Koba the Dread: Laughter and the Twenty Million

by Martin Amis

A brilliant weave of personal involvement, vivid biography and political insight, Koba the Dread is the successor to Martin Amis’s award-winning memoir, Experience.

Koba the Dread captures the appeal of one of the most powerful belief systems of the 20th century — one that spread through the world, both captivating it and staining it red. It addresses itself to the central lacuna of 20th-century thought: the indulgence of Communism by the intellectuals of the West. In between the personal beginnings and the personal ending, Amis gives us perhaps the best one-hundred pages ever written about Stalin: Koba the Dread, Iosif the Terrible.

The author’s father, Kingsley Amis, though later reactionary in tendency, was a “Comintern dogsbody” (as he would come to put it) from 1941 to 1956. His second-closest, and then his closest friend (after the death of the poet Philip Larkin), was Robert Conquest, our leading Sovietologist whose book of 1968, The Great Terror, was second only to Solzhenitsyn’s The Gulag Archipelago in undermining the USSR. The present memoir explores these connections.

Stalin said that the death of one person was tragic, the death of a million a mere “statistic.” Koba the Dread, during whose course the author absorbs a particular, a familial death, is a rebuttal of Stalin’s aphorism.


From the Hardcover edition.

Genres: History, Nonfiction, Russia, Biography, Politics, Russian History, Memoir

289 pages, Kindle Edition

First published January 1, 2002

About the author

Martin Amis was an English novelist, essayist, and short story writer. His works included the novels Money, London Fields and The Information.

The Guardian writes that "all his critics have noted what Kingsley Amis [his father] complained of as a 'terrible compulsive vividness in his style... that constant demonstrating of his command of English'; and it's true that the Amis-ness of Amis will be recognisable in any piece before he reaches his first full stop."

Amis's raw material is what he sees as the absurdity of the postmodern condition with its grotesque caricatures. He has thus sometimes been portrayed as the undisputed master of what the New York Times has called "the new unpleasantness."

Reviews

[Maciek · Rating 3 out of 5]

There has never been a regime quite like it, not anywhere in the history of the universe. To have its subjects simultaneously quaking with terror, with hypothermia, with hunger – and with laughter.

The first jokes about communism in Russia have surfaced almost immediately after the Revolution of 1917. In one, an old woman visits the Zoo in Moscow and upon seeing a camel for the first time laments: "look what the Bolsheviks did to that horse!" The usual characteristics of such jokes was their deadpan and absurd humor, which drew from real-life absurdities of the system that their tellers had to live in. Usually the jokes made fun of various shortages and inefficiencies (What is colder than cold water in Moscow during the winter? Hot water), and most of the time were pretty grim and ominous: two Russians are walking down the street in Moscow, and the first one asks: "is this it? Have we finally achieved full communism?" The other man replies: "Oh no! Things still have to get much worse".

Despite the joke-inspiring absurdities the system itself was no joke, and carried out immense terror in the name of social justice with great precision. Terror in Russia was carried out against "counter-revolutionaries" from the very beginning, with cruelty matched only by the Spanish Inquisition, and harvested tens of thousands of victims - but it was just a prelude to Stalinism, whose victims were counted in tens of millions. Stalin's collectivized agriculture led not only to widespread peasant repression but also provoked a catastrophic famine. Staling purged Soviet elite and society of any element which might have challenged his rule - no party member, army official and regular comrade could feel safe. On his order entire nations have been deported from their homelands to distant, remote regions, hundreds of thousands dying en route.

The main gist behind the book is a simple one - where is the outrage? Everyone knows what the Holocaust is and who died in it, but who remembers the millions of Ukrainians, Russians and other ethnicities who were systematically starved to death - in peacetime? We all know what the SS was, but who today remembers the Cheka or the NKVD? We know who Heinrich Himmler and Adolf Eichmann were, but can we say the same about Nikolai Yezhov and Felix Dzerzhinsky?

Martin Amis is not a historian and doesn't pretend to be one - most of historical details about the various horrors of Stalinism and characteristics of Stalin himself Amis takes from works of other historians and authors, all duly cited - and the book doesn't aim to be a scholarly work. Rather, this is a work which specifically aims to shock - and not necessarily by displaying many of Stalin's horrifying atrocities in effect, but rather the silence from those most fit to condemn them - the Western intellectual. In sympathy with communist ideals and strong feeling for social justice, many of them turned a blind eye to the horrors of the system as practiced in Russia - they believed the regime's claim that it was building a better future for its citizens, while turning a blind eye to the reality of the fact that it was slaughtering them by the millions. Among intellectuals flirting with Soviet Russia were Amis's own father, Kingsley, and his lifelong friend, Christopher Hitchens - and the book contains personal letters to both, and as a whole reads as the ultimate attempt at an catharsis.

In Russia, popular opinion about Stalin remains mixed; A 2007 pool revealed that over a half of surveyed Russian considered Stalin to be a wise leader; in an earlier poll over one third of the respondents would vote for Stalin were he alive today. Stalin's image as a strong leader continues to be cultivated, with many of his supporters seeing in him a person who would bring the end to corruption inside the country and greatly elevate its role on the world stage. These are mostly people who were born and grew up decades after Stalin was long dead but not only - among the nation his crimes are only dimly remembered, like a fever dream which it has half-forgotten upon waking up to its normal life. It's almost biblical, as it seems that in the end all sins truly will be forgiven - even Stalin's.

For those interested in a broader but still very accessible history of revolutionary Russia, I'd recommend Orlando Figes's book of the same title, Revolutionary Russia, 1891-1991: A History - my review linked.

[Alireza · Rating 3 out of 5]

