Rating: 
Summary: Masterful
Review: A riveting indictment of Communism and the prolonged love affair of the left with that murderous ideology. Amis condenses Solzhenitsyn and Conquest and gives us a compact, readable, and memorable description of what Communism was and the horrors it inflicted. Too many want to forget Stalin and his millions of victims; anyone who reads Amis will never forget.
Rating:
Summary: In spite of the evidence, useful idiots still defend Stalin
Review: The reviewer who said the spiritual inspiration for the book was Goebbels obviously never read the book, as Amis denounced Nazism as appealing to "the reptile brain" (pg 85). In my opinion, those who would defend Stalin, who is considered by most reputable historians to be one of the worst mass murderers in history, are every bit as repulsive as those who would defend Hitler. I was watching a History Channel program last Sunday entitled "Stalin: Man of Steel" which featured rare documents from the Soviet archives, interviews with leading Soviet historians and survivors of Stalin's gulags and I thought - in spite of all the overwhelming evidence that Stalin indeed killed some 20 million Soviet citizens, people can still defend this monster? And those who did defend him at one time (Christopher Hitchens) can laugh about it now? This is outrageous! Martin Amis has similar feelings on this issue, which is why the subtitle of his book is "Laughter and the Twenty Million." Critics like the aforementioned reviewer point out that the majority of the material in this tome of Soviet horrors comes from "Cold War Propagandist" Robert Conquest and "Apologist for the Russian Monarchy" Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn (notice the ad hominem attacks here). While much of it does, and there is nothing wrong with that considering the work of these two great men (one a renowned Sovietologist and the other a Gulag survivor) has been vindicated by the opening of the Soviet archives, there are numerous other sources Amis uses: Kolyma Tales by Varlam Shalamov, The Black Book of Communism by Stephane Courtois et al, Man is Wolf to Man: Surviving the Gulag by Janusz Bardach, A People's Tragedy: The Russian Revolution: 1891-1924 by Orlando Figes, Journey into the Whirlwind by Eugenia Semyonovna, Lenin: A New Biography by Dmitri Volkogonov (who lost his father to Stalin's executioners), Hitler and Stalin: Parallel Lives by Alan Bullock, Russia Under the Bolshevik Regime by Richard Pipes and many more. I suppose they are all liars, right? We are all to take the word of a select few who believe Stalin "wasn't that bad," it seems. There are also a select few who revere Hitler. Are we to believe them too? Although this book primarily focuses on the evils of Stalinism, Lenin and Trotsky also get their fair share of criticism for setting up the cruel, totalitarian police state that Stalin would later use to enslave and murder his own people wholesale. Amis quotes Trotsky as stating: "We must put and end once and for all to the papist-Quaker babble about the sanctity of human life" (pg 35. Amis obviously got this quote from A People's Tragedy, pg 641) The Bolsheviks did just that. Amis points out that it is quite possible more people were murdered by the Bolshevik secret police from 1917-24 than died in the battles of the Russian civil war (pg 34. Also taken from A People's Tragedy, pg 649) Read this important book (and those listed in the second paragraph of this review) and spread the word so the useful idiots, fellow travelers and Left-wing propagandists don't get away with whitewashing state-sponsored mass murder on an unprecedented scale. God knows they've gotten away with it for far too long! Highly recommended!
Rating: 
Summary: Nausea
Review: In looking at the other reviews, I'm stunned at how anyone could even conceive of downplaying the content of this book for their own ideology. Absolutely contemptible and sick. The manner in which Amis wrote this book was interesting enough to help get through the gruesome, nauseating content. One of the saddest things I've read in ages. Everyone should have to read this book to see the results of philosophy gone awry. As tired as it may sound, "Be careful what you wish for."
Rating: 
Summary: That old smelly dead horse
Review: Western writers, novelists and historians of the late 20th and early 21st century seem to have a deep need to prove that Communism was wrose than Fascism and much, much worse than Liberal Capitalist "Democracy". This rambling, bizarre tome beats that old, smelly horse named Anticommunism but fails to beat any new life into it. In this Goebbelsian view of history anyone who ever died in the USSR was a victim. Famines were purposeful, the constant civil war and invasion by other countries was all the communist's fault. This book FAILS to bring any new or convincing evidence to light which would prove the wild claim of 20 million Stalinist victims. The famine photos are of the "Volga Famine" which was caused by the Civil War and thus as much the West's fault as the commies'. (Actually not ONE photo exists of the so-called "Harvest Terror" famine.) There are two actual and one spiritual scource for this book- Robert Conquest the Cold War propagandist and Alexander Solzhenitsyn the apologist for Russian monarchy. The spiritual scource for this book is of couse Herr Goebbels. As usual, no notes, no bibliography, just flawed and UNPROVEN personal opinion.
