Koba The Dread: Laughter and the Twenty Million
Published August 13, 2002
This is what drives Amis, the almost complete lack of intellectual honesty - on the left especially - about Lenin, Stalin, and the Soviet experiment. What led him to write this book, is the search for an explanation. At this quest he ultimately fails, in fact he doesn't really attack the subject much. Instead what Amis does is provide a angry, indignant, and outraged tour through the horror, degradation, and terror of Soviet Communism. Amis apparently didn't find a suitable explanation but instead he came to the realization that the victims of this almost unimaginable terror deserve to be remembered; that if we are to avoid a continuation of this willful blindness we must remember what really happened. In this more limited goal Amis succeeds by using his skills as a writer to memorialize the victims and excoriate Lenin and Stalin - to show them as the monsters they truly were rather than as the misguided and flawed revolutionaries of leftist legend.
What emerges from Amis' wandering but poignant and often sharp pen, is that Stalin, following in the footsteps of Lenin, waged a gigantic struggle against truth and reality resulting in the death of at least twenty million people. Stalin literally squeezed, crushed, starved, tortured, terrified, and eventually destroyed huge swath's of his country because he could not face reality. Stalin and his underlings felt bound by no laws moral, ethical, legal, scientific or economic. They literally felt they could remake the world in their own image. Amis notes that communist economist S. G. Strumilin said exactly that:
"Our task is not to study economics but to change it. We are bound by no laws."
The difference between Stalin and other utopians is that when faced with failure he refused to relent. The amazing, if tragic, thing about Stalin is that he did manage to escape reality or to impose his reality on a vast country for so long. Amis notes that the forced collectivisation and famine of the 30's was the "most precipitous economic decline in recorded history." But Stalin refused to acknowledge it. Even Lenin eventually relented after a famine of similar proportions twenty years earlier. Amis explains the difference:
In the earlier case, Lenin accepted defeat, withdrawal and compromise. In other words, he accepted reality. Stalin did not. The peasantry no longer faced a frigid intellectual. It faced a passionate low-brow whose personality was warping and crackling in the heat of power. He would not accept reality. He would break it.
- Koba The Dread: Laughter and the Twenty Million
- Published: August 13, 2002
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- Section: Books: Biography
- Filed Under: Books: History, Books: Nonfiction
- Writer: Kevin Holtsberry
- Kevin Holtsberry's BC Writer page
- Kevin Holtsberry's personal site
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Thought you might be interested to know I referenced your review on my own blog. I haven't read the book and don't presume to have an opinion on it, but an Amis article in Harper's caught my attention recently. At any rate, I'm glad to see blogcritics examining serious literature. Thanks.
Here's my piece, for anyone interested:
I'm pleased to report that Slate's Anne Applebaum has added her articulate voice to the chorus of critics chiding Martin Amis for the shortcomings of his quasi history of Stalinist terror, Koba the Dread... Even this blogcritic acknowledges that Amis's interweaving of memoir-esque material obfuscates his theme. (Here, parenthetically, I acknowledge the bias clearly revealed in my leade.)
I'm not an Amis reader (père Kinsely nor fis Martin) but I did read Martin's unconvincing diatribe on novel writing as an antidote/antithesis to religion in The Guardian, which is now reprinted in the current Harper's. I'm at a lost to explain why the latter chose to reprint such a disjointed piece, which seems all the less relevant for it's now-passé references to the aftermath of 11 September. Even The Guardian's secular audience found reason to slam the piece, twice. The reader who warned against allowing novelists to presume to be social theorists--outside of their artwork--proved prescient. In both the essay and book, Amis attempts to make sense of real life using the model of literary criticism. Rather backwards, I'm afraid. Fiction helps us understand/deal with reality, but crit. is for lit. not life. Of course, if you have no religion (in a broad sense here) you might think a critics lens as good as any.
But back to Harper's a moment: Why reprint a bad essay? Either 1) the editors can't tell bad from good (again, I'm not a regular reader so I can't say, though I doubt this), 2) the reprint was tangential promotion for their chum's Koba..., or 3) their blind anti-religion stance (revealed in the headers for this and other recent pieces) made 'em do it. I suspect a combination of 2 and 3. Which prompts me to say at least Amis has the integrity to acknowledge his opinions as such and, if not explicitly, admit that his life has shaped his perspective. I searched Harper's website and found no professed editorial stance. The publication is guilty of a typical sin (small s) of the left: failing to acknowledge one's bias. Generally, conservatives own up to their ideology. Their contemporaries on the left however, like to cloak themselves in robes of academia and pretend their opinions are the logical conclusions of learning. Honest left-leaners will at least label themselves "progressive." Those who pretend their beliefs are those of all learned men (and women) are delusional and/or self-righteous, which is far worse than idealistic. (Let's get a few bloggers off the NYT's back and let them take a look at the magazine rack.)
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Interesting review. Thanks for posting it. It makes the book sound like it's worth reading as more than a curiosity for Martin Amis fans.
You say that Amis failed to show why communism evokes nostalgia while nazism evokes horror. Did his raising the topic at least provoke you to do your own thinking about why? I suppose I've always thought that the difference had something to do with the motives we project on the two movements: it's possible to imagine the communist enterprise beginning from a sincere desire to make the world a better place, whereas fascism from the outset declares itself to be based on hatred. That may be simplistic as to the actual history of the movements, but those are two paths which seem to have been recapitulated by many a young person who joined up. Or am I wrong?
In the US, at least, I also associate a sympathy with communism with a repudiation of the narrow and ignorant ways of its most visible opponents: if the Reagan-Nixon-McCarthy-etc. camp sees communism as pure evil (along with mind-altering substances, music with a beat and making love with the lights on) then there must be something good about it. This belief that "the enemy of my enemy is my friend" is of course a fallacy which leads to all sorts of tragic mistakes.