Koba the Dread: Laughter and the Twenty MillionKoba the Dread is the successor to Martin Amis's celebrated memoir, Experience. It is largely political (while remaining personal). It addresses itself to the central lacuna of twentieth-century thought: the indulgence of communism by intellectuals of the West. In between the personal beginning 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, a leading Sovietologist, whose book of 1968, The Great Terror, was second only to Solzhenitsyn's The Gulag Archipelago in undermining the USSR. Amis's remarkable 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. |
Contents
Russian earth The Saddest Story Into the Sere The Bedbug | 97 |
Census Georgia Demian Bedny The Grey Blur the Yellow Eyes | 120 |
Index | 283 |
Copyright | |
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Common terms and phrases
anti-Semitism arrested became Bedny Beria Bolshevism Bukharin Butyrki called camps Census Board Central Committee Cheka Chekist Civil Collectivization Communist Comrade course dacha dead death denounced died Dmitri Volkogonov enemy execution exile face famine fascist father feel Georgian German going Gorky Gorky's Gulag Archipelago Hitler human interrogation Iosif Ivan Kaganovich Kamenev Khrushchev killed Kirov Koba Kolyma Kremlin Krupskaya kulaks later laughter Lenin lives Mandelstam million Molotov Moscow murder Nabokov Nadezhda Nadezhda Mandelstam Nadya Nazi Nazism never night Old Bolsheviks Party peasants perhaps permission to reprint poet Politburo political Pravda prison proletariat purge regime reprint material Revolution revolutionary Richard Pipes Robert Conquest Russian seems sentence Shalamov shot Solzhenitsyn Soviet Union Stalin Stalinist Sten Svetlana Szamuely Terror thing thought Tibor Tibor Szamuely tion told torture trial Trotsky Trotsky's Tucker Ukraine urkas USSR Vasily Vasily Grossman wife words writes wrote Yakov Zinoviev