Rating: 
Summary: A paradise so bought is no paradise.
Review: That this book has already caused consternation, and more significantly a somewhat neverous puzzlement as to why it even had to be written at all, has vindicated the thesis. Nowhere does the author claim to have undertaken original scholarship, and nor was such his point. He could quite possibly be the first English language novelist to bring any kind compelling imagination not only to life under the Soviet state but to the workings of the minds of Stalin and those Bolsheviks who left him a blueprint for a police state, minds defined by an "unpunctuated self-righteousness", to borrow Amis's absolutely perfect phrase. Yes, many Western intellectuals distanced themselves from the Great Terror and the Show Trials, some begrudgingly when reality was irrefutable, and there were certainly Western leaders who opposed Communism because they knew first-hand what was eminating from the Kremlin. But the opposition to Communism in the West, though official policy, was never given any intellectual credibility. And still isn't, although the tag Marxist or Trostkyite can still today summon up an aura of social conscience and intellectual rigor. Meanwhile Robert Conquest was a rightwing "Cold Warrior" for having been honest and accurate. And this is because much of the Western world continues to see its intellectual history through a leftist lense. It's still considered reactionary to dwell for too long on the ideological roots of the Soviet union. Yes, we know Stalin was awful, the assumption seems to be, but the ideals remain intact. And yet the ideals, to remake society and perfect human nature, could only preclude humanity in order to achieve fufillment. The police state, as Amis says, was inherent in the ideals. When every application of the theory leads to calamity one would think then that the theory would need to be restructured. But nope. The theory remains intact. Reality failed the theory. Meanwhile, the Robert Conquests of the world, who acknowledged the reality from the very beginning, are still suspected of some kind of agenda or bias. The left eschewed the Soviet government in practice after the show trials, and have never been able to defend any real manifestation Communism ever since. But they are still, as one astute observer recently noted, committed "anti-anti-communists". After the fraudulent posturings of Wells, Shaw, Wilson, Sartre, entire legions of the French left, the still-living Eric Hobsbawm, the Italian publisher Feltrinelli in the 1960s, and of course the Moscow correspondent for The Nation during the 1930s, there was no way anyone of this intellectual heritage could still be FOR Communism. But at least they could be AGAINST the anti-communists. And to think that prestige still clings to these people. That a writer of Amis' talent has really tried to think and feel his way into this history will go a long way towards restoring the balance.
Rating:
Summary: ...
Review: Refreshing to see a left-wing literary limey indict Stalin. Too often they waste their ink thrashing Reagan and Thatcher, et al. Amis is not a historian, but too often historians' writing is dry and dead. Amis brought life to the story. Or perhaps I should say death to the story. Stalin should be more a household name of evil than he is. And Amis' fictional writing is often obscure and oblique. I was pleased this book was written with clarity. The Stalin nightmare can not be documented enough. I'm glad Amis documented it here.
Rating: 
Summary: Unbearable Evil
Review: Martin Amis asks how the unimaginable evil of the Soviet state comes to be tolerated, smoothed over, even laughed at, by western elites. It's an inquiry; there is no answer. Amis's father Kingsley began his adult life as a Communist, from which horrible fate he was saved partly by his own inability to tolerate nonsense and his long friendship with Robert Conquest. Conquest spent many years documenting just how horrible the Soviet state was, to little avail. He did, however, prevail upon his friend Kingsley, who moved steadily away from Communism. Martin Amis provides a "Short Course" on Stalin's horror, but as a framework for asking why Leninist-Stalinist atrocities are treated differently than Hitler's, and why even today the blood-soaked record of communism is slighted. The willful blindness of the western elite is Amis's theme, and one which he approaches indirectly. After the long middle section, full of horror, blood, death, starvation, and the utter destruction of truth which Amis thinks was Stalin's goal, he offers a short reflection on his grief over his father's, and later his sister's, deaths; the point being that he, favored and blessed by his birth in a free society, can remaining a thinking, feeling, and grieving man; while in the Soviet horror, all human emotion died.
Rating: 
Summary: Uhhh...yeah, Stalin was Evil with a Captial E!
Review: Hey, if this book opens some eyes and leads readers to the works of Conquest and Solzhenitsyn then it has served its purpose. I found it interesting to read mainly because of Martin's style, which is very literary, and rare in most books body-slamming communism. The fact is we need more books like this, by writers that can appeal to the left-leaning literati types, books that will open their eyes to the greatest crimes of human history, crimes committed in the name of lofty lefty goals. Human engineering--which is what ALL socialism is--always needs violent coercive force, and Stalin is the most extreme example of this. The difference between Stalin and say...Castro, is quantitative not qualitative, a point Martin makes about the difference between Stalin and Lenin. Overall this is good pop history, and hopefully it will lead readers to more in-depth works.