حدود ده سال پیش خیلی دنبال این کتاب گشتم، چاپ قدیم تموم شده بود و تجدید چاپ نمیشد، بخش امانات کتابخونه ملی هم این کتاب رو نداشت و خب توی طاقچه و فیدیبو هم نبود. یکی دو سال پیش که پیداش کردم خیلی ذوقش رو داشتم ولی خب وسط چندتا کتاب مرجع تاریخی روسیه بودم، تصمیم گرفتم اونا رو تموم کنم و سر فرصت این کتاب رو بخونم. متاسفانه کتاب در اون حدی که براش اشیاق داشتم نبود، به چه دلیل؟ در ادامه میگم:
کتاب متشکل از ۳ بخش هستش و هر بخش کلی جستار چند صفحه‌ای داره. بخش اول به نام «تباهی ارزش جان آدمی» بیشتر شامل یه سری خاطرات و اتفاق‌های ناراحت‌کننده ابتدای دوره بلشویک‌هاست و به نظرم نویسنده دوست داره تو این بخش تاکید کنه که نباید فکر کنیم فقط استالین یه موجود خونخوار وحشتناک بوده، خیلی‌های دیگه از رفقا از جمله جناب لنین هم همچین معصوم نبوده و اتفاقا اوایل استالین خیلی از ایده‌ها رو از لنین گرفته بوده و سعی میکرده با مکتب فکری لنین اونا رو توجیه کنه.
بخش دوم اصل قضیه هستش و در مورد خود استالین از حدودهای زمان جوانی تا مرگ رو شامل میشه و خب بیشتر شامل یه سری اتفاق‌های ناراحت‌کننده و آزاردهنده میشه (هسته اصلی این بخش هم برمیگرده به سولژنیتسین و کتاب معروفش مجمع‌الجزایر گولاگ). بخش سوم هم که به نظرم یه تکه بی‌نظم و مزخرف هست که نویسنده سعی کرده هرچی به ذهنش میاد رو روی کاغذ بیاره از جمله مکاتبه با چند مارکسیست، بحث با پدرش و چندتا خاطره از خودش!
حالا چرا این کتاب ناامیدم کرد چون یک روند پیوسته و مرتب و حتی داستانی نداشت. یک مجموعه مقاله یا جستار بود که میشد توی یه سایت یا وبلاگ عرضه بشه. مساله دیگه اینکه انگار نویسنده این کتاب رو جمع کرده که پاسخی به بعضی از دوستان و همکاران و از همه مهم‌تر پدرش بده که در جوونی سمت چپ ایستاده بود برای همین یه جاهایی خیلی شخصی میشه و برای من خواننده جذابیتی نداره.
این کتاب رو نمیشه به عنوان یه مرجع تاریخی روسیه و حتی مرجع زندگی استالین خوند ولی اگر قبلش چندتا کتاب جامع و زندگی استالین رو خونده باشید با خوندن هر بخش این کتاب یه سری چراغ‌ها روشن میشه و با خودتون میگید: آهان!
چی در این کتاب برای من جالب بود؟ نویسنده آشنایی خوبی با منابع مختلف در مورد شوروی داره (چه بعد تاریخی چه ادبیاتی) برای همین با چندتا کتاب و نویسنده آشنا شدم که برای مطالعه آینده قطعا به دردم میخورده. دوم اینکه مجموعه عکس‌های داخل کتاب از استالین در دوره‌های مختلف برای من خیلی جذاب بود و اون حدود سی چهل‌تا عکس خیلی دید خوبی به آدم میده. البته به نظرم انتخاب تصویر روی جلد با اینکه مرتبط با استالین هست خیلی با مضوع کتاب و مطالب داخلش همخوانی نداره، برعکس تصویر روی جلد اصلا با کتاب گوگولی روبه‌رو نخواهید بود
در مورد ترجمه هم خب من خیلی از ترجمه‌های قدیمی لذت نمیبرم و اینم مثل چندتا کتاب دیگه که از آقای کامشاد خوندم برام معمولی بود مخصوصا اینکه اسامی اشخاص و مکان‌ها بعضا طوری توی این کتاب اومده که با اون چیزی که در منابع جدید و مترجم‌های آشنا به زبان روسی دیده میشه، متفاوت هست.

[Manny · Rating 3 out of 5]

Amis on Stalin. Not a scholarly work, as many people have pointed out, and is it still necessary to debunk Stalin? But I thought it was a successful book. You think you know how bad Stalin was, but, in fact, most people don't. At least, I didn't, and I've read Solzhenitsyn.

My favorite part was the section on Stalin's incredible popularity. ("It's painful to write this", says Amis). He describes the belief, widely held by ordinary citizens, that Stalin was quite unaware of all the terrible things that were being done by his subordinates. He was living in the bubble, to use the modern idiom. People would wistfully say that, if only he knew, he'd surely take steps to fix it.

Stalin being popular with the Russians... it defies the imagination, but apparently it was true. You can see that Orwell was just reporting what he saw.

[Peter Tillman · Rating 5 out of 5]

Martin Amis's "Koba the Dread" is his personal account of Stalin the mass-murdering monster, and of the obstinate blindness and stupidity of Western intellectuals who continued to argue that, even if it had "problems," Soviet Communism had its heart in the right place, really.... Which Martin got to view firsthand, as Kingsley Amis's son -- his dad was an old CPUK comrade, turned virulently anti-communist in his old age.

Robert Conquest memorably began his history of Stalin's Terror-famine: "about 20 human lives were lost, not for every word, but for every letter in this book." Or around 320,000 dead for every letter in this little quote. Stalin's career total was at least 20 million people killed -- the vast majority Soviet citizens. For his revised edition of "The Great Terror" some years ago, Conquest suggested that his publisher retitle it "I Told You So, You Fucking Fools."

I never quite got the courage to read "The Great Terror", and in fact I repeatedly bogged down in Amis's "short course" on Stalin's monstrous career. This sort of thing is almost too awful to contemplate. So people make excuses, or just don't believe, or put off thinking about it. Well, "Me too." Amis notes how convenient it was for Stalin that "a true description of the Soviet Union *exactly* resembled a demented slander of the Soviet Union." Negative perfection!

Yet contemplate monsters we must, or we will suffer them again. Stalin was hardly an isolated figure. The 21st century has monsters, too. But best read in small doses.....

My 2005 review:
http://www.amazon.com/review/RYO407KC...

[Jovi Ene · Rating 5 out of 5]

Care a fost Răul Suprem, comunismul sau nazismul? O întrebare care s-a tot pus și totuși nimeni nu poate oferi un răspuns definitiv, pentru că atrocitățile au fost de neimaginat din partea ambelor mari rele ale secolului trecut. Martin Amis încearcă să se concentreze aici pe răul comunismului, pentru că, pe de o parte, consecințele și asasinatele comunismului au fost mai mereu considerate marginale de către Occident (e vorba totuși de peste 20 de milioane de oameni uciși de Stalin!), iar pe de altă parte tatăl său, Kinsley Amis, a fost un partizan fățiș al comunismului pentru o perioadă de peste 12 ani.
Așa că volumul „Koba cel cumplit” are două componente esențiale: una personală, în care autorul caută să găsească motive pentru care generația anterioară (inclusiv tatăl său) a considerat că răul venea doar dinspre nazism; alta documentară, istorică, în care este înfățișat concret, sincer, cu nenumărate exemple diavolești, felul în care Stalin și-a construit un regim criminal, malefic, care nu și-a dorit altceva decât stârpirea tuturor persoanelor, etniilor, popoarelor etc. care nu erau de acord cu el. Sau despre care avea el această părere. O perioadă de zeci de ani în care poporul rus a trăit sub o amenințare continuă, de care poate nu a scăpat nici acum. Într-un exemplu, Martin Amis spune despre un prieten rus exilat că nu putea să doarmă, nici după mutarea în Anglia, până nu vedea primele semne ale zorilor. Avea nevoie „să fie absolut sigur că n-o să vină după el în timpul nopții”.
#recomand

[Titi Coolda · Rating 5 out of 5]

O meta-analiză asupra Răului( dictatură în general, comunism în special) într-o formulă literară marca Amis.

[Szplug · Rating 3 out of 5]

Amis is a fine writer, and the personal touches he brings to his recounting of the crimes committed by Stalin(ism)—more or less the musings about a family raised under the strong left leanings of his father, Kingsley, and the troubling political and ideological shoring-up they were forced to undertake as the murderousness of the Soviet regime began to crystalize with a definition that only the most fervent fellow-traveler could wish away—provide a principal ingredient of what makes this book worthwhile. As other reviews have pointed out, much that comprises Amis' revelations within about the brutal communist despotism conducted by the Georgian Maestro has been pinched from the historic writings of other authors, with a particular emphasis upon those of Alexander Solzhenitsyn. It might further be noted that Amis' anti-Stalinist—and hence Soviet—salvo, with its pronouncing upon the furious violence that so often attends revolution, that the latter gravitates towards devouring its progenitors, of the impositions, illusions, and sheer inhumanity inherent to any state-instituted cult of personality, was launched from the comfort of a perch occupied when nothing revealed was new, its purported targets not visible anywhere on the immediate horizon. And that would not be completely unfair. Yet, with all of that said, I felt that Amis' outraged tone (together with blackly humorous undertone) did justice to the material at hand, never allowing the reader—particularly the (former) leftist reader—to forget the appalling brutality that was visited upon millions of citizens during a period that combined technological and bureaucratic prowess with an ideological insanity.

