) I'm a fan of stories about Stalin and (2) I loved author Amis' wonderfully weird Time's Arrow. In spite of my belief that any book that causes a stir about Stalin "and the Twenty Million" is worth a look, I couldn't get beyond thinking it was just so-so. It reads as if Amis chose his topic, grabbed all the books on his shelf concerning Stalin, read through them, thought about conversations he'd had with others on the subject, and then shared his views on what he found out (with chapters arranged by subject instead of the more conventional chronological format). Even the interesting stuff, like the beginning (an attempt to provide perspective for the magnitude of the twenty million lives lost) loses its luster with the reader's realization that he's taken it straight from Robert Conquest's Harvest of Sorrow. Additionally, Amis chooses to accuse Christopher Hitchens, a friend and colleague, of several things, like making light of conditions in the USSR at the time of Stalin, including (p 47) that he denied the famine [of which there was more than one] as described in this passage, `"What about the famine?" I once asked him. "There wasn't a famine," he said smiling slightly and lowering his gaze. "There may have been occasional shortages...."' Later on, the author includes an open "Letter to a Friend" directed at Hitchens in which he berates him for his supposed (p 248), "...reverence for Lenin and" "unregretted discipleship of Trotsky." While I agree with Amis' assertion that (p 203), "All his life Stalin was a consistently terrible little man;" and appreciate both his references to Gulag memoirs and pseudo-memoirs like: Man is Wolf to Man by Janusz Bardach, Journey Into the Whirlwind by Eugenia Ginzburg, and Kolyma Tales by Varlam Shalamov and the buzz the book brought; I could do without the Hitchens hullabaloo (read more about the battle in The Atlantic). Better: The Forsaken: An American Tragedy in Russia by Tim Tzouliadis, Coming Out of the Ice: An Unexpected Life by Victor Herman (MP3 format/unabridged version only), and The Case of Comrade Tulayev by Victor Serge.

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.

Amis describes the confusing, monstrous mind of Stalin and relates how the devotees of the religion of Marxism survived - and perished - in Stalin's savage reign.

This book concentrates on Stalin's abnormal psychology, and the impacts of his murderings on Russia, which was his greater victim. Amis is very good on the twisted workings of Stalin's mind. I read Francis Carr's "Ivan the Terrible" more or less simultaneously; the pathology was more or less the same. Ivan Grozny did even more damage to Russia than did Stalin. Amis also shows the moral putridity of the British intellectual class in confronting monstrosities. For bald narrative I would read Conquest first. For insider detail, Simon Sebag Montefiore's "Young Stalin" and "In the Court of the Red Tsar"; but for emotional impact, Amis is hard to beat, for this the most important maker of the modern world.

A clear view of one of the 20th century's biggest criminal group. Violence combined with righteousness killed over 20 million in the USSR

This book should be on the National Curriculum. (For several reasons: to expose the intellectual bankruptcy of the Left in its apologetics (and worse) for Russia; to highlight that Stalin was every bit as evil and tyrannical as Hitler; and to demonstrate the value of our democracy, for all its faults, and what future generations stand to risk by political ignorance and apathy.) God knows what it cost Amis in researching for this book. The final product is an immensely painful and difficult read. (in terms of content: the style, the writing, and the message are impeccable.) I cannot imagine how haunted he must be by the mass of material he must have read. The torture, cruelty and inhumanity of the regime almost defy description. In a lesser writers hands it would have become an unreadable litany of unendurable pain. But Martin Amis is a great writer and I would argue this is his magnum opus. It starts with the premise; why is it okay to tell jokes about Communist Russia, but not Nazi Germany? and goes on to explain the reasons why with personal honesty, searing insight and absolute humanity. As well as, of course, rigorous and thorough research. (dear God - the research.) You will not forget this book - and that is the intention. An absolute must-read - of how theories become tyranny, and 20 million people are murdered as a result.

Good first primer about a character that the human imagination couldn't or wouldn't be able to dream up. And surely he went to his grave thinking that he was transcendant and noble. What can you say?

Superb

this highlights the murky world of Bolshevism, right from the beginning, with its culmination in terror under Stalin. It's not Stalin, so much as the system that results in Stalins rising to the top that is taken to task in this hard-hitting acerbic btu effective account of the criminality of state socialism

Great book at a great price, heavy subject however...