Rating: 
Summary: The truth in an unreadable form
Review: This book is a failure if its purpose is to document Stalin's murders. Solzhenitsyn and Anne Applebaum have done it more than adequately. Amis has a lot of baggage concerning fellow-travelling family and friends which intrude here and is the real subject of this book. His personal concerns spoil his discussion of Stalin's crimes and the horrendous apparatus of death which the Bolsheviks created. I cannot see the point of this book at all. It is a tribute to self-indulgence as perhaps only an Englishman feels free to indulge.
Rating:
Summary: Brilliant and Provocative
Review: A well attended panel discussion in London in the nineties featured a high-profile thinker and writer and former apologist for Stalinism. In the discussion, this writer (Christopher Hitchens) acknowledged that, in his youth, he underestimated the evils of Stalinism. At the same time, he was more amused than ashamed of his pro-Stalinist position, since, at least ideologically, Stalin's government was committed to improving life for its citizens. This attitude, Amis observes, had support in the audience, where many people seemed to think Hitchens, while certainly naïve in youth, had his heart in the right place. This, really, is the central issue of "Koba the Dread". Here, Amis points out that no one today justifies youthful support of Nazism by pointing out that Hitler had an economic program that worked. But, people will sheepishly defend their support of Stalinism and get laughs, provided they present themselves as duped by their idealism. This is possible, Amis contends, because it has not really penetrated our society, despite Solzhenitsyn, that Stalin killed 20 million of his own citizens (the Holocaust claimed 8 million) while presenting a deceptive ideological face to the world. In writing this book, Amis addresses this issue. Why, he asks, have the evils of Stalinism, which he reviews with great clarity and power, not really penetrated? Why can we laugh at our naiveté despite the murder of 20 million innocent Soviet citizens? In my opinion, this great little book frames this question brilliantly. Highly recommended!
Rating:
Summary: An unnerving vision of Hell
Review: This book is required reading for anyone who does not yet understand that the USSR 1918-1953 was literally hell on earth. In America and Britain we think of our government as mostly there to carry out our wishes. In the USSR, the government was the enemy of the people. Lenin set everything up for Stalin: the camps, the terror, the famines, the secret police. Trotsky was as bloodthirsty and mendacious as the rest of the Bolsheviks. As Simon Karlinsky and MANY MANY other Russians have pointed out (to persons apparently deaf), the Bolsheviks were not "the Revolution." They were the Counterrevolution. Uncounted millions died... the "official figure" is Twenty Million, but that's a very, very conservative estimate. Martin Amis coins an apt term for this vast arena of death and despair: Negative Perfection. A place where a brute like Stalin could reach into your life at any time, and decide, at a whim, to condemn you to a lifetime of agony and torture. I am currently living in Thailand, a country which many people regard as "third-world" and therefore desperately poor. Let us remember now: there was "the first world" -- the US, Europe, Japan, and the developed capitalist nations. Then there was "the second world" -- the Communist empires. And the "third world" was everybody else. This book makes you realize just how lucky the "third world" was, if it managed to avoid the nightmares convulsing everyone in the "second world." Very highly recommended, indeed!
Rating: 
Summary: Not Robert Conquest, but important nonetheless
Review: What happened to Martin Amis? Such promise. For my part, I parted company with Amis shortly after 'London Fields', a book that largely rehashed the infinitely superior 'Money.' This was followed by 'Time's Arrow', a 'one trick pony" if ever there was one, that I tired of after the first chapter. After this, we were treated to Amis the Essayist. Not content with presenting his genius to the public through his novels, Amis decided that he should adopt a high moral tone and dispense his wisdom in the form of essays, articles and books such as this. I realize that if you are a fan of Amis', then I have probably lost you already. But I hope I haven't because I think this book has real value. And if I have somehow managed to keep you reading, then please bear with me for a moment longer. In writing this book, Amis has done something important. He has a wide readership ' a readership that would be unlikely to pick up a volume by Conquest. A darling of the left, a fellow traveler of Christopher Hitchens, Amis certainly takes his loyal readers on an unexpected detour here. Readers might at first have been surprised to discover that he had this in him. As a result, a whole segment of society that would otherwise have been ignorant of the full extent of what went on in Stalin's Russia, may have been helped to the sort of enlightening that Amis experienced when he delved into the subject. And, true to form, Amis does have his own take on things. He is largely outraged by the facile ignorance or cavalier indifference displayed by the liberal intelligentsia to what went on in Stalin's Russia. Amis was genuinely horrified. Shaken to the roots of his humanity by what he learned when he began to study the literature on the Great Terror. He provides many examples of this. He recounts a conversation he had with Hitchens (who I believe is his son's godfather!). It went like this: 'What about the famine?' I once asked him. There wasn't a famine,' he said, smiling slightly and lowering his gaze. "There may have been occasional shortages....' I am surprised he didn't slug Hitchens. Anyone who knows anything about the millions of deaths knows that there were more than a few 'shortages'. Having said all this, as some of the other reviewers have pointed out, this is a eccentric and personal volume. If you REALLY want to understand Stalin, what you really want is Robert Conquest. Either his book on the subject of Stalin per se ('Stalin: Breaker of Nations') or his more general book, 'The Great Terror: A Reassessment'. Indeed, Amis makes such heavy use of secondary sources, and in particular Conquest, that I am surprised those authors have not lined up for royalties. The Publisher's Weekly review is accurate.