[Robert · Rating 4 out of 5]

Nu se parcurge ușor această carte, dar nici să o abandonezi nu poți. Martin Amis își ține cititorul aproape, în ciuda informațiilor înfiorătoare transmise. Pentru mine nu a fost ceva nou, cunoșteam deja multe dintre ororile petrecute sub domnia lui Stalin și înaintea sa, dar au fost și multe informații noi. Poate fi citită de oricine, fiind o combinație de proză și istorie, o combinație chiar foarte reușită, neavând acel limbaj greoi al documentelor istorice.
Merită citită, în special pentru traducerea excepțională realizată de Radu Paraschivescu.
4,5/5

,,Întemeiat pe un hău de neadevăr, bolșevismul s-a dedicat carierei de falsitate ieftină, atingând neveridicitatea universală și ideală sub Stalin.’’

Pag. 289

[Michael · Rating 1 out of 5]

[First, a note about Goodreads star ratings: Some people on Goodreads don't really "get" the one-star review. A single star means simply that for whatever reason, you didn't like a book. That's all. Not that you hated it, not that you loathed it—a single star is not a black hole of antipathy—but just a note that a book didn't satisfy you in some deeper sense. It's not an objective rating of quality, but all about subjective response. So when I give a book one star, it's not that I think I'm speaking for the entirety of western readership. It's just me, saying I didn't care for a book.]

I originally posted a brief rating of this book years ago, and some asshat responded by attacking me and my tastes. That review has disappeared—don't remember whether I deleted it or whether one of the Goodreads librarians took down the comment threat. Regardless, considering that I'd pretty much skimmed the second half of the book back in 2004, I thought it worth rereading the book to see if my feelings about it had changed. And they haven't.

Look, I love Martin Amis. I do. I think his best books partake of all kinds of genius, among them a first-rate analytical mind and a nimble writerly voice capable of linguistic hijinks as well as emotional subtleties. But I felt that Koba the Dread was a chore six years ago, and I still feel that way.

The gist of the book is this: Not enough is made of the nearly incomprehensible horrors of Bolshevism, first in its Leninist incarnation and then in the refined-in-terms-of-killing-the-populace-form that was Stalinism. We all know of the death camps of the Third Reich, and can even name them with some knowledge of what happened there. We've all seen Schindler's List. But there is not an equivalent awareness of the horrors that transpired in Russia after the revolution of 1917.

In large part, Amis's book functions as a gloss on the atrocities of the era. The scholarship here is impeccable—he's ransacked whole shelves of Soviet camp literature and histories to put together this 280 page march of misery. It's horrifying stuff. I read the first Gulag Archipelago in high school, along with One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovitch, and that is as nothing to the full roster of ugliness laid out in this book. Amis conveys it all in a cool burn, his fury held barely in check but always sensed in the extremities of the writing. (His stylistic tics, present in all of his novels, are at their worst when he is feeling righteous. The self-conscious effects sometimes almost draw attention away from the things he is writing about.)

So far, so good. There are fatter books that cover the same material—his family friend Robert Conquest is one of the main authorities, as well as Solzhenitsyn and too many others to list here. Those books opt for a different tone, trusting that the facts and accounts will suffice to get the horror across. But maybe Amis's book will reach a wider audience, and maybe that's why he wrote it.

But I don't know that I believe that. And I guess it is Amis's reasons for writing the book that bothered me the most. Who is he writing this for? Who is he attacking? Because the book feels like a sustained attack on some strawman apologist for the Soviet Union who hasn't existed since the mid-eighties. Back then, in the eighties, I worked in USC's Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures, and even then, the depredations of the Soviet Union were pretty well documented. The number dead were estimated to be about 15 million back then, but as the Soviet Union fell and more records were released, the numbers steadily climbed upward. And the silences that met these accounts were those of people horrified to a place beyond words. Hard to know how to respond, but at any rate, by the turn of the millennium, the horrors were pretty well known. And no one was standing as the champion for that old regime that murdered its populace.

So who is this book for? There is a troubling bit of "memoir" appended to this book, an open letter to Christopher Hitchens taking him to task for his romantic attachments to the old Soviet Union. And perhaps that is who this is for—perhaps it is a settling of scores of an ill-considered intellectual stance held by Amis's dear friends.

But I don't know that that is reason enough for this book, and I don't know that it is an appropriate use of the twenty million dead (more). Amis's cataloging of the horrors is infallible; it's the reason behind it that made me uncomfortable, then and now.

So: one star. I didn't like it. I respect it, but I didn't like it then, and I didn't like it upon rereading it.

[William · Rating 4 out of 5]

I enjoy a good laugh as much as the next fella but I didn't laugh as much at the 20 million as much as the cover suggested I would. Sure there was some silliness in the tying of human beings to logs and kicking them down several flights of stairs, and there was a bit of mirth in locking a man up in a closet full of thousands of bedbugs so that he is devoured to near death by vermin. And if "Jackass" has taught us nothing, it's that laughter can always be elicited by peeing in a man's mouth while he's down (in this book it helps to torture him first. Amis as usual has to take things one step further than Johnny Knoxville.) The funniest parts of the book had more to do with the men behind those 20 million than the 20 million themselves.
There was this guy they called Lenin and in a funny sort of way he said of his country's intellectuals "they're not its brains. They're its shit." It's a good line, worthy of a tweet. It makes me think of the so called intellectuals of the good ol' USA.
Gulag is a funny word. Goooolog. Ha-ha! It makes me chuckle just typing it. It turns out, however it wasn't a very funny place. All sorts of things happen in a gulag but mostly they had a "no clowning" policy.
There was though this Stalin character, he was central to all the laughter. Sometimes one gets the impression he was the only one in on the joke. He laughed at things that make most people cry. Strange man.
I think that he was caught up in a bit of what they call delusional thinking. Upon a cliff was written the words:
GLORY TO STALIN, THE GREATEST GENIUS OF MANKIND. (But this is before the reader could have met that fellow who invented the machine that distributes our tweets.)
GLORY TO STALIN, THE GREATEST MILITARY LEADER. (But this is before the reader could have met that fellow who had war in Iraq and in Afghanistan all while having an affair with his biographer.
GLORY TO STALIN, THE GREATEST LEADER OF THE INTERNATIONAL PROLETARIAT. (I don't know what this means. When I find these people I will ask them who their greatest leader is and if it's Stalin I will apologize to the Stalin estate.)
GLORY TO STALIN, THE BEST FRIEND OF WORKERS AND PEASANTS. (Now, I know this isn't true. Most workers and peasants I know prefer the company of Anheuser-Busch, Jim Beam and Adolph Coors to that of Stalin.
If Stalin believed all of them capital letters that was on the cliff then it is no wonder he was no fun to be around. He had such little perspective. But he was a little man so maybe it makes sense.
At the end of it all I found that I don't laugh at the death of millions as much as I used to. Maybe our sense of humor matures with age, maybe one day Martin Amis will learn this as well.
This book is for: Proletariat peoples, people who like to laugh at mass murder, people who dig paranoiacs.

