Koba the Dread: Laughter and the Twenty Million

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A brilliant weave of personal involvement, vivid biography and political insight, Koba the Dread is the successor to Martin Amis’s award-winning memoir, Experience.

Koba the Dread captures the appeal of one of the most powerful belief systems of the 20th century — one that spread through the world, both captivating it and staining it red. It addresses itself to the central lacuna of 20th-century thought: the indulgence of Communism by the intellectuals of the West. In between the personal beginnings and the personal ending, Amis gives us perhaps the best one-hundred pages ever written about Stalin: Koba the Dread, Iosif the Terrible.

The author’s father, Kingsley Amis, though later reactionary in tendency, was a “Comintern dogsbody” (as he would come to put it) from 1941 to 1956. His second-closest, and then his closest friend (after the death of the poet Philip Larkin), was Robert Conquest, our leading Sovietologist whose book of 1968, The Great Terror, was second only to Solzhenitsyn’s The Gulag Archipelago in undermining the USSR. The present memoir explores these connections.

Stalin said that the death of one person was tragic, the death of a million a mere “statistic.” Koba the Dread, during whose course the author absorbs a particular, a familial death, is a rebuttal of Stalin’s aphorism.

From The New Yorker

When the historian Robert Conquest was asked in the post-Gorbachev years to give a new title to a revised edition of "The Great Terror," his classic 1968 account of the murderous Stalin era, he said to his publisher, "How about 'I Told You So, You Fucking Fools'?" Rarely has such smugness been so deeply earned. There had been many fools who dismissed Conquest as a dupe. In this meditation, the novelist Martin Amis sets out to recall the moral and intellectual blindness that allowed so many to ignore the millions of corpses and the camps, and his heroic voices include Conquest (to whom the book is dedicated), Solzhenitsyn, Koestler, and Akhmatova. "Koba the Dread" is a vivid, if often eccentric, rereading of those authors; the frequent instances when the book veers into family memoir and homely analogy, however, are less successful. At one point, Amis writes that the nighttime cries of his baby daughter "would not have been out of place in the deepest cellars of the Butyrki Prison in Moscow during the Great Terror." As it happens, they would have.
Copyright © 2005 The New Yorker

Review

“Koba the Dread is filled with passion and intelligence, and with prose that gleams and startles.... This fierce little book...[has the] power to surprise, and ultimately to provoke, enrage and illuminate.” –San Jose Mercury News

“Heartfelt.... Amis does not shrink from difficult questions about possible moral distinctions between Lenin and Stalin, Stalin and Hitler.” –San Francisco Chronicle

“Riveting...Martin Amis has a noble purpose in writing Koba the Dread. He wants to call attention to just what an insanely cruel monster Josef Stalin was.” –Seattle Times

“Martin Amis is our inimitable prose master, a constructor of towering English sentences, and his life…is genuinely worth writing about.” –Esquire

From the Inside Flap

A brilliant weave of personal involvement, vivid biography and political insight, Koba the Dread is the successor to Martin Amis?s award-winning memoir, Experience.

Koba the Dread captures the appeal of one of the most powerful belief systems of the 20th century ? one that spread through the world, both captivating it and staining it red. It addresses itself to the central lacuna of 20th-century thought: the indulgence of Communism by the intellectuals of the West. In between the personal beginnings and the personal ending, Amis gives us perhaps the best one-hundred pages ever written about Stalin: Koba the Dread, Iosif the Terrible.

The author?s father, Kingsley Amis, though later reactionary in tendency, was a ?Comintern dogsbody? (as he would come to put it) from 1941 to 1956. His second-closest, and then his closest friend (after the death of the poet Philip Larkin), was Robert Conquest, our leading Sovietologist whose book of 1968, The Great Terror, was second only to Solzhenitsyn?s The Gulag Archipelago in undermining the USSR. The present memoir explores these connections.

Stalin said that the death of one person was tragic, the death of a million a mere ?statistic.? Koba the Dread, during whose course the author absorbs a particular, a familial death, is a rebuttal of Stalin?s aphorism.

From the Hardcover edition.

