Martin Amis's Searing "Koba the Dread" (Contra Giles Harvey)

 

Giles Harvey, in his recent New Yorker review of Martin Amis’s new novel Inside Story (“Last Laugh," October 26, 2020), says of Amis’s Koba the Dread: Laughter and the Twenty Million (2002), “The whole thing felt less like a stand on principle than like a way to demonstrate that Amis had transitioned from erotic jester to moral and intellectual heavyweight, someone capable of holding his own on matters of world history.” Well, it doesn’t feel that way to me. When I read Koba, I feel the heat of its anger – anger at all the “fucking fools” (Robert Conquest’s words, quoted by Amis) who lauded the “Soviet experiment.” Some experiment! It resulted in the extermination of at least twenty million people. Those “fucking fools” include a lot of people who should’ve known better – H. G. Wells, George Bernard Shaw, Sidney and Beatrice Webb, A. J. Ayer, Eric Hobsbawm, Edmund Wilson, Hugh MacDiarmid, Christopher Hitchens, among others. The world offered a choice between two realities, and these so-called “brains” chose the wrong one.

Amis is relentless in his documentation of Stalin’s barbarity. For example, he writes, “Imagine the mass of the glove that Stalin swiped across your face; imagine the mass of it.” To this he appends a searing footnote:

It will be as well, here, to get a foretaste of his rigor. 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 Alexander. 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.”

Koba the Dread is a powerful indictment of Stalinism, written in fierce unforgettable prose. Samples:

Your chair is never softer, your study never warmer, your prospect of the evening meal never more secure than when you read about the gulag: the epic agony of the gulag.

The tortures described by Solzhenitsyn are unendurable. This reader has endured none of them; and I will proceed with caution and unease. It feels necessary because torture, among its other applications, was part of Stalin’s war against the truth. He tortured, not to force you to reveal a fact, but to force you to collude in a fiction.

Of course, the figures are still not secure, and they vary dismayingly. But these are not the “imaginary” zeros of the millennium, and we we will certainly need seven of them in our inventory of the Soviet experiment. We badly need to know the numbers of the dead. More than this, we need to know their names. And the dead, too, need us to know their names. 

Is there a moral difference between the Nazi doctor (the white coat, the black boots, the pellets of Zyklon B) and the blood-bespattered interrogator in the penalty camp of Orotukan? 

But Stalin, in the execution of the broad brushstrokes of his hate, had weapons that Hitler did not have.

He would not accept reality. He would break it.

This, perhaps, is the meaning of the Terror-Famine of 1933: the self-cannibalized were destroyed by the self-executed. And this is the surreal moral gangrene of Stalinism.

Congress of Vultures, one might say, after briefly consulting the reality of the countryside – or Congress of Vampires. And Congress of Vaudevillians, too: in January/February 1934 the Party began to absent itself from actuality. It entered the psychotheater in Stalin’s head.For Stalin, power was a thing of the senses and the membranes. And he invariably sought the upper limit.

Nor should we neglect the obvious point – that Stalin did it because Stalin liked it. He couldn’t help himself. The Terror was, in part, an episode of sensual indulgence. It was a bacchanal whose stimulant was power.

And although Hitler’s invigilation of the citizenry was intimidating and persistent, he did not go out of his way, as Stalin did, to create a circumambience of nausea and fear.

Paul Berman, in his “A Million Deaths Is Not a Statistic” (The New York Times, July 28, 2002), says Koba the Dread “carries a punch, artfully delivered.” I agree. It’s the same kind of punch Amis delivers in his literary criticism: see, for example, his brilliant, jabbing, stinging “Don Juan in Hull” (The New Yorker, July 12, 1993), a ferocious defence of Philip Larkin. 

Koba the Dread’s punch comes from looking at Stalinism and finding fresh ways to describe its evil: “The shoes: sections of old car tire, secured with wire or an electrical cord”; “A group of prisoners at Kolyma were hungry enough to eat a horse that had been dead for more than a week (despite the stench and the infestation of flies and maggots)”; “The hospitals were themselves deathtraps, but inert deathtraps. A man chopped off half his foot to get in there. And prisoners cultivated infections, feeding saliva, pus or kerosene to their wounds.”

Reading Giles Harvey’s facile comment above, I question whether he actually read Amis’s book.