*In all seriousness, this was a great read. Amis's personal touch and connection with the material made this book very hard to put down. I borrowed my copy from a friend though, and if this were Soviet times I would use the notes he wrote in the margins as proof that he is at heart a Trotskyite and I would have him shot, because this is just the kind of friend I am. #dontputitinwriting

[Len · Rating 4 out of 5]

The book appears to have been written because of the author's anger at what he believed was the flippant approach intellectuals and academics of his father's generation, and which included his father, those who had been won over to communism in the 1930s, had towards the terrifying violence and lack of humanity within Stalin's mentality. Their laughter and chuckles when they reminisced over their younger days as Party members and the complete absence as older men of any recognition of what barbarities they had supported certainly forced their way under Martin Amis' skin.

Amis guides the reader through atrocity after sickening atrocity, using the works of Robert Conquest and Alexander Solzhenitsyn - and others - as evidence. It is disturbing and viscerally upsetting most of the time, which is perhaps the book's weak point. A little like watching a diet of terrorist and war barbarities on television news, repetition turns revulsion into an acceptance of "that's the way the world is." So with Amis' book. If one allows that Stalin was simply evil the text will affirm your belief and will not add to it while, if you follow Vlad the Putin's perverted views and believe it is all anti-Soviet propaganda the repeated cruelties and gruesomeness will probably sound more and more like storytelling for emotional and political effect.

While Koba the Dread: Laughter and the Twenty Million is a truthful book about an evil man it is written with such a sense of strenuous righteousness and a duty to inform a misdirected world that it ends up dulling the edge of its own mission. Still worth a read though it may not convert many hero-worshipping Stalinists.

[Mahya danesh · Rating 4 out of 5]

حدودا یکسال یا شاید بیشتر هم بشه که سراغ کتاب هایی درباره شوروی ،رهبران و تاریخش نرفتم ،قبلش اتفاقا نزدیک یکسال یا بیشتر برای همین موارد وقت گذاشتم ولی حس کردم از یه جایی خسته شدم و بین سیر مطالعاتیم وقفه انداختم تا اینکه این ماه مجدد دوتا کتاب در این حوزه خوندم که یکیش همین کتاب بود.
استالین از اون شخصیت هاییه که من زیاد سراغش میرم زیاد درموردش میخونم و هربار یه بعد جدید از شخصیت این ادم رو کشف میکنم .اگه حوزه مورد علاقه ام روانشناسی سیاسی بود حتما روی شخصیت استالین کار میکردم فردی که از یه گذشته نه چندان جالب به اوج قدرت میرسه تا جایی که حکم مرگ یا زندگی ادم ها رو با یه پلک زدن تعیین میکنه.اگه بخوایم به تعداد انگشت های دست فرد مستبد،دیکتاتور و خون ریز بشماریم حتما استالین اون بالا بالاها و توی صدر جدول دیده میشه به نظرم .اصلا یه چیزی میگم یه چیزی میشنوی .حتی توی یه کتاب خوندم در بین رهبران خون ریز بهش جایگاه دوم رو داده بودن .
به هرحال این کتاب هم درباره اعمال مخوف این فرد میگه .نکته ای که هست اینه که من ابتدای کتاب یکم سخت ارتباط گرفتم و حس کردم با ترجمه اش راحت نیستم اما از اواسط تا اواخر دیگه باهاش مانوس شدم و خوندنش سرعت گرفت . از اونجایی هم که قبلا چندتا کتاب درمورد این شخصیت خوندم باید بگم خیلی از کارهایی رو که برشمرد میدونستم مخصوصا در ارتباط با فرزندانش اما بازم یه چیزایی بود که بعد از خوندن این کتاب بهش رسیدم و باید یکم صحتش رو بررسی کنم .
راستش کتاب متن سخت و ثقیلی نداره و برای کسی که صرفا یه خلاصه درمورد این شخص بخواد بدونه بد نیست هرچند کتاب های بهتری هم داریم اما نمیتونم به همه پیشنهادش کنم چون برخی جنبه های خوفناکی رو بررسی میکنه که شاید خوندنش برای بعضی ها چندان خوشایند نباشه .

[Muhammad Ahmad · Rating 2 out of 5]

This is a book about Stalin's reign of terror that, unlike Orwell, is unsparing towards Lenin and Trotsky as well. The author wonders why people are revolted by Nazism, but Stalinism gets such an easy pass. Indeed, it is common in the west for Soviet nostalgia among intellectuals to not be considered an evil on par with Nazi sympathies. Many young people equally ignorant of Soviet history see communism as an edgy, aesthetic affectation. This book would be useful in disabusing them of such romanticising. It would be, if it weren't for the author. The book is useful as a compendium of extant writings on soviet history. Many good quotations. But every time the author's voice intrudes, you feel clutched by the clammy hands of pretension and inauthenticity. If you remove the author's turgid interventions, it may even be a good book. But there is too much of the author in here, and the author, alas, is insufferable.

[Stela · Rating 3 out of 5]

Whenever I hear the name Stalin I think of Solzhenitsyn, and his Gulag Archipelago, and from many stories that brought tears to my eyes and made me feel helpless outrage, one image always appears first in my mind: the stairs. Those stairs leading to an interrogatory room in Moscow, worn out by the prisoners’ steps.

Therefore, when I finished Koba the Dread I wondered what image will stay with me from Martin Amis’s book. And I’m afraid it is not much: some not very solid portrait of tyranny, some information about his father (the fact that Kingsley Amis was member of the Communist Party for 15 years, which I did not know, made me sad, for Lucky Jim is one of my all-time favourite novels) and some doubtful anecdote regarding his daughter nickname Butyrki (which stuck after a night where his daughter cried so much that he told his wife she sounded like a prisoner “in the deepest cellars of the Butyrki Prison in Moscow during the Great Terror”).

Tibor Fischer said somewhere, somehow maliciously, but nevertheless accurately, that Koba the Dread is nothing else that “the world's longest book review, with digressions on his family holidays and his mate, The Hitch” and it is true that the most poignant stories are taken from Conquest's Great Terror and Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag Archipelago. Paradoxically, as Michiko Kakutani observes in an equally severe review, this is also the best feature of the book, the author “using his arsenal of literary skills to create a compelling narrative, summarizing vast amounts of information and presenting them in a lucid, accessible form”.

On the contrary, the weakest part, according to Neal Ascherson, concerns Stalin’s portrait, for he “fails to reconstruct a character out of the slimy bits he can feel”. He finishes his review with a sharp admonition I unfortunately agree with :

“At the end, Amis challenges the two men who mean so much to him. He asks Hitchens: do you admire Lenin's and Trotsky's terror, which made Stalin possible? Even if they had created paradise, would you want to live in it at the price of 15 million lives? And to his father's shade: your emotional need to believe in the brotherhood of man, the possible Just City – don't you see that the joke is here, that ‘the breakdown, the ignobility, is inherent in the ideal’? Here Amis closes, in effect remarking that ‘you don't have to be mad to believe in liberty, fraternity and equality, but it helps’. It's inadequate for a book written to honour dead millions who, in spite of their grotesque betrayal, continued to hope against hope.”

[SA®A · Rating 3 out of 5]

توصیه می کنم اگر روحیه ای حساس و اعصابی شکننده دارید،به این کتاب نزدیک نشوید!چرا که حاوی توصیفات و اسناد و آمار فجایع تکان دهنده ی انسانیست!
____________________

در معرفی این اثر(استالین مخوف:خنده و بیست میلیون)نوشته ی (مارتین ایمیس) و ترجمه ی (حسن کامشاد )،شاید اشاره به نوشته ی روی جلد،کافی باشد
:

استالین مخوف , درباره کمونیسم شوروی و خیال واهی آرمان شهری است . درباره لاس زدن روشنفکران کشورهای غربی - و بعضی جاهای دیگر - با توهمی است که تجسد راستین آن دست کم بیست میلیون شهروند اتحاد شوروی و به احتمالی سد میلیون تن را در سراسر جهان به کشتن داد.


