Rating: 
Summary: KOBA the Dreadful comedian
Review: Well I don't understand this weird thing Mr. Amis has about Christopher Hitchen . Why give him any acknowledgement, is he really valid? Isn't Mr. Hitchen in the same catagory as a monarchist? Anyway Mr. Amis wrote another marvelous book, a condenced course on Stalin. Highly readable, often with dark humor, and thought-provoking. A must read.
Rating: 
Summary: One photo is worth the price of the book
Review: The book relies too much on secondary sources, but one photo, possibly apocryphal, is worth the price of the book. It shows a man and a woman, looking somewhat like the painting 'American Gothic' by Grant Wood, before a table of meats. It is captioned "ANTROPOPHAGI". A Greek word: "ANTROPO" = MAN + "PHAGI" = TO EAT Man eaters. PS--UPDATE: I read this book after writing this review, and the prose is stilted. The author loves namesdropping (Robert Conquest is a family friend). Once again, I was spot on judging the book by its cover--the best part of the book was indeed the 'maneater' photo.
Rating:
Summary: The Horrors of Stalin's Russia & Why Reagan Was Right
Review: Mr. Amis does an incredible job cataloging the horrors and evile of Stalin's Soviet Union. Stalin's inhumanity knows no bounds. Reagan was right when he called the Soviet Union "the evil empire." PResident Reagan was lambasted by the left and others for that statement but he was right. The stories of the Soviet slaves ships will leave you in tears and numb. Mr. Amis also details how Stalin transformed the entire state into hell on earth. The stories of young people murdering older people by suffocation with plastic bags in Camboida under Pol Pot look like a picnic compared to Stalin's Soviet Union. This book also is also a stinging indictment of the left from the 1930s until today. We have the same type of people today who want to appease tyrants like Saddam, Castro, Kim Jong-Il and others who fawned over Stalin. One of Stalin's lackeys included folk singer Pete Seeger who was awarded a medal for his good "works" a few years ago by Bill Clinton. Buy this book but be prepared to reading some of the most distrurbing books you will ever read.
Rating:
Summary: Redeeming the real victimizers
Review: Martin Amis' excellently crafted book is about two things: 1) It builds a strong clinical case of a dictator; and 2) It rightfully equalizes Bolshevik terror to the horrors of Nazism, thus reinforcing the case of guilt Western intellectuals failing to recognize the above must experience. The reviews so far posted here justify his latter point: none of them are able to grasp the non-personal, truly historic message of Amis: unless the Western world does not recognize Bolshevism and the following Eastern European socialism as evil equal to, if not greater than, the Holocaust, the lessons of the horrible 20th century will never be learned properly. Amis misses the history point in one key aspect. Had he been able to see it and understand it, he would have written a different book. The history of Bolshevik/Soviet-style communism was not the exclusive deed of the dictator; he only made it look more unbelievable, more horrifying, and more brutal. It is an error of judgment to explain this regime solely with the father, the boss, the usurper, the psychopath, the chieftain. This regime was made possible and durable by the Russians (in the hundred millions) who complied with it. There are undeniable proofs of that: 1) All checkists were Russians, brothers of the tormented and murdered innocent victims. Without their voluntary participation, the death machine couldn't have worked as it did; 2) All Russians were able to believe in Stalin's innocence, including intellectuals such as Erenburg and Pasternak (as pointed out by Amis himself). Why? Because they believed in the ideology. Thus, they supported the regime; 3) After Stalin's death Russians did not condemn his regime and did not turn their backs to the idea of socialism. So, we had the lukewarm Khrushchev period and the stagnant Brezhnev times. All this under the highly elevated banner of the construction of communism; ... and many more, among them a personal one: I knew personally Janucz Bardach--even after he had survived Kolyma, he lived his life as a member of the communist party, and in his eighties, as a U.S. citizen, he did not condemn communism as an ideology. Amis' error is an error of paradigm. He fell prey to the widely held belief that, in contrast to democracy, dictatorial regimes are possible because of the maniacal will of a person. Those who have lived under the communist regimes know all too well that their compliance, usually due to commitment to the regime's ideological goals and to fear, was what kept the dictators afloat. The truth is that responsibility is shared between the dictator and his nation (even in the case of a small dictator like Milosevic). However, no nation can incriminate and punish itself, thus, the dictator becomes the scapegoat both for the justice system and for the commentators of history.
