KOBA THE DREAD: Laughter and the Twenty Million
Martin Amis
Talk Miramax Books
Nonfiction/Memoir
ISBN: 0786868767

Martin Amis is an English literary force. He is a modern intellectual aristocrat. Stateside we have only political forces with equal lineage, evidenced in George W. Bush and Al Gore. Bush and Gore were given the first rights to their father's seats of power, and Martin Amis commands an equal presence in Arts and Letters.

Amis's latest addition to his large body of work is KOBA THE DREAD: Laughter and the Twenty Million. It is an open conversation that is equal parts personal history --- of the discussions his father Kingsley Amis had with contemporaries (Phillip Larkin, Robert Conquest) concerning the USSR --- as it is didactic hymnal for the terror of the communist strategy of Lenin and Stalin.

Amis bases his evidence on the revealing works of Robert Conquest's THE GREAT TERROR and Alexander Solzhenitsyn's THE GULAG ARCHIPELAGO, and he puts them in context with memories and discoveries of his own that have affected his enlightenment to the Soviet Union.

Amis's primary argument, besides exacting the horror of 20 million Soviet deaths, is that the tragedy still retains a sense of absurd humor, evidenced in his choice of the tongue in cheek title (Koba is Stalin's boyhood nickname), while the "other" atrocity of the 20th century, the German Holocaust, does not.

This opinion slants the lessons of the 20 million dead, it is written with a strange deranged grin, one that permeates the air after learning of the calculating madmen orchestrating the revolution. Stalin is quoted as saying that one death is tragic and the death of a million is merely a "statistic." Equally sinister is the terrible and truthful history KOBA THE DREAD concerns itself with and, worse yet, the great minds who were duped by this regime.

I for one, had no idea. I realize that there are horrible quakes of human tragedy when something occurs as socially destructible as a government coup, but this was no ordinary transformation. Absent was the right to your land, your family, your job, and finally, the most staggering loss, your God. Without these, Russian life seems hollow --- and it was. Famine was an intentional weapon of the state, as was the evil whimsy weighing the decisions for who was thrown in the gulag and whether they lived or died.

It was a collectivization of the sacred, and Amis does a dutiful job through research and personal memory to explain these minds and their acceptance of what one could today call collateral damage. Using this term, of course, would be one of the most crippling understatements of the 20th century; however, it is not an original analysis. Great modern minds such as H. G. Wells and George Bernard Shaw visited the Bolshevik state in the '30s and returned with flowery rhetoric of their grand achievement. Wells was quoted to say about Stalin, "never met a man more candid, fair, and honest."

One of the most revealing and provocative memories Amis relays is one of Christopher Hitchens (best friend, journalist, and pontificator for the left of left) who argues that Stalin was a great man. Christopher Hitchens, idealist and Clinton-basher, and in his new role, apologist for Stalin's famine-induced Russia. In a replay of a discussion, Martin Amis asks Hitchens, "'What about the famine?' and he replied, 'there wasn't a famine, he said, smiling slightly and lowering his gaze. There may have been occasional shortages.'" Could he really have said such a thing? Can this be true? It is.

Here is the grin, absurd, sad, hysterical.

This great mistake arising from the political left, trusted defender of the minority, the woman, the sub-altern --- is it possible that they could be so wholeheartedly duped?

As always with Martin Amis, the reader must be prepared for brutal honesty and surprise. In his last book, the memoir EXPERIENCE, he wields tragedy and romance all at once, but it is his life. The story of his cousin Lucy Partington's grisly death by a serial killer is mixed in with the mention of a youthful affair with Tina Brown. Incidentally, it is Talk Miramax who is the publisher of KOBA THE DREAD.

Back to the point of the book. I would like Martin Amis to be my history teacher. His silver spoon was Kingsley Amis's world. Martin Amis's overwhelming talent has of course proven his club membership to the literary elite. Engaging oneself in his books offers a unique experience. With the constant footnoted asides from the writer, it becomes a secret world he is revealing to you. KOBA THE DREAD is focused on Communist Russia but it is written in the same style as his previous work, EXPERIENCE. They are in-depth tangents and occasionally fill up a page of text. It has the effect of a learned "Pop Up Video." The ultimate back-story to a writer's life.

I do recommend taking the course, "The Soviet idea and how it duped the West's brightest minds," Communism 101 taught by Martin Amis. KOBA THE DREAD would be the perfect companion text; it is as human, as overwhelming, as personal, and as honest a historical analysis that I have ever read. The true weight of 20 million empty souls and those leaders who took them there cannot be taken lightly or without the mad grin that comes with its comprehension.

A joke from the text:

"Q: Why are the USSR and America the same?
A: Because in the USSR you can joke about America and in America you can joke about America."

Here is the grin again, absurd, sad, hysterical.

-   -- Reviewed by R. Scott Hillkirk (rscotthillkirk@hotmail.com)

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