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A review of Koba the Dread - laughter and the twenty million

by Martin Amis

Biography and Amis' personal assessment of Stalin's regime

Reviewed by: Guy Brandon
About Guy Brandon

Koba the Dread 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

Reviewed by Guy Brandon:
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-- Angry White Pyjamas - by Robert Twigger
-- Lord of the Rings - by J. R. R. Tolkien
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