Koba the Dread, Martin Amis

Koba the Dread; Laughter and the Twenty Million, Martin Amis, Vintage International, New York, 2003

Robert Conquest's The Harvest of Sorrow: Soviet Collectivization and the Terror-Famine...quotes Vasily Grossman's essayistic documentary novel Forever Flowering: 'And the children's faces were aged, tormented, just as if they were seventy years old. And by spring they no longer had faces. Instead, they had birdlike heads with beaks, or frog heads--thin, wide lips--and some of them resembled fish, mouths open' (3,880 lives). 3

This is from a letter [by Stalin] addressed to Maxim Gorky concerning the status of intellectuals under the new regime: 'The intellectual strength of workers and peasants grows in the struggle to overturn the bourgeoisie and their acolytes, those second-rate intellectuals and lackeys of capitalism, who think they are the brains of the nation. They are not the brains of the nation. They're its shit.' 15

...all the camps were death camps, by the nature of things. Those not immediately killed at Auschwitz, which was a slave camp and a death camp, tended to last three months. Two years seems to have been the average for the slave camps of the gulag archipelago. 18

Tibor was an unusally late riser, and Kingsley once complained to Nina about it. She said that her husband sometimes needed to see the first signs of dawn before he could begin to contemplate sleep. Even in England. He needs, said Nina, "to be absolutely certain that they won't be coming for him that night." 19-20

This is the usual figure for military losses in World War I (all belligerent nations) : c. 7,800,000. 25

Lenin suffered his first stroke in May 1922. In September he wrote the ferocious letter to Gorky. In the intervening July he was drawing up his many lists of intellectuals for arrest and deportation or internal exile. A month earlier Lenin's doctors had asked him to multiply 12 by 7. Three hours later he solved the problem by addition: 12 + 12 =24, 24 + 12 =36...The ex-believer Dmitri Volkogonov comments in his Lenin: A New Biography: 'He had covered a twenty-one-page notepad with childish scrawls...The future of an entire generation of the flower of the Russian intelligentsia was being decided by a man who could barely cope with an arithmetical problem for a seven-year-old.' 26

During an earlier Russian famine, that of 1891, in which half a million died...a twenty-two-year-old lawyer, refused to participate in the effort--and, indeed, publicly denounced it. This was Lenin:...[who had it that] as a friend put it, 'famine would have numerous positive results...destroying the outdated peasant economy...usher in socialism...destroy faith not only in the tsar, but in God too.' 30

As for the Russians themselves, Lenin was frankly racist in his settled dislike for them. They were fools and bunglers, and "too soft" to run an efficient police state. He made no secret of his preference for Germans. 30

The differences between the regimes of Lenin and Stalin were quantitative, not qualitative. Stalin's one true novelty was the discovery of another stratum of society in need of purgation: Bolsheviks. 32

There is no hint in any of the vast array of archival material to suggest that [Lenin] was troubled by his conscience about anyo f the long list of destructive measures he took (Volkogonov, Lenin: A New Biography). 33

Trotsky: "We must put an end once and for all to the papist-Quaker babble about the sanctity of human life." 35

Two comrades are discussing the inexplicable failure of a luxurious, state-run, Western-style cocktail lounge, recently opened in Moscow. The place is going under, despite all the gimmicks: rock music, light shows, skimpily clad waitresses. Why? Is it the furnishings? No, it can't be the furnishings: they were all imported from Milan, at startling cost. Is it the cocktails? No, it can't be the cocktails: the booze is of the finest, and the bartenders are all from the London Savoy. Is it the waitresses, in their bustiers and cupless brassieres, their thongs, their G-strings? No, it can't be the waitresses...they've all been loyal party members for at least forty-five years. 46

Stalin famously said: "Death solves all problems. No man, no problem." 57

First, arrest...Next, imprisonment and interrogation: this period normally lasted about three months...The interrogators needed confessions...because these had been demanded from above by quota--that cornerstone of Bolshevik methodology. 61

