MARTIN AMIS, WHO BEGAN as a journalist with The New Statesman in the early 1970s and then moved to the writing of novels, quickly established his reputation as keen observer of contemporary social and moral decay. His analyses were never tendentious: no reflexive blaming of all woes on the usual suspects of the left-liberal imagination. On the contrary, on big canvasses like those of London Fields (1989) and Information (1995) he told insistently how his characters managed to be the authors, the petty lapsed gods, of their own petty worlds of misery, or occasionally the originators and sustainers of such happiness as they possessed. He exhibited the courage, in London Fields, of attributing decency to a fellow, Guy Clinch, who also happened to be rich; of laying bare the stupidity and nihilism that kept Keith Talent, a lowlife, on the dole; he even had the temerity to make his prime femme, Nicola Six, a bitch. Character is fate, Amis is wont to declare with the sage Heraclitus, while choristers of multiculturalism, of feminism, and of rebuke (against everything normative or traditional), simultaneously and cacophonously deny it.
Amis has not withdrawn as a literary journalist and an essayist and as the biographer, of his late father, Kingsley Amis (1922-1995). While in his fiction he cultivates the comic or the satirical, in his nonfiction he tends toward the morally serious. This is the case with his new book. Koba the Dread: Laughter and the Twenty Million. The "Koba" of the title is Stalin, his revolutionary code name. The book treats of the massive blood-taint in the doctrine, Marxism-Leninism, that Stalin put murderously into effect over the twenty-five years of his reign; it is about the fact that men with revolutionary code names took over a good part of the world and dominated it in the middle, the long middle, of a century. Koba the Dread also examines the magnetic spell that Marxism-Leninism was to exert over Western intellectuals, who shouted hurrah over its imagined triumphs and who roundly, inveterately, either denied or justified its many homicidal predations.
Amis can write about this latter aspect of the phenomenon because his own father belonged to the British Communist Party for nearly two decades, experiencing his conversion back to normative conscience only after the at last undeniable brutality of the Kremlin's military suppression of the Hungarian revolt. The Amis household suddenly became the center of British anti-communism, and many refugees and victims passed through its milieu. Longhaired and moderately radical in his post-baccalaureate years, Martin Amis had received his inoculation against the worst, because most fanatical and stupid, of Western intellectual diseases: infatuation with the workers' paradise in the U.S.S.R. The Koba part of Amis's title explains itself easily enough, but what about Laughter and the Twenty Million? It aims at a moral paradox. Wickedness in defeat can assume the visage of the ridiculous, but the danger is that in ridiculing it, one forgets the original, nonridiculous evil.
There is, thus, something in Bolshevism that is painfully, unshirkably comic. This became palpable when the Russian experiment entered its decadent phase: the vanity and high-bourgeois kleptomania of Brezhnev and the pitiful figure of Chernenko (an old janitor with barely enough strength to honor himself as a Hero of Socialist Labor). Both these men, and Andropov (the K.G.B. highbrow), whom they flanked, presided over a wretched police state. The country was living at African levels of poverty, malnutrition, disease, and child mortality.
Especially with hindsight, in the knowledge that the terror, if not the misery, would eventually slacken and then altogether cease, the post-Krushchev First Secretaries can appear comically puffed up and foolish--and so can their post-Soviet successor, Yeltsin. But just behind the comic-opera antics, as Amis reminds us, lay that "great landmass of suffering." Amis himself used to laugh about Communism and the U.S.S.R. with his friend (despite a non-correspondence in political stripe) Christopher Hitchens. In the early 1970s they both wrote for The New Statesman. Amis records a number of their talks in his partly autobiographical, partly biographical (the subject is his father, Kingsley), and partly historical book. Amis once asked Hitchens about the famine in Ukraine in the 1930s: "There wasn't a famine." Hitchens answered, "there may have been occasional shortages." (1) Another time. Amis wondered aloud to Hitchens "about the difference between Stalin's Russia and Hitler's Germany." "Don't fall for that," Hitchens said, "don't fall for moral equivalence." Amis wanted to know why not, to which Hitchens replied, "Lenin was ... a great man."
Even so, Hitchens could joke about the Soviet Union. Amis quotes a longish jape about the failure of a centrally planned cocktail lounge. The waitresses wear westernized, skimpy garb. And then there's the additional attraction: "they've all been loyal party members for at least forty-five years." Note, however, that the fall guy in the story is the geronto-cracy. About Lenin, the "great man." Hitchens did not caper or jest. "As a socialist, he needed to feel that October had not been an instantaneous--or indeed an intrinsic--disaster." His making fun of the Brezhnev's self-parodying U.S.S.R., Amis thinks, revealed Hitchens's insecurity about the line he had chosen to adopt: if only Trotsky instead of Stalin.... "He knew it wasn't true. But truth, like much else, was postponable." By 1975, however, the postponement should no longer have been morally tenable. The second volume of The Gulag Archipelago had appeared. Yet Amis's left-wing acquaintances hardly seemed to have registered it.