Rating: 
Summary: Title misrepresents content
Review: This book by Martin Amis is thought-provoking at times, but on the whole it is much too personal. The third chapter, "When We Dead Awaken", has absolutely no value whatsoever and is largely a memoir dedicated to his father. How he (the author) is able to put Stalin on the cover and the badge of the NKVD on the back and call his book "Koba the Dread" only he can answer. These are false as his book is less historical and more personal concerning himself and not to the reader. Except for the Short Course of Stalin in the middle, which seems to be stuck in between to placate the reader who bought the book for historical value, "Koba the Dread" is less about the title character and more about the author and his father. Robert Conquest, who the author refers to excessively, is never as personal in his books as is Amis.
Perhaps the author should have been less deceptive in his choice for a title and cover page when putting a memoir on the market. It is obvious he was aiming for the maximum sales possible of a poorly-constructed novella. It has a plot somewhere in it, but the author takes an excruciatingly exorbitant amount of time to get to it and then abandons it at the conclusion. His central assertion that the Bolshevik regime in Russia has always been as humorous as Nazi Germany is not is an interesting theory. Unfortunately, again, the author stops short of elaborating and moves on into more flashbacks. The aforementioned Conquest would be a better source of information in one of his many books on Stalin and his regime.
Rating:
Summary: The Exorcist
Review: This is a somewhat odd book. Martin Amis, the famous English novelist has decided now, in 2002, that Communism was incredibly evil and foul, from beginning to end and has now written a memoir to fully articulate his disgust and outrage. How, he asks several times throughout this book, could such horror and evil be indulged by so many Western intellectuals. The book consists of an introductory chapter with autobiographical materials, and a discussion of the almost unmatched foulness of Lenin. There is a concluding chapter which consists of letters to his friend Christopher Hitchens and his deceased father, the novelist Kingsley Amis. But much of the book consists of the middle section detailing the horror of Stalin, whose crimes are virtually equal to Hitler's. The result is a book that is based largely on the work of his father's close and dear friend, Robert Conquest; Conquest and several other like-minded writers and scholars. This leads to the first irony of the book. This is a book that claims to be a vigorous attack on totalitarian tyranny. Yet the sources relied on, Conquest, Solzhenitsyn, Richard Pipes, Martin Malia, General Volganov show a rather narrow range of reading and a rather narrow ideological range. One might as well read them first and not this second hand version. As a historical study its limitations are obvious. Amis seems to think the October Revolution could have be evaded if Kerensky had been more intelligent (Amis quotes Orlando Figes, but seems to have ignored where Figes shows that is wildly wrong) and reduced it all to Lenin's sadistic blood-thirstiness and lust for power. (One would be better off reading William Rosenberg's "Beheading the Revolution," in the December 2001 issue of The Journal of Modern History.) Amis quotes Shoskatovich's "Testimony," unaware that scholars vigorously debate its authenticity. At one point Amis says nearly all scholars are nearly 99% sure that Stalin had Kirov assasinated. In fact opinion is sharply divided about this (one skeptical historian is quoted with agreement in Francois Furet's own strongly anti-communist The Passing of an Illusion.) There is much denunciation of Trotsky as a murderer and a liar, but Amis at one point admits that he has never actually read Isaac Deutscher's seminal trilogy on the man. One might point out that Amis' discussion of Stalin's entry into the second world war would have been improved by the reading of Gabriel Gorodestsky's "Grand Delusion." And his discussion of the war is flawed by the apparent belief that the Soviet peoples defeated Hitler despite the Soviet State doing nearly everything possible to lose. This is good propaganda, and it is more truthful than the opposite, but it is not remotely accurate. It is not just the redolent tone that irritates one (but could you have such a book that did NOT include the tale how the Webbs made a fool of themselves over Stalin). A certain moral unpleasantness, a certain ostentatiousness involved. At one point Amis ruminates on which way of mass murder he would prefer to suffer, and says he would prefer to be incinerated at Hiroshima than die in the Gulag. This is empty chatter from someone who will never have to experience either. At another point Amis seems to endorse, or only mildly dissent from Solzhenitsyn's gratuitously vicious attack on Maxim Gorky. When one considers that moral depth, sensitivity or simple decency is not really the trademark of the fiction of either Amis Senior and Junior there is something unseemly in judging a man who lived in infinitely more difficult circumstances. But the oddest thing in this book is that the main example of the West's callousness towards Soviet suffering is, of all people, Christopher Hitchens! (and to a lesser extent, Edmund Wilson). Much of this is based on a conversation Hitchens denies, yet Amis works himself into a lather in which Hitchens jokingly addresses a meeting as "comrades," saying it would be like addressing a group of people as fellow blackshirts. Poppycock. Amis appears to state that simple fraternity should be surrendered to the Bolsheviks, and while people who do make that ironic comment to fellow fascists, like David Irving, are not to be trusted, no honest or thoughtful person could think Hitchens was a Stalinist. It is an interesting question as to why Soviet atrocities are not more widespread in the public consciousness than they are. But it is certainly not because anti-communists like Conquest or Kinsley Amis were cruelly ignored. (Fortunately the knighthood must have provided some consolation.) After all for most of its existence, except for part of the eighties, even the British Labour Party supported Britain having nuclear arms, a policy that could only be justified by arguing that the Soviet Union was so evil that it should be threatened with extermination and extinction should it attack us. And during the swinging sixties it was the official policy of both the Democratic and Republican parties to pretend that Chiang Kai-Shek was still the legitimate government of China. Utlimately this book is not so much an analysis as an exorcism.