:بخش هایی از کتاب

گروسمن می نویسد : در روستاها ، در خانواده ها ، مادران کودکانشان را می نگریستند و از ترس جیغ می زدند.انگار ماری به خانه شان خزیده است.این مار،قحطی،گرسنگی و مرگ بود.این مار استالین بود.بچه ها ابتدا تمام روز برای غذا می گریستند.سپس تمام شب نیز می گریستند بعضی از پدر و مادرها از دست اطفالشان گریختند.دیگران فرزندانشان را به شهرها بردند و آنجا رها کردند.
ص166

***

ده اکتبر 1937
وقتی می بینم مردم چنین خونسرد می گویند:او را کشتند،دیگری را کشتند،کشتند،کشتند،حال تهوع گلویم را می فشارد.این کلمات...در هوا طنین می اندازنذ.مردم راحت و آرام این کلمات را بر زبان می آورند،انگار بگویند:"فلانی رفت سینما"...ا

بیست و دو اکتبر 1937
بامداد بیست و دوم ماه حدود ساعت سه از خاب پریدم و دیگر خابم نبرد.تا مدتی بعد از ساعت پنج...ناگهان صدای رگبار تیر شنیدم و سپس ده دقیقه بعد،رگبار دیگری.صدای شلیک تیر پشت سر هم می آمد.تا اندکی پس از پنج...این را می گویند مبارزه انتخاباتی.هشیاری ما چنان کرخ شده که شور و هیجان بر سطح سخت و صیقلی می لغزد و هیچ اثری برجا نمی گذارد.تمام شب صدای تیرباران مردم،مردم بی شک بی گناه را می شنویم و دیوانه نمی شویم و بعد دوباره به خاب می رویم.می خابیم و انگار نه انگار که اتفاقی افتاده است.چه وحشتناک...ا
ص 228/229

***
چیزهایی که استالین می گفت خنده دار بود.کارهایی که استالین می کرد ،هیچ خنده نداشت.

ص 232

[Alberto · Rating 3 out of 5]

Cuando era niño, todavía me tocó escuchar algunos de los argumentos en defensa de Stalin (y de Lenin, y de Trotsky, y de la Unión Soviética y de la idea de la revolución) que Martin Amis combate, en general con éxito, en este libro. A estas alturas es imposible negar los horrores y los millones de muertes de las que Stalin fue responsable durante su largo "reinado" en la URSS..., pero, a la vez, muchas personas desconocen por completo este capítulo espantoso, y por lo mismo crucial, de la historia del siglo XX. Éste es un buen libro para conocer los detalles esenciales, aunque Amis supone que su lector tiene al menos una idea básica de quiénes son los protagonistas de los episodios históricos que recuerda, así como del orden en que éstos ocurrieron (por supuesto le interesa menos la precisión de su condena que la contundencia).

Las numerosas referencias autobiográficas que Amis inserta en el texto son, en el mejor, de los casos melodramáticas, y la personalidad de su máscara literaria es sumamente desagradable. Sin embargo, incluso las personas orientadas políticamente hacia la izquierda (es mi caso) harían bien en leer los testimonios que Amis ofrece, y señaladamente la historia de personajes como Varlam Shalamov; lo peor que puede hacerse es tolerar, como hacen tantos políticos de todas las tendencias, la hipocresía y el silencio. Y más todavía si se está en desacuerdo (yo lo estoy) con muchas de las conclusiones de Amis en relación con la naturaleza humana y la derecha realmente existente. Éste es, en fin, uno de esos libros incómodos, dolorosos y necesarios.

[Stewart Home · Rating 1 out of 5]

Martin Amis is a man in trouble. He gets big advances for his books, but in the UK he is overshadowed by the popularity of younger writers such as Irvine Welsh. Amis is thus under pressure to maximise his media profile as a means of moving product. Hardly surprising then that Amis should frame his absurdly late denunciation of Stalin as a snub to his ‘friend’ Christopher Hitchens; public spats being peculiarly popular with UK newspapers. As a publicity stunt this manoeuvre worked well enough, generating widespread coverage in the press; but the book has been ridiculed by historians. The manufactured row with Hitchens serves both to illuminate and obscure the curious phenomenon of celebrities existing as a reification of what it is to be human. Koba The Dread tells us far more about Amis than it does about Stalin. Koba is not a revisionist history; it consists of fragments of cold war propaganda strung together by a gibbering idiot. Taking his cue from Robert Conquest - a former advisor to Margaret Thatcher - Amis equates each of his words with the dead of Stalinist terror: ‘In these pages, guileless prepositions like at and to each represent the murder of six or seven large families.’ Rather than adding gravity to a risible book, this cynical ploy illustrates that what an airhead like Amis writes is ultimately without weight. Amis speaks with a corpse in his mouth, and so inevitably the dead become ballast for his depleted prose. It is impossible to list all the things Amis gets wrong, although a scan through the more objective reviews will give an inkling of the book’s inaccuracies.

Read the whole review here: http://www.stewarthomesociety.org/pol...

[Erik Graff · Rating 3 out of 5]

It is unfortunate that Vintage lists this as "Memoir/History" as it isn't history in any serious sense. Amis is no historian. While indexed, the book lacks both bibliography and substantiating footnotes. Amis' primary sources as cited in the text, lean, as he admits, to the right.

The book is, however, partly a personal memoir and mostly an polemical essay or series of essays attacking the Soviet system in general and Stalin in particular. On the personal side, it is interesting that Amis is an old friend of Christopher Hitchens. Not knowing that until he mentioned it, Amis' style reminded me of Hitchens': clever and opinionated, if not so learned. (Now what would be really interesting would have been a book of Amis and Hitchens arguing about Communism given that Amis has no real investment while Hitchens had Trotskyist roots).

That said, it is a well-written essay, a quick read. Amis actually does manage to evoke dark chuckles as he recounts the terrors of the Soviet system without making light of the suffering. Indeed, he bludgeons the reader with tales of terror and suffering, enough perhaps to make even a diehard apologist take note and pursue a modern history of the subject.

[Hossein · Rating 3 out of 5]

با خوندن این کتاب و کتاب هایی نظیر مجمع الجزایر گولاگ کاملا متوجه میشه آدم که حزب کمونیست شوروی به مراتب جنایتکار تر از نازی ها بوده

[Peterb · Rating 4 out of 5]

"It was...a symmetrical convenience – for Stalin – that a true description of the Soviet Union exactly resembled a demented slander of the Soviet Union."

Martin Amis opens his very personal history of Josef Stalin, Koba the Dread: Laughter and the Twenty Million with a quote from Robert Conquest's book on the the Terror-Famine.

"...

We may perhaps put this in perspective in the present case by saying that in the actions here recorded about twenty human lives were lost for, not every word, but every letter, in this book.

That sentence represented 3,040 lives. The book is 411 pages long."

Amis belongs to a particular literary circle that is more inbred than the most backward hillbilly clans in Appalachia. They self-congratulate, they self-promote, they review each others' books, and they never seem to tire of writing about the 1980s in London. One must always approach anything by this clique with caution, as if engaging a drunk at a party, because you never know when they will ambush you with tiresome insider rubbish. One moment you'll be engaged in sparkling repartee about Sir Richard Burton's Arabian Nights, and then suddenly you're listening to a pointless ramble about the time James Fenton got really drunk and threw up on the doorstep of The New Statesman, and you have to start looking for excuses to leave the party. I completely fabricated this example — but if you've read any of their works you know that it might have been true.

