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5 comments about Koba the Dread.

1. 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.



2. 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.



3. This book was my introduction to Soviet history when it came out (a role I suspect it played for many readers) and I thought highly of it at the time. The most memorable moment in the book, for me, was Amis's epiphany that even an achieved socialist utopia would be a kind of "hell." But rereading it recently, I didn't think it had aged well. Amis's tone is relentlessly sour, smug, and soggily self-important in the way that a certain type of Nabokov fan is (I like Nabokov, but his airy pomposity is insufferable in the hands of almost any imitator). I couldn't help but think that a more straightforward style would have suited his subject better. For that matter, the book could have been considerably shorter; as is, it's too long to be a good essay and too short to be a good history book. And despite his boast that he combed through "yards" of books on the Soviet Union to write the book, he makes countless errors. For instance, Lenin's brother is listed in the index as "Alexander Lenin." Did none of the yards of books Amis read tell him that Lenin's real name was Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov? He also makes commonsensical errors that are downright comical: He devotes a paragraph to a sentence of Trotsky's which he finds to be appallingly phrased, apparently unaware that Trotsky didn't originally write that sentence in English.
   
   His utter refusal to cite even the simplest sources is also annoying; it's as if he thinks he's writing a "better" type of book than a simple history text. Perhaps he feared that citations would make it too obvious that he's basically ripped off every major historian in the field. His open letter to Christopher Hitchens (an incredibly embarrassing concept) lectures his Trotsky-worshiping friend in such condescending tones that I can almost imagine the letter's recipient cringing on his behalf.
   
   That said, the book is a decent, readable introduction to Stalin's Russia (Amis appears to know next to nothing of Russia prior to 1917), but this emphasis makes the book's thesis seem lopsided. Surely the majority of Western leftists don't need to be told that Stalin was a wicked tyrant. If Amis actually took his own thesis seriously, he'd devote his book to tearing apart Lenin and Trotsky. I couldn't help but think that Amis simply didn't have the intellectual stomach for this task - much easier to regurgitate large chunks of Solzhenitsyn and Conquest and smugly imply that Hitchens is some kind of apologist for the Gulag. At one point he implies that the February Revolution was the "real" revolution, but at another point he brusquely dismisses Kerensky as a fool. Most of his judgments seem filched from other historians. This isn't a bad place to start, but don't let this be the last book you read on the subject.



4. Amis applies his mastery of language to the soviet "experiment", recounting his own story of discovery.
   Horrific and brilliant



5. There are a number of good negative reviews already, with which I agree for the most part, especially the one that asks: Why was this written in the first place?
   
   The book attempts to stand on the shoulders of much more serious and lengthy works by Conquest, Pipes, Solzhenitsyn, Mandelstam and many others, and might serve as a good, well-written synopsis of their work, but Amis wanted to make it more pesonal than that and took up some very odd, rather remote contingent themes, such was why Soviet history is regarded with laughter, whereas Nazi history is not. Maybe this is more of a problem in Great Britain. I think we Americans are guilty of not knowing as much about Soviet atrocities as we should, but not of undue levity.
   
   Anyway, there is much for sensitive souls to consider in the story of Russia in the 20th century, some of it is hinted at and evoked here - that maybe there is such a thing as conscious evil in the world, for example. And I think that maybe Amis wanted to provide a picture that included both the horror of the millions of civilian murders inflicted in varying degrees of maliciousness and the intellectual (me, him) sitting in his chair reading about it. But if he did, it doesn't really come across, interesting as they might have been. I think it's a intriguing illusion we have that memorializing people whose lives have been unjustly tormented and cut short somehow influences the deceased favorably.
   
   The oddest thing are the juxtapositions of historical (and outrageous) fact with his personal activities, friendships, pre-occupations, which as I say, don't jell. Ingredients are poured together but they don't make anything.
   
   Another theme hinted at but not developed that interests me very much is that Stalin and his brothers in hatred are symptoms of our soulless, inwardly dead age, in the way that alcoholism is a symptom of inner imbalance in an individual. How does a person like Stalin come about? How does an individual gain power enough over other people to get them to murder? Most people can hardly get someone else to bring them a glass of water. What are the inner dynamics of someone who gets millions to murder other millions?
   
   So all in all, it was a disappointment, though it began well.

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