Koba the Dread: Laughter and the Twenty Million (Paperback)

Sad to say, Amis was not up to the task he set. Although well-written, the book is overly self-indulgent and superficial.

The book is divided, into three parts. Part I, approximately one third of the book contains general background information on Amis and his `credentials' for writing the book. Those credentials include his reading of the historian Robert Conquest's Reflections on a Ravaged Century and his presence at a celebration of the end of the millennium along with Tony Blair and the Queen. The remainder of Part I explores Amis' coming of age in a family in which political discourse formed the focus of dinner table and other conversations. It also contained more than a bit of information about Amis' education and early work experience. Last, he touches on some of the political developments in post-revolutionary Russia including an overview of Lenin and the formation of the earliest labor camps. Although interesting, it provides nothing more than a cursory overview of the issues allegedly at the core of the book.

Part II, which constitutes more than a half of the book, is entitled Iosif the Terrible: Short Course. This is a two-fold play on words as Stalin fancied himself as a latter day version of Ivan the terrible and wrote a book entitled "Short Course on the Soviet Union." The overview reads well. Amis is, clearly, a good writer. However, it does not contain any new research or original thought. Rather, as Amis acknowledges, it is a summary of many books Amis has read on the subject, specifically Conquest's The Great Terror. Again, anyone coming to this book with even a passing knowledge of Soviet history will find one half the book superfluous.

Part II, a mere 34 pages, addresses the question posed on the book cover as its central theme, "the indulgence of communism by intellectuals of the West." Part III consists of a Letter to a Friend (Christopher Hitchens) and an after word addressed to his late father. Although both are touching and deeply personal in their own way they never really did get to the heart of the question.

The question posed was a decent one. But I left disappointed. I gave the book three stars because, despite my disappointment, it was well-written. I also realize that the book could serve as a valuable introduction to readers new to Russian/Soviet history who might wish to dip their toes into the subject matter. This is not a bad place to start. However, I would not recommend this book to anyone with more than superficial knowledge of the subject matter. At best, this should have been a magazine length article.

Next, the heart of the book provides a primer on Stalinist terror, cribbed from a number of sources. Here, the critics once again open up, curiously accosting Amis on roughly three points (A) Amis isn't telling us anything we didn't already know, (B) Amis is simply cribbing from other books, (C) Amis's sources are weak. The response to A is that Amis never claims that he's providing new information, quite the contrary. His point is that how could we (Western lefties) know all this and not totally distance themselves from it? Furthermore, I suggest that the argument that people already know is only valid up to a certain age. As a thirty-year-old with an honors degree in international relations, I knew the gist of Stalinist times, but certainly not the level of detail Amis provides. And if you took a survey of people on my phone list, almost all of whom have some kind of Master's degree and are engaged in the world at large, I would bet good money that 90% could tell you who Eichmann was and that maybe 5% could tell you who Dzerhinsky was. As to B, Amis tells you all the way through where his citations are from and never pretends otherwise. C is the sort of specialist sniping that's hard to dispute but seems kind of pointless when you consider that much of Amis's quoting is from first-person accounts.

Finally, the book ends with a rather strange letter to his dead father in which Amis digresses into family talk, including the death of his sister. It's not history and politics, and thus is appears to upset those for whom these topics dare not be contaminated with anything personal. That, in way seems to be the subtext of some of criticism of the book, why is it so personal, and why does Amis write about it all with such a naive wonder and anger. Of course, to criticize it thusly is to utterly miss the book's point.

In any event, the book is filled with keen insight and deadly venom, especially when it comes to the posthumous lionization of Trotsky and Lenin (p 250, "An admiration for Lenin or Trotsky is meaningless without an admiration for terror."). It's the rare piece of writing from the left that refuses to separate the ideological ideal of communism with it's real world totalitarian application and utter dehumanization of those under its rule. Amis's conclusions, such as they are, can best be summarized by the following passage from page 258, "The enemy of the people was the regime. The dictatorship of the proletariat was a lie; Union was a lie, and Soviet was a lit, and Republics was a lie. Comrade was a lie. The Revolution was a lie." This is an important work—not without its flaws and rough edges—that does the valuable service of reacquainting us with the horror of Stalinist rule.

I read this book in a day. Apart from the slightly irrelevant and unconvincing bits towards the end where Amis tries to connect it all to his baby crying and his sister dying, it is a thought provoking read.