I am willing to forgive Amis his lapses into inside baseball. Why? Because his sentences are beautiful. Because he is a compelling prose stylist. And because you can recognize his writing from just a few sentences.

"But that is want they want, the believers, the steely ones, that is what they live for: the politicization of sleep. They want politics to be going on everywhere all the time, politics permanent and circumambient. They want the ubiquitization of politics; they want the politicization of sleep."

I approached Koba the Dread with some trepidation also because the reviews of it in the mainstream British literary press were so universally tepid, and surprisingly negative. Now, with the benefit of having read the book, one can see the level to which the criticisms are not political, or even literary, but personal. Certainly one might forgive this of the late Christopher Hitchens, since after all Amis includes a chapter written to him in the book, and — gently but directly — indicts him. When punched, it's fair game to punch back. But this excuse doesn't extend to those such as Johann Hari (am I allowed to be publicly amused at his fall from grace?) who mix valid criticism of the work (Amis interpreting Stalin's crimes from a personal perspective come off as somewhat lightweight) with purely personal ad hominem (of course Amis' book isn't any good, because Hari didn't like his father.)

"I was in my late twenties when I first realized–the moment came as I read a piece about Islam in the TLS– that theocracies are meant to work. Until then I thought that repression, censorship, terror and destitution were the price you had to pay for living by the Book. But no, that wasn't the idea at all: Koranic rule was meant to bring you swimming pools and hydrogen bombs. Collectivization, similarly, was meant to work. Stalin had earlier expressed doubts about the "Left-deviation" (i.e., extremely doctrinaire) attitude to the peasantry: its policies, he said, would "inevitably lead to ... a great increase in the price of agricultural produce, a fall in real salaries and an artificially produced famine." And his preparations for Collectivization, in the initial burst, were frivolously lax. Yet Stalin believed that Collectivization would work Collectivization would astonish the world. This was a Stalinist rush of blood. And that is how Stalinism is perhaps best represented: as a series of rushes of blood."

Other criticisms of the work center around the choice of topic ("Who, today, are the Stalinists who must be denounced?") and the appropriateness of Amis as the writer. Amis relies heavily on the works of Robert Conquest, whose book The Great Terror
remains the most encyclopedic treatise on the topic. Why not just read Conquest?

Amis himself is not coy about his credentials: he presents himself as a novelist who has read "several yards of books about the Soviet experiment." He does not pretend to be Robert Conquest, but rather someone writing a book that summarizes and distills the horrors that he's read about and tries to grapple with certain questions. Among them, why were so many seemingly otherwise intelligent Westerners seduced into sympathizing with the Soviet experiment in the face of the pile of corpses it produced? Why can people so easily joke about Communism, when it is so much more difficult, comparatively speaking, to joke about Nazism? And why, in world where the name Stalin is only somewhat less reviled than the name Hitler, do people still speak admiringly of Lenin and Trotsky ("a nun-killer", opines Amis), who were no less brutal in their aims, albeit more limited in their capabilities?

"Some prominent comrade further remarked that only then, when Communism ruled the earth, would the really warm work of class struggle be ready to begin....And I instantly pictured a scorpion stinging itself to death. Scorpions have of course been known to do this–when surrounded by fire, for example. But where is the fire, on a Communist planet? It is a fire in the self. It is self-hatred and life-hatred. After all, the scorpion has an excellent "objective" reason for killing the scorpion: it's alive, isn't it?"

The central part of Koba the Dread is concerned with the events leading up to the Great Terror, including the numerous famines and the Party machinations that resulted in Stalin taking power. Amis makes the argument that this became inevitable years before, around the time of the Kronstadt rebellion when the Bolsheviks realized that they did not, in fact, have any meaningful support among the workers they claimed to represent. Kronstad made it clear, even to Lenin, that World Revolution was not about to happen. And so the Bolsheviks decided that if the People weren't going to support the revolution, than the Party itself would have to safeguard it. By murdering the People the revolution was on behalf of, if necessary. The Party, in other words, became its own raison d'être, and from this point some result similar to the Terror became inevitable. Although Stalin did manage to be truly impressive in his brutality. To quote Amis, "when Stalin wished for a death, then that wish came true."

This core of the book is shocking to anyone whom, like me, was not acquainted with the breadth and depth of human misery the Great Terror encompassed. As Amis observes, all of us would say we feel that the Holocaust was "worse" than the Terror. But if called to account for this based strictly on numbers and the horror of personal stories, I think any of us would be hard-pressed to reduce that feeling to a cogent and consistent explanation. From that perspective, I think that Koba the Dread is an important book. It takes a topic that I would be willing to wager most Westerners simply don't know much about and distills it into an emotional blow that can be absorbed, and that will leave the reader thinking for days.

Wrapped around this core are some of Amis' personal recollections - the death of his sister Sally, some struggle understanding his father's move from a dedicated Communist to that of a dedicated right-winger, and all of this wrapped up with not a little guilt about his many happy years running in a social circle that was (and, honestly, still is) all too happy to make excuse after excuse for the Soviet experiment, despite the piles of corpses. While I understand Amis' need to provide a framework to hang the core upon, it does, in my opinion, weaken the work somewhat. It may have been cathartic for him to create that frame, but next to the edifice of Soviet dead, any such frame will appear trivial at best, and petty at worst.

Despite my reservations about the framing, I think that Koba the Dread is still an important work, and one whose importance will only become apparent some years from now - after the cocktail party clique grows old and is forgotten, and what remains is an exploration into the depths of pain and degradation into which ideology can drag us.

[Katie.dorny · Rating 4 out of 5]

Part memoir and part mind boggling account of the career and life of Stalin and his contemporaries.

Amis rightly has a reputation for incredibly convoluted language, so have a dictionary to hand.

Otherwise it’s a brilliant analysis and research on the Great Terror.

[Phillip Fuller · Rating 5 out of 5]

Martin Amis knew people including his father who supported the Soviet Union and this book is for them. The Soviet Union is portrayed as a totalitarian state that destroyed all dissent and perceived threats with sheer brutality. The main perpetrator is Joseph Stalin who expanded on Lenin And Trotsky's work to create this empire of repression. Stalin believed that death was the answer to all problems and you saw it all over the Soviet Union. Martin Amis makes his case by citing Vasily Grossman, Dmitri Volkgonov, and other dissidents who saw Stalinism in action. Many died in manmade famines, gulags, and at the hands of the secret police. All of this I have read of before but Amis goes further by blaming Stalin's not taking Hitler seriously for many deaths in the Great Patriotic War. What Stalinism's greatest crime in this book is the hypocrisy of a regime that promised a worker's state but gave them exploitation and death.

[Edmond Dantes · Rating 4 out of 5]

Regolamento di conti in famiglia…. Marin prende qualche catasta di libri sul tema e inchioda non tanto Stalin, quanto la Intellighenzia che ha non solo tollerato, ma sostenuto, lodato, elogiato, servilmente adorato il tiranno georgiano (ma che alfine divenne il più russo degli zar), tra cui spicca il Padre, colpevole tra gli anni 30 e 40 di essere stato tra i Laudatores del Regime Sovietico insieme ad altri esponenti della Sinistra Britannica.
La Conta dei morti, non è rilevante, anche se fosse solo stato uno la disumanità del regime ne sarebbe stata compromessa;
Interessante potrebbe essere una simile analisi in salsa italiana… chiunque riuscisse a trovare l’archivio della Unità di Togliatti degli anni 40 a 50 non farebbe fatica a trovarvi il gotha intellettuale Italiano, impegnato a lodare l’umanissimo Giuseppe Stalin, l’uomo di ferro….

