Martin Amis: Koba the Dread: Laughter and the Twenty Million

By DAVID LAWRENCE*

Martin Amis could not write an uncontroversial book if he tried, but he's outdone himself with this one. An alternative subtitle might be: Novelist turns historian with disastrous results.

The subject is Iosif Vissarionovich, aka Koba but better known by another nickname, Stalin. Amis has read "several yards of books" about what Stalin did (Robert Conquest and Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn are much quoted) and distilled them into his own portrait of a monster.

Orlando Figes, a bona fide historian who is also quoted more than once, has accused Amis of a shallow understanding of Soviet politics and of basic factual errors in the book.

The scholarship is shaky. But that's not the problem.

Amis argues that there is something "unshirkably comic" about Bolshevism and sprinkles the book with jokes.

He notes, for instance, that Lenin had difficulty pronouncing the letter r - "not a good start for a Russian revolutionary".

It amuses him (and me) that the leading cause of house fires in the Soviet Union at one point was spontaneously exploding television sets.

The absurdity and enormity of Stalin's lies, he says, had the populace quaking with both terror and laughter.

"It has always been possible to joke about the Soviet Union," he writes, "just as it has never been possible to joke about Nazi Germany."

Not true. Witness the success of (Jewish) comedian Mel Brooks' The Producers, in which the production is Springtime For Hitler: A Gay Romp with Adolf and Eva in Berchtesgarten.

Amis regards Stalinism as a black farce rather than a tragedy. Not everyone, however, will see the funny side of a tyranny under which 20 million died (other estimates are closer to 40 million); of the unimaginable suffering in the Gulag; of vile "recreational torture" endured for months or even years; of starving peasants eating their children.

Jokes sit uneasily amid accounts of these horrors. But that's not really the problem.

Amis concludes with letters to his best friend, the iconoclastic left-wing writer Christopher Hitchens, and to the ghost of his father, Kingsley, the great comic novelist, who was a card-carrying Communist for 12 years until a lurch to the right.

He takes them - and Western intellectuals in general - to task for their tardiness in recognising and admitting the inhumanity of Stalinism.

The upshot of this, as Hitchens put it in a vigorous riposte, is to pygmify a Himalayan topic.

"I find myself embarrassed almost every day," wrote Hitchens, "by the thought of an actual Gulag survivor reading this, or even reading about it, and finding his or her experience reduced to a sub-Leavisite tiff, gleefully interpreted as literary fratricide by hacks who couldn't give a hoot for the real subject."

But that's still not quite the problem. The real trouble with Koba is the family memoirs that bookend the history.

Amis reflects on the death of his sister. It brought to mind Stalin's line about one death being a tragedy and a million deaths being a mere statistic.

He recalls a weeping fit by his 6-year-old daughter. The noise she made brought to mind the sounds of anguish from the cellars of the Butyrki Prison in Moscow during the Great Terror; Butyrki is now his daughter's nickname.

In a book that purports to honour the victims and their families, by a writer of much perspicacity, such self-indulgent musing is a bizarre misjudgment in proportion and taste.

* Jonathan Cape, $54.95

* David Lawrence is a Herald subeditor.