Rating:
Summary: Circles of Hell
Review: In the vein of Robert Conquest's The Great Terror, and The Black Book Of Communism, this penetrating snapshot of Stalin at his most grotesque is another of the 'delayed reactions', going into shock in the wake of 1989, that ask us to take stock also of the slogans and ideologies of so many, and the inability of leftist intellectuals to see the obvious. The book has a photograph of a poster from 1931 clearly warning of the rising sense of the Stalin problem. It is not as if noone was able to arrive at the facts, or be alert to emerging disaster amidst the tactics of propaganda. However, the composers of the more thorough Black Book of Communism were leftists. This perspective threatens to become a witchhunt of every intellectual even moderately confused here, including Edmund Wilson. While most leftist intellectuals might well beat themselves over the head for stupidity here, as the author seems to suggest, I think one should beware at this point, short of a reactionary exploitation of this horror, whose insanity proceeds seamlessly into the realities of capitalist convulsion, Social Darwinism, nineteenth century imperialism, and the First World War. We are all co-responsible. Globalization drives men to insanity as the musical chairs effect makes them wake up to their coming statistical destruction. To this day, we fail to note the obvious and analogous ideological blindness clearly present in the legacy of Darwinism, and the ceaseless promotion of concealed Social Darwinism. And our kneejerk defense, "This is science", is the image of the core delusion. The problem stretches across ideological boundaries.
That said, this is a gripping account in some ways more effective than the others, with the author shouting in your ear, where this particular history in hell is uniquely Dante-esque, almost unbelievable in this skewering blast of contempt.
Rating: 
Summary: Turret's Syndrome at the Oxford Union
Review: Reading Martin Amis writing about 20th Century tragedy is like watching someone with Turret's Syndrome at the Oxford Union. Push Jew buttons with 'Time's Arrow' - get hype and half million dollar advance, now it's on to the gulag!! Of course, Amis has to invent leftist denial about the gulag where there is none. There is SOME but not in any serious circles. The Gulag Archipeligo had an enormous effect on Paris and New York when it came out and led in part to the French backlash against Louis Althusser and the CFP and to the movement towards abstraction rather than social commitment in American writing and art. Chris Hitchens cites other examples in his little love pat to Martin. If you are dumb enough to read a book that says an historical topic is taboo and but has NO original research - gee, where did he get his info then? ...then get this book. How did the Holocaust get more press than the Gulag? Go to the Holocaust museum in DC and there is a quote by Dwight David Eisenhower on the front of it. We fought a war against Hitler, we, the Americans, the British, the French. We had a propaganda machine against Hitler. The same propaganda machine wanted the kids to sleep well at night not knowing that we had made common cause with Uncle Joe who had already done his worst in Siberia, killing millions. Or... if you want to think that the entire US media has less effect on American consciousness than the stubborn liberalism of Kingsley Amis and George Steiner, then get this book. The Gulag was a dehumanizing attempt to restore the Soviet economy on the backs of getting surplus production from collectivized peasants. There was a famine, bad weather. It was also a lot of dissidents being eliminated. Granted, the supreme authority given to Stalin by the USSR allowed it to happen. But the October Revolution did not impose central authority on a democratic nation, it shifted authority from a monarchy to a Supreme Soviet. The Gulag was not modeled after any Marxist principle but rather after the abuse of serfdom during the reign of the Czar. In fact, the horror most similar to the gulag was the potato famine in Ireland - people forced to work without proper compensation dying by natural causes brought about by the austerity of the oppressor's policies. Is Martin Amis against the monarchy? He attended the Queen's Jubilee ball, and said about the Royal Family: "The monarchy allows us to take a holiday from reason; and on that holiday we do no harm." When Amis or Hitchens attempt to grapple with the relation of ideology to perception and virtue, they are WAY over their head. The most scathing attack on ideology was Marx's 'The German Ideology.' They are dilettantes who clearly don't have enough attention span to go over the complexities of the question or they would be able to refer to the great traditions that have spoken to this matter. If you want to read about the Gulag, Solzhenitzyn's classics are a good source as is J Arch Getty's The Road to Terror. On ideology: Jorge Lorrain, The Concept of Ideology; Jurgen Habermas, Knowledge and Human Interests, Terry Eagleton, Ideology: An Introduction.
Rating: 
Summary:
Reigning Champion Monster
Review:
I read a small recollection in this book that I would easily forsake having experienced, and therefore won't share it here. That Stalin was the reigning champion monster of the 20th century, probably (and hopefully) of all time, is further reinforced by this book, which is worth reading almost in entire. But please, stop after Part II. The short Part III is more like an appendix anyway, and is guaranteed to break the heart.
Stalin's crimes numbered literally in the millions.
On page 97 we learn that, when the census figures of 1937 failed to agree with Stalin's own estimates of what the population should be (and might have been had he not conducted warfare against his citizens), he had the census board shot and denounced. Stalin had more than a million of his country's POWs (who had been liberated from the Germans) executed without any apparent reason (p 211).
And in case you've wondered why the anti-Zionist propaganda has soaked in throughout the world:
"Then, from what at first seems to be an unexpected direction, there was suddenly another crime: the crime of being Jewish... his history of anti-Semitism turns out to be long and colorful. Khruschev said he was dyed in the wool; and there are examples... dating back to the teens of the century... During the 1930s anti-Semitism became a part of Cheka policy, and in the years of the Terror such phrases as 'contact with Zionist circles' began to appear in its fabrications." (p 217)
Stalin had Sergei Kirov, the popular party boss of Leningrad, murdered, then had thousands rounded up as Kirov's assassins, and sent them to nearly certain death in the gulags.
