“Koba the Dread: Laughter and the Twenty Million”, by Martin Amis

320 pages, Miramax, ISBN-13: 978-0786868766

I have read several books concerning the Soviet Holocaust – Stalin: The Court of the Red Tsar by Simon Sebag Montefiore (reviewed on May 30^th, 2013); The Rise and Fall of the Soviet Empire by Brian Crozier (reviewed on January 10^th, 2018); A People’s Tragedy: A History of the Russian Revolution by Orlando Figes (reviewed on August 31^st, 2018); amongst many others – and can only come to the conclusion that Ioseb Besarionis dzе Jughashvili – Stalin – was a demon in human form. As if anything else was needed to add to this judgment, I read Koba the Dread: Laughter and the Twenty Million by Martin Amis, a book that will keep you spellbound and horrified as he acts as one’s guide through the labyrinth of Soviet madness. 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 not just about the historical facts, but also about what it is for a modern person to learn about these events, comparing the large-scale tragedy to relevant events in his own life.

He also draws many perceptive conclusions. For example, he suggests that while it’s socially acceptable to laugh at Stalinism, one cannot say the same about Nazism. The reason for this, he argues, is not the mere gap between propaganda and reality (a problem for any government, it seems), but the perfect opposition of Stalinist propaganda and Soviet reality. The Nazis were, to a large extent, candid about the evil they were trying to commit; Stalin, meanwhile, was claiming the triumph of a workers’ paradise, always the high-minded ideal of Communism, as he was quite 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 refers to this phenomenon as “Negative Perfection”, and it is hard indeed not to have an ironic guffaw 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, though you cannot tell that to today’s cheerleaders of Communism, a system that has always, always, led to oppression, penury and mass death.

Amis doesn’t add any new material to what we already know about Stalin and his Twenty Million victims, but then that is not the point of Koba the Dread, which is to tell the tale of this malevolent Georgian runt better than anyone before against the background of the small clan of psychopaths and morons that formed Stalin’s inner circle. Amis’ prose is passionate and sardonic in equal measure, with moments of pure brilliance dotted throughout the book. All the important facts are there, related in a way at once compassionate and hilarious which compels you to read on, often laughing through the tears. Yes, 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”. For while Nazism and (by extension) Hitler cannot be laughed about, Communism and (again, by extension) Stalin can be.

Koba the Dread does two very necessary and needful 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; and then it asks why, as an historical figure, Stalin is forgiven his sins by having had them forgotten. 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.