This is Solzhenitsyn's description of "the swan dive": 'A long piece of rough towelling was inserted between the prisoner's jaws like a bridle; the ends were then pulled back over his shoulders and tied to his heels. Just try lying on your stomach like a wheel, with your spine breaking--and without water and food for two days.' Another method was to confine the prisoner in a dark wooden closet where 'hundreds, maybe even thousands of bedbugs had been allowed to multiply. The guards removed the prisoner's jacket or field shirt, and immediately the hungry bedbugs assaulted him, crawling on him from the walls or falling off the ceiling . At first he waged war with them strenuously, crushing them on his body and on the walls, suffocated by their stink. But after several hours he weakened and let them drink his blood without a murmur.'...Chulpenyev was kept for a month on three and a half ounces of bread, after which--when he had just been brought in from the pit [a deep grave in which the half-stripped suspect lay open day and night to the elements]...60-62

Three months of that and then the prisoners faced the journey to their islands in the archipelago. The descriptions of these train rides match anything in the literature of the Shoah...No, the children were there, as victims, and not just on the transports. About 1 million children died in the Holocaust. About 3 million children died in the Terror-Famine of 1933...The journey [train ride] would tend to be much longer (and much colder: Stalin, as we shall see, had things that Hitler didn't have)--a month, six weeks. 63-64

At Vanino, en route to Kolyma, the prisoners entered what was in effect a slave market, where they were prodded and graded and assigned...In that immense, cavernous, murky hold [of the slaveship] were crammed more than two thousand women. From the floor to the ceiling, as in a gigantic poultry farm, they were cooped up in open cages...Michael Solomon: 'One had the impression that they were some half-human, half-bird creatures which belonged to a different world and a different age.' 67

In the arctic camps the prisoners were not supposed to work outside when the temperature fell below minus fifty--or at any rate sixty--degrees Fahrenheit. At fifty below it starts to be difficult to breathe. 70

The hospitals were themselves deathtraps, but inert deathtraps. A man chopped off half his foot to go there. And prisoners cultivated infections, feeding saliva, pus and kerosene to their wounds. / Goldmining could break a strong man's health forever in three weeks. A three-week logging term was likewise know as "dry execution". 70

Marx dismissed slavery as unproductive by definition. But Frenkel argued that it could work economically--so long as the slaves died very quickly. Solzhenitsyn seems to be quoting Frenkel here: " 'We have to squeeze everything out of a prisoner in the first three months--after that we don't need him any more.' " 72

There are several names for what happened in Germany and Poland in the early 1940s. The Holocaust, the Shoah...There are no names for what happened in the Soviet Union between 1917 and 1953 (although Russians refer, totemically, to "the twenty million" 75

Some isolators consisted of split logs thrown together; some had no roofs, exposing the prisoners to the elements--and the insects; some were designed to force the prisoner to stand upright (seventy-two hours of this could be enough to cause permanent damage to the knees.) 78

Bardach was now obliged to go on a journey within himself and examine the boundaries of his spirit: "Is this unbearable, or is it something I can survive? I wondered. What is unbearable? How am I to decide what my limit is?...What is it like to break down?" He thought of the self-mutilators...He thought of the dokhodyagas, the "goners," the garbage-eaters: "Why some and not others?...the dokhodyaga: the goners. It is easy to miss the goners because (as Bardach says), "rummaging through the garbage, eating rancid scraps to meat, chewing on fish skeletons--such behavior was so common that no one noticed." The goners became "semi-idiots," writes Vladamir Petrov, "whom no amount of beating could drive from the refuse heaps." 79-80

Solzhenitsyn gives a figure ("a modest estimate") of 40-50 million who were given long sentences in the gulag from 1917 to 1953... 83

The Holocaust is "the only example which history offers to date of a deliberate policy aimed at the total physical destruction of every member of an ethnic group," write Ian Kershaw and Moshe Lewin in Stalinism and Nazism: Dictatorships in Comparison--whereas, under Stalin, "no ethnic group was singled out for total annihilation." The distinction thus resides in the word "total," because Lenin pursued genocidal policies (de-Cossackization) and so of course did Stalin (see below). 85