Rating:
Summary: SWEPT UNDER THE RUG
Review: In this book, Martin Amis tries to come to grips with the stupidity of the generation before him, some of whose members supported and idealised a man as brutal, if not more so, than Adolf Hitler. Yes, this book is about that great guy, Josef Stalin, a man, or should I say, an insane demon in the guise of a man. Back in the old days, it was fashionable to be in the Communist Party if you were an intellectual. Now, supposedly these people were intellectuals. Much as the German people in WWII claimed that they were unaware of the Jewish extermination, so these "intellectuals" claimed ignorance of the atrocities being carried out by Stalin. Even after he joined in alliance with Hitler at different points. They ignored the facts and just ballyhooed the greatness of Communism. Later on, in the 50s, some of them would even let their careers be destroyed by adhering to its tenents. Time and again, Amis shows his disgust for these people. The middle section of the book is devoted to a short biography of Stalin that would have fit well into the Penguin Lives series. It is as cold-blooded and efficent as the man it chronicles and shows the brutal methods of famine, imprisonment, and intimidation that Stalin used to keep control of his country. Stalin killed millions of people, but around the world he was admired as a leader of a great nation. A nation that in which he was killing millions of its inhabitants. Right before he died, he was planning on putting into place a system of anti-Semitism probably just as bad as the Nazis. This book was difficult to read, simply because of its piled horrors. Tortures are short but graphically detailed and the evil of the man piles up on you fast and exhausts you. I became increasingly frustrated with the Russian people themselves. I mean, that they allowed the Communists to take power first, and then to suffer under such awful leaders such as Stalin for decades without a fight. In the end, a people get the leader they deserve, whether good or bad. It's hard to believe that people fought such major battles over Communism back in the day. Yes, we still have Cuba, but that country is stuck in the 1960s. We have North Korea, which is run by a psycho equal to Stalin who can't even feed his people, and we have China, the only real Communist power, who likes to run over its people with tanks. For the most part though, the world recognizes Communism as a dead system. I see it as one of the worst catastrophes of the 20th century, along with Facism and militant Islam. This is a good introduction to the man that is the idol of Saddam Hussein and is a warning to never turn a blind eye to the activities of a tyrant.
Rating:
Summary: Not definitive, but a good place to start
Review: Martin Amis sails through this book on the crest of a valiant wave of anger almost angelic in its intensity. It saturates the entire work as he spits out the now-familiar facts, made fresh through his horror--the countries decimated, the tortured confessions multiplied into the millions, the planned starvation, the conversion of a once-viable nation into a giant slaughterhouse. It's all been said before, but so what? It needs to be said again to a new generation grown soft through ignorance. I loved this particular book for several reasons. Firstly, I can't think of a better introduction to Sovietology for the young, especially those nursed at the breast of American Socialism. Let them try to excuse Stalin away! Amis asserts that Stalin was the result of socialism--not an aberration, but its culminating product. Secondly, Amis says outright that we helped him kill, and he's absolutely right. He despises the left-wing enablers in the West, even his father, Kinsley Amis. Thirdly, he says that it is a crime that Hitler is held up as the quintessential man of evil and Stalin is, well, laughed at. Hitler, despite everything, he asserts, didn't completely destroy the fabric of his society. Lenin most assuredly tried, and Stalin succeeded. It's a bold assertion to make in Western Society, where Hitler is Satan. There are many Satans, Amis says, and Stalin was worse. Fourthly, and most importantly, "Koba the Dread" is excellent starting-point for those who haven't read Solzhenitsyn, Conquest or Grossman, because he quotes whole passages from their work, and cites many others. After I finished "Koba" I ran out and devoured every Vasily Grossman book I could find. Even if you don't do this, you'll be a much better educated person when you're through. Lastly--and unimportant to anyone but me, I know---is Martin Amis' style, his anger, his absolutely beautiful prose. There are many who, along with Solzhenitsyn, are able to compose eulogies for The Twenty Million---Vasily Grossman did in his dreamlike "Forever Flowing". Amis' style has very nearly elevated his into a hymn.
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