Rating: 
Summary: SOMETHING AMISS
Review: On the surface of "Koba the Dread" Amis is asking two not-very-interesting questions: why does the Soviet Union still have its admirers and, who was worse, the Nazis or the Communists? The first question is never really answered -- we're told what is obvious, that there is a lingering nostalgia for a set of ideals never realized, or even approximated. The second strikes me somewhat like asking if you would rather be set fire to or set on fire. The Soviets clearly managed to kill more people than the Nazis: they win in quantitative measures. Amis decides however that the Nazis were worse, for qualitative reasons. Stalin wins again -- style points.But there is, of course, much more here. His writing on the "negative perfection" achieved by Stalin is priceless. Even more, his writing on the almost lunatic laughter brought about by Stalin's policies are perhaps the most illuminating aspect of the book. In his description of an election, seen through the journal of a woman who lived during the Terror, we are also reading a close parallel to Amis's own ideas about humor. In early essays, Amis has been very clear that only the blackest humor will do, a humor he achieves to remarkable effect in novels such as "Dead babies" "Money" "London Fields", "The Information" and others. But this humor is real, and it provides a component of discomfort about what the fiction does accomplish, in a way that fiction cannot (is this an experiemnt in form?). Death is also real, on a continental scale. Humor and death -- death after all is "The Information" -- imbue virtually all his fiction. His interest in real death, real humor, must have provided some of the impetus for this book. Read this way, "Koba the Dread" probably tells us more about Amis than Stalin. After all, the stories and facts presented in "Koba" are drawn from widely known, still readily available sources. While they are masterfully selected, arranged and presented, I think they serve only one main purpose, and that is to take us from the incomprehensible magnitude of Soviet lies and crimes down to a fully comprehensible one-on-one experience. By closing with a letter to his friend Christopher Hitchens and another to his one-time party-member deceased father, Amis transforms this observation of history into something infinitely closer to the bone. Through this personal familiarity, death now takes on a color different from his fiction. It is frankly, damply, intimate. We are allowed a glimpse of the other struggle, the struggle of intellect facing its own end. Here, Amis seems rounder and more humbled by experience, by real life. "The Information" is no longer abstract and confined to the printed page, it is in the air he's breathing. And because of this transformation, there passes between author and reader, a sense of something sacred. Which brings us to the final question of the book. "Zachto?", "what for?". For the Soviet experiment, there is no answer able to justify such a grotesque and utterly failed exercise of power. For the rest of us, the answer is, obviously, in recognizing the profound value of life.
Rating:
Summary: Brilliant Scholarship, Very Well Written
Review: This subject has always been one that vexes me. Why do so many people revile Nazism to such an extent, yet Communism is often seen as a bad joke or "a well meaning system hijacked by bad people"? Amis hits on this theme time and time again, while summarizing the mind boggling crimes committed by Stalin, Trotsky, and Lenin. Amis paints one of the best pictures of Koba I've ever read. It's short, but it's very effective. In my mind, this book solidifies Stalin's place as the most evil person the world has ever seen. I can't even think of the right adjectives to describe the horrible things he ordered, as described in this book. Amis brings in tons of stories, told by people such as Solzhenitsyn and Conquest. He decries the lack of knowledge concerning the deaths of so many, and how leftist apologists worked so hard to explain or ignore the crimes.
Amis also attacks the popular fallacy among many on the far left that Trotsky and Lenin were good guys. What a lie. Their own words are used to indict them, such as the "enlightened" Trotsky saying that state terror is just another glorious attribute of a communist society. I wonder if he felt the irony when Stalin's henchmen stuck a pick axe into his skull. Just a great book by Amis that will leave you with a bad taste in your mouth.