Orlando Figes: The Bolshevik programme was based on the ideals of the Enlightenment--it stemmed from Kant as much as from Marx--which makes Western liberals, even in this age of post-modernism, sympathise with it, or at least obliges us to try and understand it, even if we do not share its political goals... 85

Marxism was the product of the intellectual middle classes; Nazism was yellow, tabloidal, of the gutter. Marxism made wholly unrealistic demands on human nature; Nazism constituted a direct appeal to the reptile brain. 85

Stalin, unlike Hitler, did his worst...Hitler, by contrast, did not do his worst. Hitler's worst stands like a great thrown shadow, and implicitly affects our sense of his crimes...[but] fundamentally suicidal in tendency, Nazism was incapable of maturation. Twelve years was perhaps the natural lifespan for such preternatural virulence. 91

"At Oimyakon [in the Kolyma] a temperature has been recorded of - 97.8 F. In far less cold, steel splits, tyres explode and larch trees shower sparks at the touch of an axe. As the thermometer drops, your breath freezes into crystals, and tinkles to the ground with a noise they call 'the whispering of the stars.' " (From Colin Thubron's In Siberia.) 92

There was a national census in 1937, the first since 1926, which had shown a population of 147 million. Extrapolating from the growth figures of the 1920s, Stalin said that he expected a new total of 170 million. The Census Board reported a figure of 163 million--a figure that reflected the consequences of Stalin's policies. So Stalin had the Census Board arrested and shot. 97

both Adolf and Iosif served as choirboys; and both would grow to a height of five feet four. 98

"Stalin," or course, was another self-imposed nickname. Man of Steel. 98

We don't know how Stalin felt about his childhood. But we know how he felt about Georgia. Why take it out on your parents, when you can take it out on a province? 99

...on the matter of Georgia came close to ending his career: itself amazing testimony that the strength of his feelings now outweighed his self-interest. (Power, as we shall see, had in instantly deranging effect on Stalin; during the Civil War he was chronically insubordinate and trigger-happy; it took him years before he learned to control the glandular excitements that power roiled in him.) 100

In 1937 the Great Terror reached Transcaucasia: "Nowhere were victims subjected to more atrocious treatment," writes Robert C. Tucker, "than in Georgia." Of the 644 delegates to the Georgian party congress, in May, 425 were either shot or dispatched to the gulag... 101

In 1925 Stalin appointed Jan Sten, deputy head of the Marx-Engels Institute, as his private tutor. Sten's job was to tighten Stalin's grip on dialectical materialism. Twice a week, for three years, Sten came to the Kremlin apartment and coached his pupil on Hegel, Kant, Feurerbach, Fichte, Schelling, Plekhanov, Kautsky, and Francis Bradley (Appearance and Reality). Stalin, ominously, found Sten's voice "monotonous," but he managed to sit through the lessons, occasionally breaking in with such queries as "Who uses all this rubbish in practice?" and "What's all this got to do with the class struggle?" As Bukharin put it, Stalin was "eaten up by the vain desire to become a well-known theoretician. He feels that it is the only thing he lacks."...The tutorials ended in 1928. By December 1930 Stalin felt himself equipped to lecture the lecturers...The final result of his intervention was that "philosophy shriveled up," as Volkogonov puts it: "no one had the courage to write anything more on the subject." 118-119

Collectivization (1929-33) was the opening and defining phase of Stalin's untrammeled power: it was the first thing he did the moment his hands were free...During Collectivization Stalin is reckoned to have killed about 4 million children. For the man himself, though, and for the man's psychology, the most salient feature of Collectivization was the abysmal depth, the gigantic reach, of its failure. In his introductory administrative push, Stalin ruined the countryside for the rest of the century. 120-121

During the earlier years of the 1920s Stalin had presented himself as a godfearing centrist. Then, with the opposition defeated, he veered wildly Left. 122

Stalin's aims were clear: crash Collectivization would, through all-out grain exports, finance wildfire industrialization, resulting in breakneck militarization to secure state and empire... 123

