Koba the Dread
by Martin Amis
Miramax Talk Books

In 1991 the Soviet Union collapsed and, with the Iron Curtain in tatters, was exposed for what it was: a sham, a failure, a desperate joke of a superpower. Clearly, conventional wisdom concluded, the Kremlin had pulled the wool over our eyes — with its bombastic overachievement and stalwart strides in the arms, space and propaganda races, it duped us into believing the Reds a force to be reckoned with. The spectacular ruins of a trumped-up economy and social order exposed by the erosive force of the ensuing decade confirmed our initial surprise: The 20th century's communist experiment was bankrupt, and its erstwhile leaders were helpless.

Martin Amis, a mightily intelligent essayist and novelist, has worked himself into a lather over the inconsistencies of idealism and morality that characterize the West's regard for the Soviet dictatorship. "Koba the Dread," 250 pages of denunciation for Stalinism and those who believed in it, summons most of its rancor from the hypocrisy of state-sponsored carnage disguised as social progress. But it offers one ironic concession to Soviet greatness; quoting Alexander Solzhenitsyn (and not for the first time) Amis pronounces the police state that was the USSR "inhumanly strong, in a way yet unimaginable to the West."

That the extent of Joseph Stalin's crimes inflicted on Russia during three decades of tyranny was "unimaginable" to the West is best evidenced by Amis' own (equally talented and respected) father, Kingsley Amis. It is his circle of intellectual "fellow travelers," scholarly and literary leftists who disavowed Stalinism but never the Revolution, that Amis challenges with his subtitle: "Laughter and the Twenty Million." How dare you breezily refer to the "old days" sitting about with an "old comrade," demands Amis, when you know about the 20 million?

The 20 million, somberly tallied up in sequences of systematic famine, dislocation, incarceration and execution, were the innocent victims of a 30-year regime that profoundly distrusted its own people. Drawing from the most agonizing testimonies of life under Stalin's terror, Amis is a relentless but poetic scourge, opening a chapter on tales from the gulag with the warning, "Exertions of the imagination are now called for." From the drudgery of corpse disposal at the height of the terror (when cremation suddenly became an industrial Soviet success in Party propaganda), to the wonderment of prison cells holding more than 10 times their envisioned capacity, and the near complete annihilation of entire villages, academic circles and officer corps, Amis bitterly submits the evidence of some of the 20th century's most shockingly cynical brutality.

None of the material here is original. Indeed, Amis' manuscript is no more than an elegantly vitriolic compendium of the "several yards of books about the Soviet Experiment" that he endeavored to read in the past decade, annotated with his own astute, if mildly hysterical, judgments. It is also, despite the incontrovertible magnitude of the atrocities of Stalinism, still controversial to condemn the excesses of Soviet Union in mid-century more strongly than the war crimes of the Third Reich. If in 1975, as Amis remembers, it was "considered tasteless or mean-spirited to be too hard on the Soviet Union," in 2001 it is simply too easy. Whereas reference to Nazi Germany "elicits spontaneous fury, the other [Soviet Communism] elicits spontaneous laughter. And what kind of laughter is it? It is, of course, the laughter of universal fondness for that old, old idea about the perfect society. It is also the laughter of forgetting. It forgets the demonic energy unconsciously embedded in that hope. It forgets the Twenty Million."

"Koba the Dread" is a curious work. Tucked between excoriations of Stalin and former sympathizers (with a very direct shot at one of his own closest peers, the writer Christopher Hitchens), Amis finds moments to reflect on his family and the recent loss of both his father and his sister. The result is a tricky mixture of vindication and bereavement. In the end, Amis has made a slight, if highly readable, contribution to the library of the twenty million, the books of which are probably already outnumbered by commemorations of our own, more recent domestic massacre.

That the United States is compelled to mourn its 3,000 dead so publicly and for so long stands in stark contrast to the base lack of acknowledgment for the infinitely larger loss of innocent life found elsewhere in the last century. When we promise "we will never forget" those who died on Sept. 11, it is a promise both inspiring in its sincerity and startling in its arrogance.

— Elizabeth Kiem (eckiem@yahoo.com)