[Andrés Cabrera · Rating 3 out of 5]

Martin Amis se ha fajado un buen relato a propósito de Stalin. Más que una biografía, el autor construyó una serie de semblanzas y episodios que de alguna manera pretenden dar cuenta del carácter del dictador georgiano. Digamos que su premisa inicial es contundente: Iósif Vissariónovich, que bien quiso denominarse "Koba" en su infancia y juventud, también fue posteriormente Stalin, el "hombre de acero". Esta entrada resulta interesante: marca de antemano el carácter difuso y ambivalente de Iósif. Si bien este pretendió ser un héroe ruso, tal como "Koba", personaje de historietas de la época, una vez lo fue castigó a todos con su pulso de acero y sus acciones genocidas. Muy rápidamente, esta vendría a ser la entrada de Amis. En esas primeras 100-120 páginas, el libro tiene un ritmo trepidante; al tiempo que se ciñe a una narración más o menos cronológica de la vida de Iósif Vissariónovich; eso sí, marcada por los episodios y semblanzas que el propio Amis considera evidentes del carácter del dictador. En este punto, el libro es sólido y oscila entre lo expositivo y lo argumentativo: cada semblanza e instantánea que capta Amis le permita formular un argumento que más o menos se desarrolla.

El problema, tal vez, está en su segunda parte. Una vez conocemos a Koba y a Stalin, Amis se ciñe a la narración de episodios más que de rasgos o atributos del dictador. Esto no está mal, de hecho, es esperable y bien recibido; ahora bien, el problema está en que lentamente Amis va filtrando la inquina que destruye la complejidad de su tesis inicial: que Stalin y Koba sean dos partes de ese ser caprichoso, megalómano y sin respeto por la vida que es Iósif Vissariónovich, termina por desdibujarse en una caricatura de un dictadorzuelo más bien sacado de "El otoño del patriarca" -librazo, por cierto-. En este punto, la ficción empieza a colarse cada vez más en el relato sustentado y estudiado de Amis, quien hasta ese punto se ha valido de una vasta erudición de la obra de historiadores (Conquest, amigo personal suyo, Turner, entre otros) y literatura testimonial (Solhenitzin, sobre todo). Su libro se llena de supuestos y aseveraciones llenas de inquina, de un anticomunismo que si bien para la época es entendible, trastoca la lectura y el devenir mismo del libro. Por momentos, su repudio es tan marcado que el libro convierte a Stalin en una especie de "sublime negativo"; esto es, un ser que por su repulsión e inhumanidad eclipsa el juicio y resulta fascinante a los ojos del investigador (Amis).

Ya Adorno, a quien Amis menciona de pasada en la primera parte de su obra, recordaba los peligros que una lectura caricaturizada de la barbarie podía tener en las personas que, externos a ella, buscasen comprenderla. Sea por banalidad o por reificación del mal, diría Todorov, debe situarse a la barbarie en su "justo medio"; es decir, en su justa proporción para prevenir sus males, propagación y emergencia. Por desgracia, Amis cae apabullado ante Stalin y su violencia: tanto que, sobre todo en cartas que dan cierre al relato, se muestra un ejercicio grotesco y preocupante de proyección respecto al drama de las víctimas. Sobre esto último, bien valdría recordar la advertencia de Primo Levi, aquel que Amis menciona en un fragmento fugaz a propósito del cine y los rusos que liberaron Auschwitz: "hablo en el lenguaje mesurado del testigo; en vez del lenguaje apasionado de la víctima" (estoy parafraseando a Levi de memoria. Esta frase pueden encontrarla desarrollada en el inicio del Apéndice de 1976 a "Si esto es un hombre"). Si Levi, quien fue víctima de los oprobios de Auschwitz, reconoce que existió una barbarie última que él no conoció, de la que sólo puede hablar de oídas (se refiere a las cámaras de gas y la existencia de los musulmanes en términos experienciales), ¿quién es Amis para hablar de un horror que estuvo lejísimos de padecer? Que yo sepa, él no vivió nada del estalinismo. Conmoverse y proyectar son dos afecciones muy distintas: la primera, es necesaria de cara a la transformación política y el reestablecimiento de la vida dañada de las víctimas. La segunda, es peligrosa a más no poder.

Entre tanto, el escritor machaca a Stalin a partir de símiles cada vez más burdos: de "psicópata de masas"-que no digo que no lo sea- pasa a asimilarlo a un "simio" en virtud de sus acciones. Creo que precisamente el estudio de la barbarie requiere comprender muy bien la racionalidad instrumental que subyace a ella; por más que muchas de las acciones que se ejecuten puedan ser superficialmente tan sólo "animales", De hecho, apelar a la metáfora animal no es más que una forma burda de deshumanizar; cuando no de ocultar las verdaderas causas de la violencia límite. Y, cuando ya el libro se desgasta y el lector se encuentra un tanto apabullado entre las repeticiones y las babas espumeantes del escritor, surgen las dos cartas con las que cierra: la primera, dirigida a Hitchens (amigo, colega y confidente de discusión política de Amis). La segunda, a su propio padre. Y ahí vuelven dos conceptos fundamentales que a pesar de la cansina inquina de Amis hicieron que el libro alumbrase: el de la risa ante la desgracia de los 20 millones de asesinados por el régimen soviético y el de la negatividad.

En efecto, pareciera que el "principio de realidad" se trastocase constantemente en el régimen soviético, que más bien el plano material de la existencia se adecuó a la material que enuncia el concepto (y no a la inversa, como debía gestarse el proyecto comunista según Marx). Ahora bien, aquí ya no hay conceptos: hay "realpolitik" y el ejercicio del principio totalitario de la soberanía schmittiana en términos de amigos y enemigos". Este punto, quien Amis sugiere en varios apartes del libro, resulta fascinante y valdría la pena explorarlo mucho más. Respecto a la risa, a ese humor que cada tanto inunda las discusiones entre amigos orillados en mares políticos distintos, la incógnita de Amis es clave: ¿por qué reirse de Stalin y no de Hitler? ¿Qué hace que el primero sea objeto de humor y el segundo de repudio absoluto? Con esta pregunta, Amis sugiere que la barbarie estalinista, caprichosa y avasalladora, lleva a una inconmensurabilidad tal que nuestros afectos de cierto modo se ven desbordados. Ahora bien, en un ataque de dignidad política, el escritor recuerda que esto consuma el triunfo de Stalin: no se trata de que la muerte de un ser humano sea una tragedia y la de millones mera estadística. Por ello, el recuerdo de la violencia estalinista es fundamental: antes que risa, debería darnos repudio y cuestionarnos políticamente en el plano de la acción. O, más bien, en las bellas palabras de Amis:

"Stalin (...) dijo una vez que mientras que una muerte es una tragedia, un millón de muertes es simple estadística. La apódosis del aforismo es falsa: un millón de muertes es, como mínimo, un millón de tragedias. La próstasis en cambio es totalmente válida, pero nada más. En realidad, también todas las vidas son una tragedia. Todas las vidas se dirigen a la curva trágica" (Amis, 2002, pág. 291).