Rating:
Summary: Damning indictment of Communism and the 'Soviet Experiment'
Review: The modern world still has yet to come to grips with the awfulness and sadistic darkness that was the so-called 'Soviet Experiment' during the 20th century. We freely damn Hitler and his Reich, and you'll be hard-pressed to find any academic, political, or cultural admirers of the Nazis. Yet across the free world, too many people are still writing love letters to Lenin. This book focuses mainly on the Stalin period, but Stalin could not have existed if Lenin and the other Bolsheviks had not constructed their diseased political and social Soviet architecture; which Stalin would later use to slaughter millions. It is a sick, sad joke that we still have intellectuals--sometimes tenured in our most prestigious universities--mouthing apologia for the Experiment and either ignoring or explaining away all the dreadfulness that went with it. Like the Platonists of old, these intellectuals prefer the imagined world of ideas to the harshness of reality. For all the grand rhetoric about the Workers Paradise and a utopia of equality, the Soviet Union was a horrific exercise in barbaric tyranny which makes the Third Reich look amateurish. Nobody in the Soviet Union was safe. Especially when Iosif Vissarionovich Dzhugashvili was at the helm. Amis does much to impress upon us the madness of Stalin's reign. Iosif sent his enemies to die, he sent his friends to die; he sent their mothers, fathers, sisters, brothers, children, and neighbors. He sent their associates, and all of their families and friends and acquaintences. Everyone was in danger of implication, and everyone was expected to confess once hauled in for trial-free conviction and sentencing. The ones given a swift bullet were lucky. For the rest, it was Gulag, a concept that I did not truly understand until reading this book. I thought I knew what a gulag was, but through Amis the gulag becomes not a mere place, nor a concept, but a sort of feasting demon, devouring the countless bodies and souls hurled into its frozen, jagged maw by a government that is still looked upon wistfully by many an academic. If history chooses to gloss over or forget the Soviet horror, then it is an academic crime of the greatest possible proportion. Countless innocent perished for the fever dreams of the Communists. Unless that toll is properly reckoned with, I fear that at some future point the human race is doomed to repeat this evil. Especially since we have an actively employed cadre of would-be armchair socialist and communist proponents who still grouse about 'imperial capitalism', the 'plight of the proletariat', and the need for an overarching, strong, one-world government capable of resolving all disputes, curing all ills, and leveling every playing field. Was 20 million too small a figure? How much blood is the Experiment worth?
Rating: 
Summary: The Revolution Was a Lie
Review: The construction of Amis's book on Stalin is extremely unconventional, which, unfortunately seems to be all the grounds some critics need to trash it. His exploration of why its considered acceptable in many circles (particularly the intellectual left) to joke about Stalin, the USSR, and communism (as opposed to Hitler, Nazi Germany, and National Socialism), begins and ends with very personal sections which bookend an overview of Stalin's rule and his use of the police state bequeathed to him by Lenin to cause the death of some 20 million of his subjects. Amis comes at this in reflection of his recently deceased father, who was himself a communist for some 15 years. The first part of the book is a sort of dialogue with not only his father as he was, but also his good friend Christopher Hitchens, who in Amis's view, is a the embodiment of the problem-a smart public intellectual who refuses to totally denounce the former USSR. Next, the heart of the book provides a primer on Stalinist terror, cribbed from a number of sources. Here, the critics once again open up, curiously accosting Amis on roughly three points (A) Amis isn't telling us anything we didn't already know, (B) Amis is simply cribbing from other books, (C) Amis's sources are weak. The response to A is that Amis never claims that he's providing new information, quite the contrary. His point is that how could we (Western lefties) know all this and not totally distance themselves from it? Furthermore, I suggest that the argument that people already know is only valid up to a certain age. As a thirty-year-old with an honors degree in international relations, I knew the gist of Stalinist times, but certainly not the level of detail Amis provides. And if you took a survey of people on my phone list, almost all of whom have some kind of Master's degree and are engaged in the world at large, I would bet good money that 90% could tell you who Eichmann was and that maybe 5% could tell you who Dzerhinsky was. As to B, Amis tells you all the way through where his citations are from and never pretends otherwise. C is the sort of specialist sniping that's hard to dispute but seems kind of pointless when you consider that much of Amis's quoting is from first-person accounts. Finally, the book ends with a rather strange letter to his dead father in which Amis digresses into family talk, including the death of his sister. It's not history and politics, and thus is appears to upset those for whom these topics dare not be contaminated with anything personal. That, in way seems to be the subtext of some of criticism of the book, why is it so personal, and why does Amis write about it all with such a naive wonder and anger. Of course, to criticize it thusly is to utterly miss the book's point. In any event, the book is filled with keen insight and deadly venom, especially when it comes to the posthumous lionization of Trotsky and Lenin (p 250, "An admiration for Lenin or Trotsky is meaningless without an admiration for terror."). It's the rare piece of writing from the left that refuses to separate the ideological ideal of communism with it's real world totalitarian application and utter dehumanization of those under its rule. Amis's conclusions, such as they are, can best be summarized by the following passage from page 258, "The enemy of the people was the regime. The dictatorship of the proletariat was a lie; Union was a lie, and Soviet was a lit, and Republics was a lie. Comrade was a lie. The Revolution was a lie." This is an important work-not without its flaws and rough edges-that does the valuable service of reacquainting us with the horror of Stalinist rule.
