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Koba the Dread: Laughter and the Twenty Million Martin Amis Alfred A. Knopf, 2002
As a boy, Joseph Stalin gave himself the nickname "Koba," after the hero in a popular novel took from the rich and gave to the poor. To this was later added "the Dread" - an appellation given in memory of Ivan the Terrible, "a recreational hands-on torturer," who was also called "Ivan the Dread," and to whom Amis says Stalin looked for inspiration during Stalin's Terror in the late 1930s.
This book's title Koba the Dread is thus unusual and provocative, in itself capturing much about Stalin, the subject of the essay. That is fitting, because the book as a whole - part intellectual memoir, part essay, part historical chronicle - is itself strikingly unusual. Told in the first person almost as though Amis had himself experienced the events he describes, the book manages to present horror on a personal, visceral level. And horror is indeed what it describes as it recounts the years of Lenin and Stalin, and the personalities who inhabited them.
From beginning to end, the essay reflects the highly literate background into which Martin Amis was raised. Even the best-read reader will often be sent scrambling for the dictionary. Combined with this background is his close personal connection both with the Communist Left and with a revulsion against Communism. Martin is the son of Kingsley Amis - a twentieth century literary figure of some prominence, as readers of this Journal will no doubt recall - who was active in the Communist Party from 1941 to 1956 and then, as did so many others, became an ardent anti-Communist. Robert Conquest, who has written the definitive histories of so...