The Cheka was one of the none-too-secret secret police forces of the USSR. Dzerzhinsky, the first to head the Cheka, gave a speech which was nothing but a tirade against Trotsky and other rivals of Stalin, and died of a heart ailment the next day. In 1991 a 40 ton statue of him in front of Lubyanka prison was torn down by popular will.
Yagoda, the third to head its operation, was shot.
His replacement was Yezhov, who was arrested and shot by his successor, Beria, less than two years later.
Beria continued in his capacity as Stalin's most faithful henchman until a few months after Stalin's death, when he was arrested, tried in secret by a military tribunal convened for the purpose, found guilty, and shot.
Recommended reading:
-:- The Commissar Vanishes (080505295X)
-:- Beria by Amy Knight (0691010935)
-:- Stalin's Secret Pogrom (0300084862)
-:- The Psychopathic God: Adolf Hitler by Robert G. L. Waite (0451621557)
Rating:
Summary: You will--you should--lose sleep over it
Review: Koba the Dread should be required reading for every political science and history student in the 21st century. In the late 1970s when I was in college, left-thinking professors and students (including myself) were more apt to glorify communist ideology by wrongly comparing Sovietism to Marxism than to examine in any detail collectivization and socialization by terror. In fact, after reading Koba, I flipped through a few a my old college texts and amazingly found little discussion on the forced famine and the inherent warpness of Stalin's mind. How wrong we were (and how duped we were), believing that Soviet Communism was somehow fashionable; that it actually worked; and that it only began to fall apart after glastnost. Thankfully Martin Amis has shared his own awakening with the rest of us, perhaps triggered by the death of his sister, who by luck and circumstance was not one of the nameless 20 million. Prior reviewers who criticize Amis for including such personal experiences in this book simply fail to understand the epiphanical connection between one's own history and world events. Read this book. You'll be glad you did.
Rating:
Summary: Disappointing
Review: While I agree with the author's main premise, and am a great fan of Conquest as a historical chronicler, I found the forrays into his personal life out of place and disappointing. It was hard to read, somewhat rambling, and anecdotal. Perhaps he will make another attempt, and stick to the task at hand, and I will gladly read it. As it is, I don't think this book will remain on my shelf.
Rating: 
Summary: Martin the Dreadful
Review: Martin Amis' new book does three things: Firstly, it concisely and interestingly catalogues the evils of Stalin's communist regime (and to an extent Lenin's and what might have been in Trotsky's). An excellent service for those of us, like me, who don't fancy slogging through Solzhenitsyn's The Gulag Archipelago, vols. I, II and III, Robert Conquest's several books on Russia, and the other numerous sources which Amis cites, frequently at some length. It is solely an overview, though: Amis contributes not a single new fact or assertion to the field of writing which is already out there. Occasionally he does stoop to administer a swift, unnecessary kick to Stalin's corpse in the form of some rather childish name-calling. Secondly, on the strength of the first, it makes the very valid point (which, though, has been made elsewhere) that the western intelligentsia (and especially, quelle surprise, the western liberal intelligentsia) is utterly hypocritical in its analysis and commentary on the "good old" communist regime compared to, say, Hitler's Nazi regime. No-one sees the funny side of the Holocaust, but the soviets, perhaps because of their appealing ideology, have been rather let off for the terrors of Stalin's regime. This point is well worth repeating, and I guess it's enough of a hook to hang a book around, but (especially since it's not an original thought) 'tis but a single swallow and not a summer. Thirdly, Koba the Dread contains some unordered, pompous, not obviously relevant and frankly bizarre pontifications, an extract of some personal correspondence presenting just Amis' side of an argument with a left-leaning colleague (it's noteworthy that Amis is not sporting enough to include - or even refer to - the colleague's rebuttal) and, most inexplicably of all, an open letter to his own, deceased, father (ending, ludicrously enough, "Your middle child hails you and embraces you"). All of this can only have been included on the presupposition that the author's personal life and views would be found interesting and worthwhile simply on account of who he is, whose son he was (Kingsley's, in case you didn't know) and who he is friends with (Kinglsey's mates, mostly). Then, without any hint of justification, Amis introduces his own sister's recent death into proceedings, despite acknowledging (to his dead father) "Sally has, of course, nothing whatever in common with [the victims of Stalin's regime]." In short, in this last 32 page section of the book, Martin Amis totally blows his cover. What on earth was he thinking? More to the point, what was his editor thinking? Without this section, Koba runs to 242 pages: perhaps it was necessary to pad out to justify the price of a hard back book? Or is this author such a significant literary figure nowadays that he is beholden to no-one? Perhaps no-one dared stand up to him, for fear of the reprisals...? In case you were wondering (well, I was), the book's silly title can be explained thus: "Koba" was Stalin's childhood nickname. "... the Dread" is a relatively unused variant on "... the Terrible", as in "Ivan the Terrible". So, Koba the Dread; Josef the Terrible, see? Martin, how come you didn't call your book "Josef the Terrible"?
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