Rating:
Summary: Why the Soviet Union still matters
Review: Martin Amis' analysis of Stalin and the Soviet terror begins with a simple yet probing question: Why can people joke about Stalin, the USSR, and their past "flirtations" with communism, while no one can (in acceptable society) make similar jokes about Hitler and National Socialist Germany? In delving into this and related questions, he draws conclusions that make this title, despite its weaknesses, essential reading for anyone who seeks to understand twentieth century history. The bulk of the book is taken up by Amis' chronicle of Stalin and his terror. He challenges Stalin's comment that "one death is a tragedy, a million deaths is a statistic," and draws us into Stalin's bizarre fantasy world -- his war against truth and, indeed, reality. The resultant tens of millions of individual tragedies -- Amis' citations from Solzhenitsyn and other are harrowing -- show how shameful it is that these stories are not as well known as those from the Holocaust. Uncovering why this is true makes up the final, and arguably most important, part of the book. That's because Amis takes aim at the myth -- so often heard even from people who should know better -- that Stalin's "excesses" were not endemic to communism, but rather were a result of the "cult of personality" that undermined true communism. Amis is having none of it. Terror, famine, slavery, and failure, "monotonous and incorrigible failure" (p. 30) are, he argues, the inevitable "Communist tetrarchy." For Amis, the lesson of the twentieth century is what it teaches about Leftism and "revolution." Much of this book is intensely personal, because Amis believes some of his dearest friends -- and, for a while, his father as well -- were duped by Stalin and his mania. In wrestling with the ghost of Stalin, Amis is wrestling too with their demons, and his own. After gazing, in these pages, upon the twenty million, his conclusion that "the Revolution was a lie" (p. 258) is hard to refute.
Rating:
Summary: Intellectual dishonesty and Moral equivalency
Review: Amis, in writing about Stalin and the horrors of the former USSR took a big chance. He knew he would be excoriated by the Left for daring to break a taboo - silence on the issue of Soviet terror. This is a strange book in many ways, self-reflective (a personal letter to his father comes at the end), historical, asking hard questions that have no answer. Why indeed was/is Soviet totalitarianism a subject for laughter whereas German totalitarianism is an object of contempt? Where are all the seminars, marches, studies, and forums on college campuses about the regime that murdered more people than any on the planet? As noted in Jewish World Review, leftist rhetoric has an appeal: It is phrased so as to demand acceptance. The idea of "social justice", group rights, equality, classless society, elimination of poverty and other such goals is alluring and is what first attracted so many intellectuals. The real question is why they remained faithful and silent long after learning that the USSR was a hell on Earth? More disturbing is that there still exists many - from NPR to college campuses - who find that past as something unworthy of negative comment on a level close to that of Germany or, absurdly, South Africa. People are referred to (an NPR feature) as "former communists" with an equanimity that would never be acceptable for a "former Nazi". Amis shows that the 20 million dead (Bukovsky, the dissident mathematician, states the true number is closer to 50 million) were people, not statistics, and that they endured unbelievable horrors. It is not just whole villages that were uprooted, it is that an entire society froze with fear and suffered in silence as the West smiled. No wonder Stalin had such contempt for us. The individual vignettes are powerful, expository pieces that could affect the most cold-hearted activist still "waiting for the Revolution."
