by Martin Amis
Biography and Amis' personal assessment of Stalin's regime
Reviewed by: Guy Brandon
About Guy Brandon
Koba the Dread, Iosif the Terrible. Stalin’s regime was one of brutality,
fear, and twenty million lives lost – in the labour camps, from starvation,
and in state-approved executions. Lenin’s legacy from his attempts to bring
about socialism on the Soviet Union a decade earlier was a fully-functional
police state; now in the early 1930’s, Stalin used the same tactics to
destroy the primitive peasant economy and force industrialisation. Grain
stores were requisitioned without payment and exported to finance the
scheme, resulting in the worst famine in European history. Cannibalism
became widespread, and the Bolshevik party employed increasing force to
prevent food being hidden.
Even today there is a widespread ignorance, and even denial, of the full
enormity of these atrocities. Martin Amis’ book, Koba the Dread, is a
wake-up call to the reality of Soviet history after the 1917 revolution.
Western intellectuals still sympathise with the ideals of Bolshevism, Lenin
and Trotsky; the author’s father, the writer Kingsley Amos, was for fifteen
years a card-carrying member of the communist party. This work is in part an
indictment of the kind of “woolly-minded utopianism” of which his generation
was particularly guilty.
Koba the Dread consists of three sections, of which by far the largest is
the second: a biography and assessment of Stalin’s regime (backed up by a
wealth of documentary evidence, official and otherwise). The first and last
parts, however, are personal meditations by Amis. Both his sister and father
died in the five years before the book’s publication, and his sorrow has
deeply coloured his work. Stalin famously said that the death of one person
is a tragedy, the death of a million a mere statistic. The author counters
this with simple arithmetic: twenty million deaths are twenty million
tragedies, plus the innumerable millions of lives affected in the process –
and one alone is hard enough to bear.
There was something farcical about Stalin’s rule, something vaguely funny
about his denial of reality and the extreme measures taken by the Bolsheviks
to perpetuate his illusions in the face of such a starkly different truth.
To laugh at Nazism or Auschwitz would be inconceivable. Subtitled “laughter
and the twenty million”, the other question Amis asks in his book is: how
can we possibly find Stalinism amusing?
Despite this question and the shocking subject matter, Amis’ style is
extremely readable – light, witty and peppered with humorous asides. The
author has engaged with his subject matter to such an extent that he often
treats the characters as almost personal acquaintances. Grimly fascinating,
Koba the Dread is well-written, informative and very thought provoking.
Click here to buy this book, or read more about it at Amazon.com: Koba the Dread
Copyright © by Guy Brandon, 2002
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