From the Back Cover

A brilliant weave of personal involvement, vivid biography and political insight, "Koba the Dread is the successor to Martin Amis's award-winning memoir, "Experience.
"Koba the Dread captures the appeal of one of the most powerful belief systems of the 20th century -- one that spread through the world, both captivating it and staining it red. It addresses itself to the central lacuna of 20th-century thought: the indulgence of Communism by the intellectuals of the West. In between the personal beginnings and the personal ending, Amis gives us perhaps the best one-hundred pages ever written about Stalin: Koba the Dread, Iosif the Terrible.
The author's father, Kingsley Amis, though later reactionary in tendency, was a "Comintern dogsbody" (as he would come to put it) from 1941 to 1956. His second-closest, and then his closest friend (after the death of the poet Philip Larkin), was Robert Conquest, our leading Sovietologist whose book of 1968, "The Great Terror, was second only to Solzhenitsyn's "The Gulag Archipelago in undermining the USSR. The present memoir explores these connections.
Stalin said that the death of one person was tragic, the death of a million a mere "statistic." "Koba the Dread, during whose course the author absorbs a particular, a familial death, is a rebuttal of Stalin's aphorism.

"From the Hardcover edition.

About the Author

MARTIN AMIS is the author of 15 novels—among them Zone of Interest, London Fields, Time’s Arrow, The Information, and Night Train—along with the memoir Experience, the novelized self-portrait Inside Story, two collections of stories, and seven nonfiction books. He died in 2023.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

PART I

THE COLLAPSE OF THE VALUE OF HUMAN LIFE

Preparatory

Here is the second sentence of Robert Conquest's The Harvest of Sorrow: Soviet Collectivization and the Terror-Famine:

We may perhaps put this in perspective in the present case by saying that in the actions here recorded about twenty human lives were lost for, not every word, but every letter, in this book.

That sentence represents 3,040 lives. The book is 4411 pages long.

'Horse manure was eaten, partly because it often contained whole grains of wheat' (1,340 lives). 'Oleska Voytrykhovsky saved his and his family's ...lives by consuming the meat of horses which had died in the collective of glanders and other diseases' (2,480 lives). Conquest quotes Vasily Grossman's essayistic-documentary novel Forever Flowing: 'And the children's faces were aged, tormented, just as if they were seventy years old. And by spring they no longer had faces. Instead, they had birdlike heads with beaks, or frog heads - thin, wide lips - and some of them resembled fish, mouths open' (3,880 lives). Grossman goes on:

In one hut there would be something like a war. Everyone would keep close watch over everyone else ...The wife turned against her husband and the husband against his wife. The mother hated the children. And in some other hut love would be inviolable to the very last. I knew one woman with four children. She would tell them fairy stories and legends so that they would forget their hunger. Her own tongue could hardly move, but she would take them into her arms even though she had hardly the strength to lift her arms when they were empty. Love lived on within her. And people noticed that where there was hate people died off more swiftly. Yet love, for that matter, saved no one. The whole village perished, one and all. No life remained in it.

Thus: 11,860 lives. Cannibalism was widely practised - and widely punished. Not all these pitiable anthropophagi received the supreme penalty. In the late 1930s, 325 cannibals from the Ukraine were still serving life sentences in Baltic slave camps.

The famine was an enforced famine: the peasants were stripped of their food. On 11 June 1933, the Ukrainian paper Visti praised an 'alert' secret policeman for unmasking and arresting a 'fascist saboteur' who had hidden some bread in a hole under a pile of clover. That word fascist. One hundred and forty lives.

In these pages, guileless prepositions like at and to each rep-resent the murder of six or seven large families. There is only one book on this subject: Conquest's. It is, I repeat, 4411 pages long.

Credentials

I am a fifty-two-year-old novelist and critic who has recently read several yards of books about the Soviet experiment. On 31 December 1999, along with Tony Blair and the Queen, I attended the celebrations at the Millennium Dome in London. Touted as a festival of high technology in an aesthetic dreamscape, the evening resembled a five-hour stopover in a second-rate German airport. For others, the evening resembled a five-hour attempt to reach a second-rate German airport - so I won't complain. I knew that the millennium was a non-event, reflecting little more than our interest in zeros; and I knew that 31 December 1999, wasn't the millennium anyway.* But that night did seem to mark the end of the twentieth century; and the twentieth century is unanimously considered to be our worst century yet (an impression confirmed by the new book I was reading: Reflections on a Ravaged Century, by Robert Conquest). I had hoped that at midnight I would get some sort of chiliastic frisson. And I didn't get it at the Dome. Nonetheless, a day or two later I started to write about the twentieth century and what I took to be its chief lacuna. The piece, or the pamphlet, grew into the slim volume you hold in your hands. I have written about the Holocaust, in a novel (Time's Arrow). Its afterword begins:

This book is dedicated to my sister Sally, who, when she was very young, rendered me two profound services. She awakened my protective instincts; and she provided, if not my earliest childhood memory, then certainly my most charged and radiant. She was perhaps half an hour old at the time. I was four.

