Martin Amis' new book does three things:
Firstly, it concisely and interestingly catalogues the evils of Stalin's communist regime (and to an extent Lenin's and what might have been in Trotsky's). An excellent service for those of us, like me, who don't fancy slogging through Solzhenitsyn's The Gulag Archipelago, vols. I, II and III, Robert Conquest's several books on Russia, and the other numerous sources which Amis cites, frequently at some length. It is solely an overview, though: Amis contributes not a single new fact or assertion to the field of writing which is already out there. Occasionally he does stoop to administer a swift, unnecessary kick to Stalin's corpse in the form of some rather childish name-calling.

Secondly, on the strength of the first, it makes the very valid point (which, though, has been made elsewhere) that the western intelligentsia (and especially, quelle surprise, the western liberal intelligentsia) is utterly hypocritical in its analysis and commentary on the "good old" communist regime compared to, say, Hitler's Nazi regime. No-one sees the funny side of the Holocaust, but the soviets, perhaps because of their appealing ideology, have been rather let off for the terrors of Stalin's regime. This point is well worth repeating, and I guess it's enough of a hook to hang a book around, but (especially since it's not an original thought) 'tis but a single swallow and not a summer.

Thirdly, Koba the Dread contains some unordered, pompous, not obviously relevant and frankly bizarre pontifications, an extract of some personal correspondence presenting just Amis' side of an argument with a left-leaning colleague (it's noteworthy that Amis is not sporting enough to include - or even refer to - the colleague's rebuttal) and, most inexplicably of all, an open letter to his own, deceased, father (ending, ludicrously enough, "Your middle child hails you and embraces you").

All of this can only have been included on the presupposition that the author's personal life and views would be found interesting and worthwhile simply on account of who he is, whose son he was (Kingsley's, in case you didn't know) and who he is friends with (Kinglsey's mates, mostly). Then, without any hint of justification, Amis introduces his own sister's recent death into proceedings, despite acknowledging (to his dead father) "Sally has, of course, nothing whatever in common with [the victims of Stalin's regime]."

In short, in this last 32 page section of the book, Martin Amis totally blows his cover. What on earth was he thinking? More to the point, what was his editor thinking? Without this section, Koba runs to 242 pages: perhaps it was necessary to pad out to justify the price of a hard back book? Or is this author such a significant literary figure nowadays that he is beholden to no-one? Perhaps no-one dared stand up to him, for fear of the reprisals...?

In case you were wondering (well, I was), the book's silly title can be explained thus: "Koba" was Stalin's childhood nickname. "... the Dread" is a relatively unused variant on "... the Terrible", as in "Ivan the Terrible". So, Koba the Dread; Josef the Terrible, see?

Martin, how come you didn't call your book "Josef the Terrible"? ( )

Curioso libro que trata sobre la poca repulsa que entre la intelectualidad occidental provoca la figura de Stalin a pesar de todos los millones de muertos que causó su desquiciada dictadura de terror comparado por ejemplo con algún otro dictador contemporáneo (e igualmente despreciable) cuyo bigote y número de víctimas fueron ligeramente inferiores a los del genocida georgiano.

Lo de "curioso" lo digo más que nada por la estructura del libro, a caballo entre unas memorias y un ensayo histórico.

Lectura recomendable para descubrir hasta qué punto pueden llegar a degenerar las sociedades humanas. Uno de esos libros que te hacen ser un poco menos optimista... ( )

Koba is Stalin. The author is the son of Kingsley Amis, who was at a time a British communist, but later became conservative, and a friend of Robert Conquest, who wrote The Great Terror about the collectivization and other terrors of Stalin’s regime. The book is about the terror, but in a personal way of trying to explain how his father and other intellectuals of the between war periods been attracted to the Soviet Union. The stories of the famine in the Ukraine, and of the camps, are horrific, and the personal asides interesting. The laughter is the concept that the Russian people always regarded the regime as a sick joke. ( )

British novelist Martin Amis ponders the question, `why is it that one never laughs about Hitler's Holocaust which claimed the lives of 11 million, while members of the left are able to laugh about Stalin's rule, which claimed the lives of over 20 million?' This is an examination of the socio-historical-political facets that underlie Soviet style communism, and seeks to provide explanation for its broad support among the European intellectual elite of the 1950's, including Amis' father Kingsley. It is also a fairly rigorous, though often unoriginal forensic portrait of Stalin's particular breed of tyranny, which Amis attributes both to his insanity as well as the totalitarian nature of the Marxist-Leninist system which he inherited.

This book might be though of as a letter to those of the old left such as Christopher Hitchens, who continue to derive a fair amount of laughter and enjoyment for their past follies. Amis breaks from his historiography in these moments, and he imposes his own anti-communism on Hitchens' work; he contrives dicey judgments such as,

"although I always liked Christopher's journalism, there seemed to me to be something wrong with it, something faintly but pervasively self-defeating: the sense that the truth could be postponed. This flaw disappeared in 1989, and his prose made immense gains in burnish and authority. I used to attribute the change to the death of Christopher's father, late in 1988, and to subsequent convulsions in his life. It had little or nothing to do with that, I now see. It had to do with the collapse of Communism" (pg. 47).

This is painting with a broad brush; one could easily make the case that Hitchens' journalistic authority diminished after his stance on Iraq in 2003. Still, Amis does a competent job of presenting the facts to the members of the hard left such as Hitchens, who have always taken a flippant tone in evaluating the USSR.

Amis' historical work is fine, though it is generally unvaried and unoriginal; he relies mostly on Alexander Solzhenitsyn's standard historical accounts in the Gulag Archipelago Volumes, which are more than competent and standard. There are also some interesting looks at the correspondence between Nabokov and Edmund Wilson during this period. However, Amis' occasionally bizarre political oversimplifications, i.e. "[a]s in Germany, this was the birth of mass-media propaganda; people were unaware, then, that propaganda was propaganda-and propaganda worked" (pg. 213). Such declarations are less then insightful, and fail to provide adequate explanations as to Stalin's popularity. Koba the Dread is still a fairly competent evaluation of Stalin's life and politics, and it provides a fair and brief overview of the Soviet Union for readers who desire a quick blow-by-blow, even if it is derivative of Solzhenitsyn. ( )