Rating:
Summary: Part self-indulgent ramble, but hauntingly effective
Review: Koba the Dread is a self-indulgent ramble of a book in parts, yet as a whole, hauntingly effective. Part 1, 'The Collapse of the Value of Human Life', sets the scene and the mood - an eclectic yet somehow logically organized collection of short points, anecdotes, reminiscences. Part 2, 'Iosif the Terrible: Short Course', explores the life, times and crimes of Stalin, from childhood to deathbed encompassing famine, collectivization, terror, invasion and the camps. But this is no dull history nor plodding biography. Bite-sized mini-topics hold your interest, yet combine in a devastating picture of ... 'a madman' is far too simplistic a term for a tyrant who, unlike the oft-compared Hitler, does not always seem aware of the nature of evil. Part 2 is an excellent 'quick study' of the major Soviet commentators (lots of Robert Conquest and of course Solzhenitsyn) if you don't have the stomach to read them, and a good humanizing of events if you have read them. Had you ever wondered why we all know what the Holocaust is, yet there is no word to cover the many more millions murdered by the Terror-Famine, or in the Gulag? While Stalin saw the Soviet Union as a reflection of himself, in major ways he and his tragic country took different paths, and this is partly why it is pointless to ask, as this and many other authors do, 'why do people instinctively revile Hitler and Nazism but not Stalin and Bolshevism?' The most chilling page in the book is the discussion that if Stalin had strengthened and properly prepared his military, they could have defeated the invading Germans in weeks, thus perhaps saving 40 million lives, including the majority of Holocaust victims. Instead, Stalin purged his army officers, ignored evidence of the imminent Nazi invasion and made huge military tactical blunders; yet despite him and the evil he did them, the Red Army and Soviet citizens defeated Hitler through their own determination for revenge, physical toughness and sheer willingness to endure. This, Mr Amis, is quite simply why you can wear a hammer and sickle t-shirt but not a swastika.
Rating: 
Summary: Very Readable But A Bit Puzzling
Review: * I've been reading up on the Nazi-Soviet War lately, and that has led to
reading quite a bit about Josef Stalin. When I ran across Martin
Amis's work KOBA THE DREAD ("Koba / Boss" being Stalin's
nickname), it looked like an interesting short biography. In fact, on getting into the book I realized that it wasn't actually a
biography as such: it's actually an attempt to make a case against
Communism, with Stalin at center stage, but with Lenin and Trotsky performing
the introduction. The case the book makes is certainly a strong one,
painting a picture of a regime based on the total, unrestrained, and almost
whimsically arbitrary abuse of power, where cruelty is not a vice, not even a
regrettable necessity forced by circumstances -- but an actual virtue. While few will dispute the worst that can be said about Stalin, Amis doesn't
spare either Lenin or Trotksy either, basically drawing them out as exactly
the same breed as Stalin, only differing in that they were simply
small-timers in comparison. When Amis quotes another source that calls Lenin
a "born moral imbecile", it seems hard to dispute it. While KOBA THE DREAD is very readable, it is a bit puzzling to figure out
what Amis's purpose was in writing it. Orwell made a case against Bolshevism
a long time ago in ANIMAL FARM and 1984 that still stands up pretty well, and
more to the point it's hard to think of anyone who would defend Communism at
this late date, except for a few antiquated cranks who are about as deep in
the far outfield as UFO cultists, scientific creationists, militant
vegetarians, and the like, and are taken about as seriously. To be sure,
there remains a modern ultra-left, most visible in anti-globalism
demonstrations, but they have no attachment to traditional Communism, and in
fact seem only to be focused on sets of various causes with no particular
ideology in the background. The other puzzling thing is Amis's somewhat novelistic approach in his
writing. I went the engineering-science path in my career, and so I tended
to find some of Amis's literary digressions in the book as verbose and
pointless woolgathering. I try to be tolerant, and will admit that those
with a literary bent may find such musings stimulating, and in the spirit of
tolerant indifference I simply ignored most of the sections of KOBA THE DREAD
that seemed to talk a lot and say little. I certainly could appreciate some of Amis's acid witticisms. One of the
funniest was a quote from Robert Conquest, whose 1968 historical work THE
GREAT TERROR led the charge on Stalin's crimes in the West. Conquest, an
Amis family friend known as "Conquers", was loudly denounced by the
intelligentsia as a "fascist" at the time. In 1990, with the USSR on the way
out, Conquest published an updated version, and when the publisher asked him
if it should be given a new name, he replied: "How about I TOLD YOU SO, YOU ***K**G FOOLS?" In sum, not knowing exactly what to make of KOBA THE DREAD, I can't really
either recommend or not recommend it. I can describe it, and I can say I
enjoyed reading it. There was certainly one lesson that I got out of it:
the question of whether the end justifies the means has the answer that the
means and the end are the same -- brutal and inefficient means lead to a
brutal and inefficient end, and in Stalin's case it is hard to believe he
ever really thought about any end beyond the means, wanting only to see (as
Orwell put it) "a boot grinding in the human face forever." If you want a "real" biography of Stalin, Conquest's 1991 STALIN: BREAKER OF
NATIONS is not bad. KOBA THE DREAD also makes good sounds about Dmitri
Volkogonov's biography of Stalin (though I haven't read it yet myself), and
incidentally good sounds about Volkogonov, a senior Soviet general whose
late-life historical research on the Soviet regime led to a certain sad but
inspiring change of heart. I'm going to get thoroughly sick of reading about Stalin, though. People
like Churchill or Roosevelt are, flaws and all, fascinating. After reading
through KOBA THE DREAD Stalin comes across more clearly as a a literally
dreadful bore, a personality like a dark, thick, gray suffocating fog, so
stultifying that it's even hard to feel disgust. I understand Saddam Hussein
liked to read everything he could about Stalin. Figures.