It feels necessary to record that, between Millennium Night and the true millennium a year later, my sister died at the age of forty-six.

Background

In 1968 I spent the summer helping to rewire a high-bourgeois mansion in a northern suburb of London. It was my only taste of proletarian life. The experience was additionally fleeting and qualified: when the job was done, I promptly moved into the high-bourgeois mansion with my father and stepmother (both of them novelists, though my father was also a poet and critic). My sister would soon move in too. That summer we were of course monitoring the events in Czechoslovakia. In June, Brezhnev deployed 16,000 men on the border. The military option on 'the Czech problem' was called Operation Tumour . . . My father had been to Prague in 1966 and made many contacts there. After that it became a family joke - the stream of Czechs who came to visit us in London. There were bouncing Czechs, certified Czechs, and at least one honoured Czech, the novelist Josef Skvorecky. And then on the morning of 21 August my father appeared in the doorway to the courtyard, where the rewiring detail was taking a break, and called out in a defeated and wretched voice: 'Russian tanks in Prague.'

I turned nineteen four days later. In September I went up to Oxford.

The first two items in The Letters of Kingsley Amis form the only occasion, in a book of 1,200 pages, where I find my father impossible to recognize. Here he is humourlessly chivvying a faint-hearted comrade to rally to the cause. The tone (earnest, elderly, 'soppy-stern') is altogether alien: 'Now, really, you know, this won't do at all, leaving the Party like that. Tut, tut, John. I am seriously displeased with you.' The second letter ends with a hand-drawn hammer and sickle. My father was a card-carrying member of the CP, taking his orders, such as they were, from Stalin's Moscow. It was November 1941: he was nineteen, and up at Oxford.

1941 Kingsley, let us assume, was sturdily ignorant of the USSR's domestic cataclysms. But its foreign policies hardly cried out for one's allegiance. A summary. August 1939: the Nazi-Soviet Pact. September 1939: the Nazi-Soviet invasion-partition of Poland (and a second pact: the Soviet-German Treaty on Borders and Friendship). November 1939: the annexation of Western Ukraine and Western Belorussia, and the attempted invasion of Finland (causing the USSR's expulsion, the following month, from the League of Nations). June 1940: the annexation of Moldavia and Northern Bukovina. August 1940: the annexation of Lithuania, Lativa and Estonia; and the murder of Trotsky. These acquisitions and decapitations would have seemed modest compared to Hitler's helter-skelter successes over the same period. And then in June 1941, of course, Germany attacked the Soviet Union. My father rightly expected to participate in the war; the Russians were now his allies. It was then that he joined the Party, and he remained a believer for fifteen years.

How much did the Oxford comrades know, in 1941? There were public protests in the West about the Soviet forced-labour camps as early as 1931. There were also many solid accounts of the violent chaos of Collectivization (1929-34) and of the 1933 famine (though no suggestion, as yet, that the famine was terroristic). And there were the Moscow Show Trials of 1936-38, which were open to foreign journalists and observers, and were monitored worldwide. In these pompous and hysterical charades, renowned Old Bolsheviks 'confessed' to being career-long enemies of the regime (and to other self-evidently ridiculous charges). The pubescent Solzhenitsyn was 'stunned by the fraud-ulence of the trials'. And yet the world, on the whole, took the other view, and further accepted indignant Soviet denials of famine, enserfment of the peasantry, and slave labour. 'There was no reasonable excuse for believing the Stalinist story. The excuses which can be advanced are irrational,' writes Conquest in The Great Terror. The world was offered a choice between two realities; and the young Kingsley, in common with the overwhelming majority of intellectuals everywhere, chose the wrong reality.