For honesty, and for a notion of the struggle with self-delusion that stands often as honesty's extended prelude, Amis enjoyed the example of his father and of his father's friend Robert Conquest, whose itinerary was less contradictory. The younger Amis knew from first-person testimony, from all of those Russian and East European types who had passed through what everyone jestingly referred to as "Fascist House," what conditions had prevailed under the regimes of Lenin and Stalin. And Amis had inherited his father's belated sensitivity to mendacious denials of the facts.
He recalls an exchange between the elder Amis and A.J. Ayer, who argued that, "in the U.S.S.R., at least they're trying to forge something positive." "But it doesn't matter what they're trying to forge," said Kingsley, "because they've already killed five million people." Or twenty million, as Conquest counted them in The Great Terror (1968). In this irreconcilable disagreement, Amis comes to the fundamental syllogism of the true believers: Socialism is an absolute value; anything other than socialism has less value than socialism; therefore human life has less value than socialism.
But it is not entirely syllogistic. Magical thinking accompanies the proofs. Thus socialism, whose chief characteristic is that it does not exist, exudes an aura; anything touched by that aura partakes in socialism's primary glamour--even the repulsive "Man of Steel." Hitchens might describe himself as, of course, anti-Stalin, but he would spend his weekends passing out Leninist and Trotskyist pamphlets in working-class neighborhoods. He could joke about his hopes for Great Britain: "rule by yobs" or in less colloquial language the dictatorship of the proletariat. Amis returns repeatedly to the squeamishness in the jokes:
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.
Immersion in the facts of the Bolshevik catastrophe may make this
increasingly hard to accept, but such an immersion will never cleanse
that catastrophe of laughter....
It is not solely Stalin, of course. Amis devotes part of Koba the Dread to documenting how the sainthood of Lenin, preached by those who want others to believe that Stalin hijacked a pure and noble experiment, is insupportable: "Lenin bequeathed to his successors a fully functioning police state," complete with the prison system for dissenters. So "the differences between the regimes of Lenin and Stalin were quantitative, not qualitative." Lenin's comparatively short reign explains the quantitative discrepancy. Lenin had barely five. Stalin over twenty-five years to express the persona of the revolution.
The myth of Lenin as the good man betrayed remains deeply imbued in the view of the contemporary left, who, in default of the proletariat, have long since nominated themselves for the redeeming class. Amis cites Vladimir Nabokov gently but firmly chastising Edmund Wilson for the latter's fatuous treatment of Lenin in To the Finland Station (1940) and Travels in Two Democracies (1936). Wilson rejoined the correction by withdrawing from the friendship.
In a section called "Ten Theses on Ilyich," Amis draws on his own research as well as that of Solzhenitsyn, Conquest, and others to expose the character and modus operandi of Vladimir Ilyich Ulianov. Lenin emerges as a fury: "Civil war became inevitable when Lenin took power"; he was a man, in the words of Adam Ulam, "at once childish and nightmarish"; his policies in 1918-1921 resulted in "the obliteration of [Russia's] industrial base and the worst famine in European history." In warring ferociously against religion--which Lenin did by murdering priests and nuns and by confiscating and razing churches--he made war "against human nature." He originated both "executions by quota" and "the notion of 'collective responsibility,' whereby the families and even the neighbors of enemies of the people, or suspected enemies of the people, were taken hostage." Amis points to Lenin's "studied amorality," his "giggly response to violence," and his "flirtatious nihilism." Trotsky too, was a "f[******] liar" and a "nun-killer." Stalin saw the value of all these traits in the pursuit of absolute power. Stalin, who in his hatred for everything "bourgeois," at least equaled Lenin and Trotsky, (2) might have seen to Lenin's demise, but he was still Lenin's successor.
The Gulag Archipelago is a big work in three volumes. People talk about it more than they read it. The same goes for Conquest's hefty single volume of The Great Terror. For the otherwise engaged, so to speak, Amis offers, in the long middle of Koba, a "Short Course" on Communism in power in the U.S.S.R. under Stalin and after him. Lenin told Maxim Gorky that the artists and intellectuals were not the "brains" of the nation but its "sh[**]." Stalin, who in Amis's analysis actually had some feel for literature, more cannily than Lenin saw how artists and intellectuals could be made to serve the regime. Stalin flattered Gorky, who edited a glowing volume, with scores of contributors, on the building of the White Sea Canal; then he placed him under house arrest and probably had him murdered. He could not murder a Bernard Shaw or a H. G. Wells, so he merely stroked their egos, showed them Potemkin villages, and feasted them from a menu unimaginable to the average Russian.
