Koba the Dread: Laughter and the Twenty Million, by Martin Amis. Talk Miramax, 306 pp.


Stalin's prose style was deadly. The gray acres of it numb a reader's mind with constant reminders that, while the young dictator-to-be may have dropped out of the seminary, he never quite lost his taste for the catechism. By the time Stalin died in 1953, there were 13 volumes of his Collected Works, covering only the early stages of his career. Imagine the relief of his editors at leaving their work unfinished. His speeches from the 1930s and '40s always included passages that go something like: "Is this the correct course? Yes, comrades, this is the correct course (stormy applause)."

It is impossible not to sympathize with that audience, driven into an abject frenzy of enthusiasm by a hopeless mediocrity with a knack for swift and total vengeance. "Keep clapping, comrades," the reader thinks, "you might get out alive."

But a lot of people cheered for Stalin whose lives weren't in danger, including British novelist Kingsley Amis. (This is all the more striking given his later reputation as a Tory.) One of the first two missives collected in The Letters of Kingsley Amis ends with a little hammer and sickle. This perplexes Martin Amis considerably: Kingsley's teenage Stalinism yields "the only occasion, in a book of 1,200 pages, where I find my father impossible to recognize," he writes in his new book.

Indeed, you could find no greater literary contrast than to compare the comic novelist's grasp of human ridiculousness with, say, the humorless paranoia of Stalin's authorized history of the Bolshevik Party from 1939, which Amis pere undoubtedly studied -- and (stranger still to imagine) believed. Or at least tried to believe. Why? In search of an answer, Martin Amis says he "recently read several yards of books about the Soviet experiment."

Evidently he took notes. They have been patched together, using little globs of personal anecdote as wheatpaste, to make Koba the Dread ("Koba" being the dictator's nickname). Offered to the public as "the successor to Martin Amis' celebrated memoir Experience," the cover promises that Koba will fill "the central lacuna of 20th century thought: the indulgence of communism by intellectuals of the West." Judged on those claims, it fails on so many levels as to lend an element of grandeur to its collapse. Without the author's name on the cover, it almost certainly would not have been published.

From those "yards" of other people's work, Amis has clipped remarkable passages from a few authors -- mainly Robert Conquest (the anti-Communist historian was a close friend of Kingsley's) and the biographies of Lenin, Trotsky and Stalin written by former Red Army general Dmitry Volkogonov. He also draws on a few memoirs of the Soviet era and (of course) Solzhenitsyn's Gulag Archipelago. The result is a scrapbook of horrors, including detailed accounts of the torture techniques preferred by the secret police.

This atrocity exhibition is periodically interrupted by what seems to be purely habitual displays of wit. The author calls one scene of wartime carnage "the meshuggah megabattle." Conquest once proposed that a Soviet party gathering officially proclaimed the Congress of Victors be renamed the Congress of Victims, since more than half the delegates were executed in short order. Amis (clearly warming to the wordplay) dubs it the Congress of Vultures, of Vampires, of Vaudevillians...These erratic surges of verbal dexterity have a grotesque and disconcerting effect, like a funeral oration delivered by someone with Tourette's syndrome.

But it is when the volume reaches beyond paraphrase or banter, attempting some kind of historical analysis, that its patchiness becomes a great liability. Amis very much tries to argue that Stalin was simply fulfilling Lenin's malevolence. But while Lenin could display an almost Henry Kissinger-like indifference to the human suffering induced by his realpolitik-rationalized policies, it requires an almost complete ignorance of Bolshevik history to equate the two. Nothing in the book suggests more than an extremely abbreviated knowledge of the party's history before the revolution -- and scarcely more about the years just after it took power. Waxing eloquent on the Marxist war against human culture, Amis does little more than mention certain memorable episodes in the history of Western civilization that were much on the Bolshevik mind: the savagery of colonialism, for instance, or World War I.

The author dips a toe into the ocean of ink devoted to understanding the relationship between Soviet totalitarianism and the fascist variety. After a bit of a ramble through the similarities and differences, he concludes that...well, they both killed a lot of people. (Thank you for sharing, Martin. Now please sit down.) There are genial taunts at Christopher Hitchens, an old drinking buddy who began his journalistic career as features editor at a Trotskyist newspaper - for underestimating the evils of the Soviet regime. Amis seems unaware that Hitchens belonged to a group that considered the USSR to be a particularly depraved sort of capitalism.

As for addressing European and American intellectuals' indulgence for Stalin's regime -- the question driving the book, or at least inspiring whoever wrote the dustjacket -- that answer never comes. Toward the end of the book, Amis quotes a passage from a late essay by his father: "We are dealing with a conflict of feeling and intelligence, a form of wilful self-deception whereby a part of the mind knows full well that its overall belief is false or wicked, but the emotional need to believe is so strong that the knowledge remains, as it were, encysted, isolated, powerless to influence word or deed." This is eloquently put. But it hides the question; it treats the historical puzzle as a psychological conundrum. Where did the need come from?

And is there any reason to think that the keen interest in the political self-delusions that were abroad in the land 50 years ago will inoculate anyone from willful obliviousness now? I am every bit as obsessed with that history as Amis is. (In fact, reading his book meant putting aside a couple of even more horrific volumes on the Cultural Revolution in China under Chairman Mao.) But one suspects that human moral stupidity is like matter itself: constantly changing forms, but never diminishing in total mass.

If you are among the several hundred people in the world who suppose the former Soviet Union was a terrestrial paradise in which workers and peasants strived joyously to build a new tomorrow, then by all means read this book. Otherwise, the real interest of Koba the Dread lies in the thought-experiment it inspires: trying to imagine what Miramax is going to do with this odd bit of literary property.