Rating:
Summary: Compelling, But Dreadfully Incomplete
Review: Two major goals for this book can be gleaned from the title: first, to show that Ioseph Stalin (and the Leninist/Communist system which spawned and empowered him) was clearly evil, and second, to show that Western and Soviet intellectuals inexcusably justified Leninism/Stalinism and then made light of their support long after the system had departed the USSR.
Amis succeeds at his first goal far better than his second. According to the author, Lenin and Stalin indifferently (at best) starved millions, Soviet intellectuals and dissidents were also frighteningly broken and then destroyed, and Stalin's henchmen fared no better -- he terrified them, too, and seemed to demand the life of at least one close relative from many of the comrades who served him. Amis believes Stalin also benefited little from the system, beyond raw power -- he had little use for women or gold, his intellectual grasp of correct Party dogmatics was patchy, and he remained a deluded and emotionally flat man right up to his horrible and lonely death. The entire endeavor was a huge ill wind that blew no good.
OK, granted -- Stalin was a demon (although he was not the worst one of the 20th Century, in absolute or relative terms). Now, what about the second thesis -- the adulatory support Communism supposedly enjoyed from intellectuals and social leaders all the way from G.B. Shaw right up to the present? Amis provides several arguments, but he develops them without much depth or substance. The author drags in a few examples (notably his father Kingsley and his old colleague Christopher Hitchens (who supposedly remarked that Communism only had shortages, not famines), but he gives too little explanation for why or how the intellectual community so enthusistically supported and collaborated with terror (this has relevance today, as the intellectual community again seems to take a frequently conciliatory line about the terrorism which threatens our civilization (e.g. Chomsky)). Amis makes some pretty hard accusations but backs them up with too little hard data or analysis, and he gives little insight into why some of them changed their opinion of Stalin (as Amis himself apparently did).
This is a pity, because the story of collaborationism with evil should be discussed. Active or passive collaboration with obvious evil may be as big an obstacle to human progress as evil itself (the French, for example, seem to have practically made collaborationsim with evil into a national characteristic), and I expected to find more about it in this book. Amis also seems to have no idea how Stalin held his power even while his closest comrades lived in mortal fear, or why Stalin could do the inhuman things he did. Well, these questions will have to wait for another day, and if you want to gain much insight into them, you may want to bypass this stylistically engaging but ultimately disappointing book.
Rating:
Summary: Dying for "negative perfection"
Review: This is not a dry, detached inquiry. Readers beware: Martin Amis calls it as he sees it. And what he sees resists forgiveness. "Why won't laughter do the decent thing? Why won't laughter excuse itself and leave the room?" Laughter, the unwanted presence that won't depart, is here the laughter of forgetting, the forgetting of the twenty million crushed during Stalin's reign. It's also the laughter of real people gathered to hear Christopher Hitchens speak, laughing at an affectionate reference he made to "many an old comrade." Koba does two things. It pulls Stalin out of the dark forgetfulness into which he has escaped and puts his psychotic wickedness under the hot light of examination. Then Koba asks why, as an historical figure, Stalin is forgiven his sins by having had them forgetten. The answer to the latter resides in the inherent tragedy that invariably emerges from an irresistible desire: the golden image of the Just City in the flawed world we know. If the cosmic joke has a smooth groove, Stalin seems to have found it. Co-mingled throughout the vivid remembrance of "negative perfection" is Amis' terrible, untimely loss of his younger sister, Sally. Ultimately, she is not forgotten and, by the book's end, hope manages an appearance. He is writing to his late father. At the funeral is Sally's daughter. He wants to remind his dad of this. "Remember...."
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