"Koba the Dread," by Martin Amis

Martin Amis calls out Christopher Hitchens and other friends on the left for not giving full weight to the 20 million victims of Stalin's terror.

By Charles Taylor

July 16, 2002 |

The left's romance with Stalinism ended decisively 30 years ago with the publication of Alexander Solzhenitsyn's "The Gulag Archipelago." For the true believers, things have only gotten worse. The onset of glasnost in the '80s saw the release of official documents that not only confirmed but exceeded the numbers of dead the historian Robert Conquest had claimed in his 1968 book "The Great Terror." When Conquest set about preparing a new edition of the book using those documents (it appeared in 1990 as "The Great Terror: A Reassessment"), his publisher asked whether he thought a new title would be appropriate. "How about, 'I Told You So, You Fucking Fools'?" Conquest responded.

For Martin Amis, in his new book "Koba the Dread: Laughter and the Twenty Million," the fools were people like the philosopher A.J. Ayer, whom Amis recalls in conversation with Amis' father, Kingsley Amis:

"In the USSR," Ayer argued, "at least they're trying to forge something positive."

"But it doesn't matter what they're trying to forge, because they've already killed 5 million people," Amis said.

"You keep going back to that 5 million," Ayer complained, unconsciously echoing Stalin's remark that the death of one person was tragic, the death of a million "a statistic."

Stalin was shrewd enough to grasp the limits of a sane person's credulity. The stories laid out in "Koba the Dread" -- like those told in "The Great Terror," in the historian Catherine Merridale's recent "Night of Stone: Death and Memory in Twentieth-Century Russia" and in Eugenia Semenovna Ginzburg's 1967 "Journey Into the Whirlwind," her memoir of 18 years in Stalin's prisons and labor camps -- are, in the truest sense, unimaginable. A country deliberately forced into famine so bad (in 1932 and '33) that parents ate their children. So many dead that the bodies were stacked in the streets, only to be frozen in the Russian winter whose snow turned, in the spring thaw, into infected water that ran through the streets and killed even more. A 1937 census, commissioned by Stalin, uncovered statistical proof of those who had died and therefore caused the census takers to be shot. Were this the stuff of fiction, it would be pulp horror or the most callous absurdism.

Despite the fact that it can be plausibly argued that true communism has never been achieved, by now it's clear that every state that has attempted it has perpetrated totalitarian outrages. In the end we find that the differences among all the variations on the theme are less striking than the similarities of the experiences of those who had to live under those regimes. More unites than separates voices like Josef Skvorecky and Milan Kundera in Czechoslovakia, Peter Schneider in Germany, Reinaldo Arenas in Cuba and the Chinese students in the Tiananmen Square documentary "The Gate of Heavenly Peace."

"Koba the Dread" is an adumbration of the incidents that Amis has gleaned from "several yards of books about the Soviet experiment." Woven through the book are his own experiences in the arguments about communism, arguments conducted with his father (a communist for 15 years before becoming a devoted anti-communist), and with his friend Christopher Hitchens. It encompasses his friendship with Robert Conquest (whom he has known since he was a child).

Amis' tone doesn't match the earned belligerence you find in Conquest's revised post-glasnost version of "The Great Terror." His prose gives off a sense of appalled wonder. Underneath the steady accumulation of facts and horror stories, Amis is asking how anyone in his or her right mind can still consider Marxism as a means to a more just world; how people (like his pal Hitchens) can joke about their communist past without invoking the horror that someone who joked about his fascist past would; how the apologists for Stalin, despite having plenty of evidence as to the truth of Soviet Russia before glasnost, can be thought of any differently from Holocaust deniers.

Part of the answer, of course, is that the public face of anti-communism has been that of buffoons like Joseph McCarthy or the John Birch Society. For many of us on the left, anti-communism has so often led to the excesses of the right that it became an ideological taint to avoid. Who, for instance, would want to believe in Alger Hiss' guilt when that meant finding oneself on the same side as Richard Nixon? But neither McCarthyism nor the execution of the Rosenbergs (who were, of course, guilty) is an adequate excuse for denying the facts of Stalin's terror, or Mao's Great Leap Forward, or -- on a lesser scale -- Castro's persecution of homosexuals, among other groups. (The catastrophic failure of Castro's revolution has increasingly become the subject of Cuban crime fiction, including Josi Latour's "Outcast" and Daniel Chavarrma's wonderful "Adios Muchachos.")

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