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idrees2022's review against another edition
2.0
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.
drbird's review
2.0
wow. just. wow. It's almost as if after The Information Martin Amis disappeared and was replaced by some lamer version of himself. I don't know what this book is for -- it sorta extends his autobiography, Experience, and it sorta is a history lesson (but not really). I like it because people often forget that Stalin was a mass murderer worse than the Nazis. But he was quieter about it. But Amis doesn't do himself any favors by comparing his own child's cry to the sounds in a Russian prison. Really? Your baby sounds like it's suffering like that? Go feed it.
mburnamfink's review against another edition
5.0
From an official list of declassified Soviet jokes prepared by the CIA (no kidding)
"A train bearing Lenin, Stalin, Khrushchev, Brezhnev, and Gorbachev stops suddenly when the tracks run out. Each leader applies his own, unique solution. Lenin gathers workers and peasants from miles around and exhorts them to build more track. Stalin shoots the train crew when the train still doesn't move. Krushchev rehabilitates the dead crew and orders the tracks behind the train ripped up and relaid in front. Brezhnev pulls down the curtains and rocks back and forth, pretending the train is moving. And Gorbachev calls a rally in front of the locomotive, where he leads a chant: 'No tracks! No tracks! No tracks!"
That's the notable feature of Communism. Despite a universal list of atrocities and failures, we can still joke about it. For figures on the left, a brush with Communism isn't the same kiss of death as a similar touch of Nazism (ironic North Korean propaganda hangs behind my monitor). Amis moves through his own biography and family history with Communism to write a personal history of coming to grips with Atrocity, in the person of Stalin, and the twenty million (at least) victims of the gulags, summary executions, purges, and deliberate famines.
Amis is a novelist, not a historian, but what he synthesizes out of the work of others, histories, survivors, and victims, is a picture of one of the great abattoirs of history, Stalin's personal weakness and paranoia, and the terrible way in which his victims came to love him. I wasn't quite sure what to make of this book, as it wandered through Martin's childhood and, his father the ex-Communist, and conversations with Christopher Hitchens, but once he finds his topic, Koba is hypnotic and compelling. We understand Stalin better by seeing his reflection in Martin Amis.
"A train bearing Lenin, Stalin, Khrushchev, Brezhnev, and Gorbachev stops suddenly when the tracks run out. Each leader applies his own, unique solution. Lenin gathers workers and peasants from miles around and exhorts them to build more track. Stalin shoots the train crew when the train still doesn't move. Krushchev rehabilitates the dead crew and orders the tracks behind the train ripped up and relaid in front. Brezhnev pulls down the curtains and rocks back and forth, pretending the train is moving. And Gorbachev calls a rally in front of the locomotive, where he leads a chant: 'No tracks! No tracks! No tracks!"
That's the notable feature of Communism. Despite a universal list of atrocities and failures, we can still joke about it. For figures on the left, a brush with Communism isn't the same kiss of death as a similar touch of Nazism (ironic North Korean propaganda hangs behind my monitor). Amis moves through his own biography and family history with Communism to write a personal history of coming to grips with Atrocity, in the person of Stalin, and the twenty million (at least) victims of the gulags, summary executions, purges, and deliberate famines.
Amis is a novelist, not a historian, but what he synthesizes out of the work of others, histories, survivors, and victims, is a picture of one of the great abattoirs of history, Stalin's personal weakness and paranoia, and the terrible way in which his victims came to love him. I wasn't quite sure what to make of this book, as it wandered through Martin's childhood and, his father the ex-Communist, and conversations with Christopher Hitchens, but once he finds his topic, Koba is hypnotic and compelling. We understand Stalin better by seeing his reflection in Martin Amis.
michaelstearns's review
1.0
[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.
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.
zachkuhn's review
5.0
Any time anyone on the left talks about fascism as if maniacal dictators only come from one side, remind him/her about the Twenty Million. That's coming from someone slightly on the left. A great work of nonfiction.
kmdra06's review
3.0
The book darts between autobiography, analysis and history in an effort to present and examine the case against communism. The facts assembled are enough to convict but the organizational structure hampers the lucidity of the argument.
robholden111's review
3.0
Incredibly heartfelt as far as historical writing goes, Amis' book is memoir if only for the pain, suffering, and anger you can feel in his prose. A very dense, heavy read, and not one for those unfamiliar with Russian history - specifically the Bolsheviks, Russian Revolution, terror famine, and the Gulag archipelago. You'll get much more out of this book if you read some more basic introductory Russian historical texts first, advice I wish I had been given before opening it. Three stars given for that reason alone; much of the book was incomprehensible to me because of my very limited knowledge of Russian history.