[Jonathan Maas · Rating 5 out of 5]

A Semi-biography of Stalin, concentrating less on the historical details, and more on a meta-analysis of the events themselves.

This was my first foray into the world of Martin Amis, and it was intense.

I read about him in the New Yorker recently, and quickly forgave myself for not having read him before. To quote Stephen King and many others - so many books so little time. If you find you've been oblivious to a great writer, forgive yourself, go to the library, get his or her work - and then move forward.

With this review I'll just pass on some insights -

There were subtle differences between Nazism and Stalinism - the softer difference was the humor

In the German case, laughter automatically absents itself. Pace Adorno, it was not poetry that became impossible after Auschwitz. What became impossible was laughter. In the Soviet case, on the other hand, laughter intransigently refuses to absent itself.

In short, you hear Communist jokes, even from Gorbachev himself. You don't hear Nazi jokes.

But all is not great in the world of Bolshevikism -

Stalinism, unlike Nazism, could be exported

Bolshevism was exportable, and produced near-identical results elsewhere. Nazism could not be duplicated. Compared to it, the other fascist states were simply amateurish.

Nazism was a one-off thing - of course it could rise again, and we must be wary, but it was a singular cult of personality that could be cast off, and it is a difficult formula to emulate.

Stalinism could be copied - as we can see in other countries, one even in the present day! Hopefully that will end soon.

Stalin also had more at his fingertips than Hitler

But Stalin, in the execution of the broad brushstrokes of his hate, had weapons that Hitler did not have. He had cold: the burning cold of the Arctic. “At Oimyakon [in the Kolyma] a temperature has been recorded of —97.8 F. In far lesser cold, steel splits, tyres explode and larch trees shower sparks at the touch of an axe. As the thermometer drops, your breath freezes into crystals, and tinkles to the ground with a noise they call ‘the whispering of the stars.’ ”ii He had darkness: the Bolshevik sequestration, the shockingly bitter and unappeasable self-exclusion from the planet, with its fear of comparison, its fear of ridicule, its fear of truth.jj He had space: the great imperium with its eleven time zones, the distances that gave their blessing to exile and isolation, steppe, desert, taiga, tundra. And, most crucially, Stalin had time.

Terrifying indeed.

In any case - other insights?

If there was one small smidgen of justice here, it's that Stalin's end was hastened by the lack of doctors

He had killed, imprisoned or exiled all the doctors at this point, and when he finally reached his end - his own doctors -

The doctors applied leeches—four behind either ear, contentedly and innocently sucking the bedbug’s blood. Magnesium sulfate was administered by enema and hypodermic.

His doctors applied leeches.

Of course, Stalin's end was not the end of his torment

At his funeral - many Russians died -

On the day of Stalin’s funeral vast multitudes, ecstatic with false grief and false love, flowed through Moscow in dangerous densities. When, in a tightening crowd, your movements are no longer your own and you have to fight to breathe, a simple and sorrowful realization asserts itself through your panic: that if death comes, it will be brought here by life, too much life, a superabundance of life. And what were they all doing there anyway—mourning him? On that day well over a hundred people died of asphyxiation in the streets of Moscow. So Stalin, embalmed in his coffin, went on doing what he was really good at: crushing Russians.

What was the cause of Stalin? This remains to be known

Amis theorizes it might be his first wife's passing. As far as his childhood goes -

Accounts of the childhoods of the great historical monsters are always bathetic. Instead of saying something like “X was raised by crocodiles in a septic tank in Kuala Lumpur,” they tell you about a mother, a father, a brother, a sister, a house, a home.

Stalin had an abusive childhood, but not exceptionally abusive. There was no smoking gun, perhaps just a series of steps, augmented by chance, history, biological psychopathy combined with an efficient work ethic. The perfect storm.

If there is one hero in this - it is Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

This is the one saving grace. Of course, we're grateful for Amis, as well as his hyper-rational friend Christopher Hitchens - as long as the world has Amis and Hitchens-types, we have a measure of rational safety.

But it's Solzhenitsyn, with his courageous documentation of the horrors of Stalinism that made Amis's works possible.

That might be the one saving grace here - no matter the monster, there will always be courageous humans that find a way to document everything, and tell us that the monster was wrong.

Regardless - great book by Martin Amis - I hope to read some of his fiction soon!

[Hamidreza_tr · Rating 5 out of 5]

استالین مخوف درباره کمونیسم شوروی و درباره لاس زدن روشنفکران ، هنرمندان و دانشمندان غربی چون جورج برنارد شاو، کریستوفر هیچنز، ماکسیم گورکی و ... با توهمی است که تجدد راستین آن دست کم بیست میلیون شهروند اتحاد شوروی و به احتمالی صد میلیون تن را در سراسر جهان به کشتن داد .پس این جنایت ، قصورش نه فقط به پای لنین و استالین بلکه به پای هنرمندان و روشنفکران حامی آن نیز نوشته می‌شود.
اما استالین مخوف درباره خیال واهی آرمانشهری نیز هست اما برای فهم این مسئله مهم وجود کمونیسم شوروی در تاریخ بشر امری اجتناب ناپذیر بود .همان طور که مارتین ایمیس در جایی از کتاب به آن اشاره می‌کند:
( انقلاب روسیه آزمونی بود که نژاد بشر ناگزیر در مرحله ای از تکاملش میبایست به جا می آورد - نتیجه منطقی تلاش تاریخی بشر برای عدالت اجتماعی و رفاقت و همقطاری)
پس انسان امروزی باید پذیرای آن باشد که به وجود آمدن آرمانشهر خیال واهی بیش نیست و جهان حیوانی که ما ناچاریم در آن بسر ببریم مکمل اجتناب ناپذیر تصور آدمیست. در واقع به گفته ایمیس سرنوشت بشر هرگز آن نبود که از مرگ ، رشک ، درد و شهوت بگریزد . شاید برای همین است که نقاش انگلیسی ویلیام بلیک وقتی خلقت آدم را تصویر میکند یک افعی گرد ران آدم حلقه زده است .

[Antonia · Rating 5 out of 5]

Stalin's "experiment." I am stunned. Hitler murdered 6 mil Jews and other assorted ""misfits" but Stalin "bested" that more than 3 times over. Now I am trying to understand why there is in Russia today, nostalgia for the "good ol' days." Who can explain this to me? I am re-reading this book because it is rich beyond words if one is to understand the Russian mind. Regarding the Ukraine, it was described as one "vast Belsen" in Stalin's day, so why the loyalty to Russia there today?

[Matin Pyron · Rating 4 out of 5]

کتاب روح ناآرام رو به هم میهنانم پیشنهاد می کنم که بخونیدش و هویداست که تاریخ، همیشه خودش رو تکرار می کنه و بزرگترین و مهم ترین کاری که می تونیم در حق کشور و دنیا انجام بدیم این هستش که از حکومت رانی انسان های خون خواری چون استالین جلوگیری کنیم

2581th Persian new year IRAN/TEHRAN
نوروز سال 2581 پارسی

[Francisco · Rating 4 out of 5]

¿Cómo aquilatar los horrores del estalinismo en menos de 300 páginas? ¿Y cómo conseguir que el lector sea consciente de la terrible experiencia que sufrió el pueblo ruso?
Martin Amis lo consigue en este libro que es un puñetazo a nuestra conciencia.

[Karen · Rating 4 out of 5]

Stalin was worse than I thought, and I knew he was bad. Why have so many excused or have forgotten?