The Oxford Communists would certainly have known about the Soviet decree of 7 April 1935, which rendered children of twelve and over subject to 'all measures of criminal punishment', including death. This law, which was published on the front page of Pravda and caused universal consternation (reducing the French CP to the argument that children, under socialism, became grownups very quickly), was intended, it seems, to serve two main purposes. One was social: it would expedite the disposal of the multitudes of feral and homeless orphans created by the regime. The second purpose, though, was political. It applied barbaric pressure on the old oppositionists, Kamenev and Zinoviev, who had children of eligible age; these men were soon to fall, and their clans with them. The law of 7 April 1935, was the crystallization of 'mature' Stalinism. Imagine the mass of the glove that Stalin swiped across your face; imagine the mass of it.**

On 7 April 1935 my father was nine days away from his thirteenth birthday. Did he ever wonder, as he continued to grow up, why a state should need 'the last line of defence' (as a secret reinforcing instruction put it) against twelve-year-olds?

Perhaps there is a reasonable excuse for believing the Stalinist story. The real story - the truth - was entirely unbelievable.

* The millennial moment was midnight, 31 December 2000 This is because we went from B.C. to A.D. without a year nought. Vladimir Putin described the (pseudo) millennium as 'the 2000th anniversary of Christianity'.

** It will be as well, here, to get a foretaste of his rigour. The fate of Mikhail Tukhachevsky, a famous Red commander in the Civil War, was ordinary enough, and that of his family was too. Tukhachevsky was arrested in 1937, tortured (his interrogation protocols were stained with drops of 'flying' blood, suggesting that his head was in rapid motion at the time), farcically arraigned, and duly executed. Moreover (this is Robert C. Tucker's précis in Stalin in Power: The Revolution from Above, 1928-41): 'His wife and daughter returned to Moscow where she was arrested a day or two later along with Tukhachevsky's mother, sisters, and brothers Nikolai and Aleksandr. Later his wife and both brothers were killed on Stalin's orders, three sisters were sent to camps, his young daughter Svetlana was placed in a home for children of "enemies of the people" and arrested and sent to a camp on reaching the age of seventeen, and his mother and one sister died in exile.'

Review:

4.9 out of 5

97.50% of customers are satisfied

5.0 out of 5 stars SOMETHING AMISS

H.N. · August 30, 2002

On the surface of "Koba the Dread" Amis is asking two not-very-interesting questions: why does the Soviet Union still have its admirers and, who was worse, the Nazis or the Communists? The first question is never really answered -- we're told what is obvious, that there is a lingering nostalgia for a set of ideals never realized, or even approximated. The second strikes me somewhat like asking if you would rather be set fire to or set on fire. The Soviets clearly managed to kill more people than the Nazis: they win in quantitative measures. Amis decides however that the Nazis were worse, for qualitative reasons. Stalin wins again -- style points.But there is, of course, much more here. His writing on the "negative perfection" achieved by Stalin is priceless. Even more, his writing on the almost lunatic laughter brought about by Stalin's policies are perhaps the most illuminating aspect of the book. In his description of an election, seen through the journal of a woman who lived during the Terror, we are also reading a close parallel to Amis's own ideas about humor. In early essays, Amis has been very clear that only the blackest humor will do, a humor he achieves to remarkable effect in novels such as "Dead babies" "Money" "London Fields", "The Information" and others. But this humor is real, and it provides a component of discomfort about what the fiction does accomplish, in a way that fiction cannot (is this an experiemnt in form?).Death is also real, on a continental scale. Humor and death -- death after all is "The Information" -- imbue virtually all his fiction. His interest in real death, real humor, must have provided some of the impetus for this book. Read this way, "Koba the Dread" probably tells us more about Amis than Stalin. After all, the stories and facts presented in "Koba" are drawn from widely known, still readily available sources. While they are masterfully selected, arranged and presented, I think they serve only one main purpose, and that is to take us from the incomprehensible magnitude of Soviet lies and crimes down to a fully comprehensible one-on-one experience. By closing with a letter to his friend Christopher Hitchens and another to his one-time party-member deceased father, Amis transforms this observation of history into something infinitely closer to the bone.Through this personal familiarity, death now takes on a color different from his fiction. It is frankly, damply, intimate. We are allowed a glimpse of the other struggle, the struggle of intellect facing its own end. Here, Amis seems rounder and more humbled by experience, by real life. "The Information" is no longer abstract and confined to the printed page, it is in the air he's breathing. And because of this transformation, there passes between author and reader, a sense of something sacred.Which brings us to the final question of the book. "Zachto?", "what for?". For the Soviet experiment, there is no answer able to justify such a grotesque and utterly failed exercise of power. For the rest of us, the answer is, obviously, in recognizing the profound value of life.