Rating:
Summary: Excellent Idea: Flawed Self-Indulgent Execution
Review: The concept behind Martin Amis' Koba The Dread had promise. Its stated goal was to examine the apparent willingness of many left-leaning 20th century intellectuals to overlook the worst excesses of the Soviet regime. The book was designed to explore why those same intellectuals who would be the first to man the barricades in opposition to Franco's Spain, Pinochet's Chile, or the Colonels in Greece could, at the same time find reasons not to condemn or even to excuse the great purges and the labor camps of the Gulag, the Hitler-Stalin pact, and the Soviet suppression of liberal movements in Hungary, Poland, and, finally, Czechoslovakia in 1968.
Sad to say, Amis was not up to the task he set. Although well-written, the book is overly self-indulgent and superficial.
The book is divided, into three parts. Part I, approximately one third of the book contains general background information on Amis and his `credentials' for writing the book. Those credentials include his reading of the historian Robert Conquest's Reflections on a Ravaged Century and his presence at a celebration of the end of the millennium along with Tony Blair and the Queen. The remainder of Part I explores Amis' coming of age in a family in which political discourse formed the focus of dinner table and other conversations. It also contained more than a bit of information about Amis' education and early work experience. Last, he touches on some of the political developments in post-revolutionary Russia including an overview of Lenin and the formation of the earliest labor camps. Although interesting, it provides nothing more than a cursory overview of the issues allegedly at the core of the book.
Part II, which constitutes more than a half of the book, is entitled Iosif the Terrible: Short Course. This is a two-fold play on words as Stalin fancied himself as a latter day version of Ivan the terrible and wrote a book entitled "Short Course on the Soviet Union." The overview reads well. Amis is, clearly, a good writer. However, it does not contain any new research or original thought. Rather, as Amis acknowledges, it is a summary of many books Amis has read on the subject, specifically Conquest's The Great Terror. Again, anyone coming to this book with even a passing knowledge of Soviet history will find one half the book superfluous.
Part II, a mere 34 pages, addresses the question posed on the book cover as its central theme, "the indulgence of communism by intellectuals of the West." Part III consists of a Letter to a Friend (Christopher Hitchens) and an after word addressed to his late father. Although both are touching and deeply personal in their own way they never really did get to the heart of the question.
The question posed was a decent one. But I left disappointed. I gave the book three stars because, despite my disappointment, it was well-written. I also realize that the book could serve as a valuable introduction to readers new to Russian/Soviet history who might wish to dip their toes into the subject matter. This is not a bad place to start. However, I would not recommend this book to anyone with more than superficial knowledge of the subject matter. At best, this should have been a magazine length article.
Rating: 
Summary: The boy's a fool, just like his father
Review: This pathetic little book is poorly written, cliche-ridden, and lousy history - yes, just like his dad and his dad's sad friend, the discredited serial liar Robert Conquest.
Rating:
Summary: Excellent Analysis of the Psychology of Authoritarianism
Review: Amis' little tome is a splendid anlysis of the psychology of authoritarianism. If you are looking for a book about the Soviet Union in World War II, the Gulags, the Russian Revolution, and the like -- look elsewhere. In short, "Koba the Dread" examines the utter banality of the autocratic mindset, the often twisted, cruel, and irrational thought processes utilized by dictators (in this case, Stalin): Paranoia, hate, hypocrisy, cruelty, self-aggrandizement, fear, and murder. This book is disturbing because it is filled with endless quotes, ancedotes, and snippets about death, torture, sadism, and slavery in Stalin's Russia. Amis tries to find some deeper, existential meaning to "the twenty million" who died under Stalin against the backdrop of the literary career of his (once) pro-Stalinist father Kingsley Amis, on one side, and the death of his young and innocent sister, Sally, on the other (One recommendation is in order: If you have no familiarity with the overall history of the Soviet Union or the life of Stalin, it might prove benficial to read an introuctory text, first...). In the end, Amis' work is one man's eloquent cry against the barbarity of modern authoritarianism...
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."
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