At this time in starvation-stricken Ukraine, as Amis points out, cannibalism was widespread. The westerners returned home fulsomely praising the tyrant. (He was "trying to forge something positive.") The litany of real events is by now well known: the engineered famine for the sake of "de-Kulakization" and the collectivization of agriculture beginning in 1933; the ceaseless arrests, deportations, imprisonments, and executions, which continued policies first emplaced by Lenin; the purges and showtrials; the swelling of the gulag. Amis writes of the "negative perfectionism" of the Stalin regime and of "hard Bolshevism" from 1918 to 1953. There are words, he says, for what happened in Germany from 1933 to 1945: Shoah, Holocaust. But there is none for what happened in Russia. Every Russian, however, knew what was happening and that was the point: to make terror and obedience ubiquitous, to make it invade sleep. The outside world should have known, for the evidence is manifest, but the intellectuals adamantly closed their eyes to the facts.
The mendacity starts with the predisposition of the chattering classes to two things: resentment of the existing, "bourgeois," order, which does not heed their chatter, and a deeply-seated presumption that nature can be remade in accordance with ideas. It continues with an attraction to the claim of the revolution-aries to be remaking the "bourgeois" order in conformance to a radical agenda and the pragmatic triumph of the revolution. The triumph especially grants to resentment a sense of vicarious power, it is true, but intoxicating all the same. The dialectic tells one, furthermore, that the victory is inevitable. This means that arguments against the revolution, or objections to its doctrine, have all failed in advance. One is vindicated a priori without having to answer one's critics. The temptation for people who put their life's stock in winning arguments must be great indeed. But in order for the formula to work, the subject has to blind himself against an inconvenient reality of spilt blood and split bone.
Koba the Dread's concluding section begins with an open letter from Amis to Hitchens. To Trotsky (the real advocate of the pure revolution, betrayed by that scoundrel Stalin). Hitchens applies the reverential term "prophet." "What was he a prophet of? A Communist England? A Communist U.S.A.?" Amis suggests to Hitchens that he should "reread the twenty-four volumes of Lenin's works in the following way: every time you see the words 'counterrevolution' or 'counterrevolutionary' you should take out the 'counter'; and every time you see the words 'revolution' or 'revolutionary' you should put the word 'counter' back in again."
Hitchens claims that 1918 redeemed a society in which "the value of human life had already collapsed." Amis demolishes this proposition, and always returns to the moral swindle required by defenders of the Bolsheviks. Suppose in 1921 that Lenin and Trotsky have built the workers' paradise. "Knowing that 15 million had been sacrificed to its creation, would you want to live in it?" Many have echoed Eric Hobsbawn's "disgraceful" affirmation. They uphold the inescapable conclusion: therefore human life has less value than socialism. Amis's address to Hitchens is as generous as it is rhetorical. It belongs to Amis's own search for a decorum that will allow him to go on speaking to those who can make light of the "Satanic arrogance," as Nadezhda Mandelstam called it, of the Bolsheviks.
The critique of ideology might be the most important of humane endeavors in the aftermath of the modern age. It is a task made more difficult by the fact that ideology since Marx has tended to appear under the guise of a critique of ideology. The image of, say, a ranting deconstructionist denouncing as false and pernicious the millennial cumulus of carefully sifted human self-observation, while declaring the true and mandatory ordo seclorum, will be familiar enough to establish the notion. Bitter experience will have taught many that the ordo brooks no rebuke, least of all the one served up by a combination of broad smile and hearty laughter.
A man's character is his fate, but so too a nation's or even a civilization's. What are we becoming, dominated increasingly, as we are, by ideological bureaucracies and crusading judiciaries? An absence of a sense of humor, of an ability to laugh self-reflexively, a defect by now endemic in Europe and in North America, indicates that the phenomenon of ideological fanaticism has not disappeared from the contemporary world. It suggests that if the U.S.S.R. has vanished, its "spirit" has inveigled its way among the vanquishers. Amis senses this: his Hitchens is a warped or split personality, for whom Amis maintains a friendship for complicated and humane reasons that would likely mean little or nothing to an ideologue--one, perhaps, like Hitchens. Moral decency thus finds itself in a paradoxical position.
I mean both to give a compliment and to make a recommendation when I say that in Koba Amis has written not a scholarly, but rather an exceptionally human book. He is not a savant, and we much hope that he never becomes one. He has made a moving and meritorious contribution to understanding one of the savage afflictions of the twentieth century (and indeed of the incipient twenty-first): the willingness of the indulgently disaffected to set vindictive ideas over ordinary human relations of the sort that have come down to the present as a common property out of the agonized laboratory of prior millennia.
Amis's study conveys an apposite knowledge to those who contemplate the reigning distortions in academia. In the university, the vicars of fanaticism can do no great, but only a little, evil. In politics, the actual fanatics admired by their vicars have stuck and bled a century. The context is different. The principle is the same.
1. When I studied comparative literature at University of California at Los Angeles in the 1980s, in the usual left-leaning academic context, I heard precisely this argument still being made by the proudly fellow-traveling privilegentsia among the graduate students. When I taught English at Central Michigan University in the 1990s, there were still framed portraits of Lenin hanging on the office walls of some faculty. I am speaking of isolated, rural Central Michigan. Hitchens stands for a great many people. 2. That is to say, Lenin and Trotsky forecast Stalin to the proverbial t.
THOMAS F. BERTONNEAU teaches English literature at SUNY, Oswego.