Reviving the memory of 20 million victims: [All Edition]

Abstract

As in Amis' bestselling memoir, "Experience," his father, the equally well known British novelist Kingsley Amis who died in 1995, is present everywhere in this book. Amis the father was a Communist fellow traveler in the 1940s and 1950s who renounced his beliefs in the 1960s, becoming an outspoken conservative.

In "[Iosif Stalin] the Terrible: Short Course," the heart of the book, Amis dissects Stalin, "that fabulously overweening ignoramus," calling him "a passionate lowbrow whose personality was warping and cracking in the heat of power."

Readers won't find a coherent history here, and may be confused by Amis' peculiar literary approach. He moves back and forth in time, jumps from events to people and back again, and digresses often, irritatingly, in footnotes. Few of his reactions can compare, say, with the pathos, humor and nuance of the Soviet writers whom he quotes, whose experiences during the Stalin dictatorship leave an indelible impression.

Reviving the memory of 20 million victims

By REBECCA MARTIN EVARTS Special to the Journal Sentinel

Sunday, July 28, 2002

Koba the Dread: Laughter and the Twenty Million. By Martin Amis. Talk Maramax Books. 192 pages. $24.95.

Twenty million people were exterminated in the Soviet Union between 1917 and 1939, a figure that eclipses the 6 million who died in the Holocaust. These 20 million were shot in Bolshevik purges, tortured to death, starved under forced collectivization, felled by cold and exhaustion in the prison camps.

Yet, why even now is the scope of this slaughter comparatively unknown in the West? Why were Western intellectuals so slow to recognize Stalin's brutality?

Novelist and critic Martin Amis claims his authority to address these questions comes from having "recently read several yards of books about the Soviet experiment."

In this passionate, highly personal book, he invites us to accompany him as he ruminates about his reading, drawing principally on Solzhenitsyn and on Robert Conquest's "The Great Terror," and turning a novelist's eye for the dramatic and absurd on this bloody period.

"Perhaps there is a reasonable excuse for believing the Stalinist story," he notes. "The real story -- the truth -- was entirely unbelievable."

As in Amis' bestselling memoir, "Experience," his father, the equally well known British novelist Kingsley Amis who died in 1995, is present everywhere in this book. Amis the father was a Communist fellow traveler in the 1940s and 1950s who renounced his beliefs in the 1960s, becoming an outspoken conservative.

Martin Amis' grief over the death of his younger sister, Sally, in 2000 also informs his desire to remember the dead, whether two individuals or 20 million, as he explains in the two personal sections that begin and end the book.

In a highly idiosyncratic and non-linear fashion, Amis explores the differences between "The Little Mustache" (Hitler) and "The Big Mustache" (Stalin), wrestling with the shame and outrage that each inspires.

Nazism was marginally worse, he decides, because it "constituted a direct appeal to the reptile brain."

Koba was Iosif Stalin's self-anointed boyhood nickname.

In "Iosif the Terrible: Short Course," the heart of the book, Amis dissects Stalin, "that fabulously overweening ignoramus," calling him "a passionate lowbrow whose personality was warping and cracking in the heat of power."

We see him as a boy beaten by his parents in Georgia; with his two wives, whose relatives he subsequently had shot; attempting to rewrite history by executing those who knew the truth. "Stalin's feelings, as always, are written in crimson."

Readers won't find a coherent history here, and may be confused by Amis' peculiar literary approach. He moves back and forth in time, jumps from events to people and back again, and digresses often, irritatingly, in footnotes. Few of his reactions can compare, say, with the pathos, humor and nuance of the Soviet writers whom he quotes, whose experiences during the Stalin dictatorship leave an indelible impression.

Yet by raising a powerful voice against brutality and increasing our awareness of this terrible tragedy, Amis makes a contribution to the growing body of literature that chronicles man's inhumanity to man.

Freelance writer and editor Rebecca Martin Evarts lives in Yarmouth, Maine.

Credit: Special to the Journal Sentinel