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: What a waste of my time!!
Review: after reading about the sige of Stalingrad, I wanted to learn more about the soviet leader of that time. This book is nothing more than quotes and references to other books that the author must assume that we have all read before. It is a pompass book that has very little insight into Joseph Stalin. you will learn no hidden facts or secrets about him. I wouldn't bother giving this book away.
Rating: 
Summary: Compelling, But Dreadfully Incomplete
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...."
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.
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