4.0 out of 5 stars Stalin Psychosis

G. · March 21, 2024

Amis describes the confusing, monstrous mind of Stalin and relates how the devotees of the religion of Marxism survived - and perished - in Stalin's savage reign.

5.0 out of 5 stars Excellent, brief, literary survey of a horrific regime

D. · June 22, 2012

"Koba" is an affecting, concise, and well-written "author's encounter" with the primary literature of the Lenin and Stalin years.If Amis had not personalized the narrative and also attempted to make it a literary effort, it could have been a deadly dull recitation of a period of horror. Fortunately, he writes about not just the historical facts, but also about what it is for a modern person to learn about these events, and compares the large-scale tragedy to relevant events in his own life. He also draws many perceptive conclusions.For example, he suggests that it's socially acceptable to laugh at Stalinism but not at Nazism. The reason for this, he argues, is not the mere gap between propoganda and reality (a problem for any government, it seems), but the perfect opposition of Stalinist propoganda and Soviet reality. The Nazis were, to a large extent, candid about what the evil was that they were trying to commit. Stalin was claiming the triumph of a workers' paradise (the high-minded ideal of Communism), while at the same time very intentionally doing everything possible to destroy human solidarity in order to maintain and increase his own power (the triumphant apex of the reactionary low-brow). Amis calls it "negative perfection". It's hard not to have an ironic laugh, though in full solidarity, with citizens who are told that utopia has finally arrived while their children are starving to death. The horror makes all the cheerleading instantly risible, or too absurd perhaps to deserve even a jeer.But this is not to say that "Koba" lacks for factual matter. In fact it is above all a history text, with as many names and dates and specific events as most readers could possibly desire. It is simply fortunate for us that Amis doesn't leave it there, but also provides ironic, penetrating commentary, and stories and events from his own life that resonate with the grand narrative.If you don't know much about this core piece of 20th Century history, Amis's survey could be the best available place to start learning, and I think that his thoughtful insights, high-minded though fluid and energetically terse style, and meticulous care for the English language are all very impressive.

Excellent value.

D.A.B. · April 30, 2013

Good first primer about a character that the human imagination couldn't or wouldn't be able to dream up. And surely he went to his grave thinking that he was transcendant and noble. What can you say?

Everyone should read this book

M.B. · July 8, 2014

This book should be on the National Curriculum.(For several reasons: to expose the intellectual bankruptcy of the Left in its apologetics (and worse) for Russia; to highlight that Stalin was every bit as evil and tyrannical as Hitler; and to demonstrate the value of our democracy, for all its faults, and what future generations stand to risk by political ignorance and apathy.)God knows what it cost Amis in researching for this book. The final product is an immensely painful and difficult read. (in terms of content: the style, the writing, and the message are impeccable.) I cannot imagine how haunted he must be by the mass of material he must have read. The torture, cruelty and inhumanity of the regime almost defy description. In a lesser writers hands it would have become an unreadable litany of unendurable pain. But Martin Amis is a great writer and I would argue this is his magnum opus. It starts with the premise; why is it okay to tell jokes about Communist Russia, but not Nazi Germany? and goes on to explain the reasons why with personal honesty, searing insight and absolute humanity. As well as, of course, rigorous and thorough research. (dear God - the research.) You will not forget this book - and that is the intention.An absolute must-read - of how theories become tyranny, and 20 million people are murdered as a result.

about more than only Stalinism

p. · December 9, 2013

this highlights the murky world of Bolshevism, right from the beginning, with its culmination in terror under Stalin. It's not Stalin, so much as the system that results in Stalins rising to the top that is taken to task in this hard-hitting acerbic btu effective account of the criminality of state socialism

Absolutely magnificent foray

l. · March 14, 2022

Well written, accurate and terrifying, a all powerful reminder of hell on earth, a must read for everyone to know

Five Stars

j. · March 5, 2016

Great book at a great price, heavy subject however...

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Koba the Dread: Laughter and the Twenty Million

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