On December 21, 1929, Stalin celebrated his fiftieth birthday, to hyperbolic acclaim; this date also marks the birth of the "cult of personality", which would take such a toll on his mental health. Eight days later he announced his policy of "liquidating the kulaks as a class." / Solzhenitsyn is insisten ("This is very important, the most important thing") that Dekulkization was chiefly a means of terrorizing the other peasants into submission: "Without frightening them to death there was no way of taking back the land which the Revolution had given them, and planting them on that same land as serfs." 124

Not all Soviet villages contained kulaks, but all Soviet villages had to be terrorized, so kulaks had to be found in all Soviet villages. Stalin was, of course, using a quota system (as he could in the Great Terror). He seemed to have in mind just under 10 percent: about 12 million people. 125

1933...It starts to be the practice that orphaned children are shot en masse. 129

As harvest yields fell, requisitioning quotas grew, with only one possible outcome. Stalin just went at the peasants until there was nobody there to sow the next harvest. 130

Considering what he could have got up to, and considering what Beria (for instance) actually did get up to, Stalin's sexual life was remarkably prim. 131

Hitler: "A highly intelligent man should take a primitive and stupid woman." 132

When Milovan Djilas personally protested that the Red Army was raping Yugoslav women, Stalin said of his universal soldier: "How can such a man react normally? And what is so awful in his having fun with a woman, after such horrors?" 135

The use of famine as a weapon of the state against the populace is generally considered to be a Stalinist innovation (later taken up by Mao and other Communist leaders), but Lenin's famine of 1921-22 had its terroristic aspects. Both famines had the same cause: punitive food-requisitioning. 138

About 5 million died in the Ukraine, and about 2 million died in the Kuban, Don and Volga regions in Kazakhstan. These were formerly the richest agricultural lands in the USSR. 141

You might denounce someone for fear of their denouncing you; you could be denounced for not doing enough denouncing... 143

Tribute must now be paid to the most prodigious denouncer of all, the great Nikolaenko, scourge of Kiev...In Kiev, pavements emptied when Nikolaenko stepped out; her presence in a room spread mortal fear. Eventually Pavel Postyshev (First Secretary in the Ukraine, candidate member of the Politburo) expelled Nikolaenko from the Party. Stalin reinstated her "with honor."...When the new, post-purge bosses, headed by Khrushchev, had established themselves in Kiev, Nikolaenko denounced Krushchev's deputy, Korotchenko. Krushchev defended his man, a posture Stalin adjudged to be "incorrect."...But then Nikolaenko denounced Krushchev, a first-echelon toady and placeman, for "bourgeois nationalism," and Stalin finally conceded that she was nuts. She helped destroy about 8,000 people. 143-145

Until 1930 the economy and culture of Kazakhstan, in Soviet Central Asia, was based on nomadism and transhumance (the seasonal movement of livestock.) The plan was to Dekulakize these wanderers, and then Collectivize them. Once denomadized, the Kazakhstanis would devote themselves to agriculture. But the land was not suitable for agriculture. What it was suitable for was nomadism and transhumance. The plan didn't work out. Over the next two years Kazakhstan lost 80 percent of its livestock. And 40 percent of its population: famine and disease. 147

...10 million peasant dead (this was Stalin's own figure, in conversation with Churchill) might be acceptable to a good Bolshevik, the political objective having been achieved (unmediated control of the peasant produce.) 148

Stalin took the podium at the Congress to a standing ovation--of which, said Pravda, "it seemed there would be no end."...Who could end the applause for Stalin when Stalin wasn't there? At a party conference in Moscow...the proceedings wound up with a tribute to Stalin. Everyone got to their feet and started applauding; and no one dared stop...After ten minutes...The first man to stop clapping (a local factory director) was arrested the next day and given ten years on another charge. 150-151

Since 1917 the Bolsheviks had systematically undermined the family. Divorce was encouraged (to achieve it you were simply obliged to notify your spouse by postcard); incest, bigamy, adultery and abortion were decriminalized; families were scattered by labor-direction and deportation; and children who denounced their parents became national figures, hymned in verse and song. 154

Varlam Shalamov...got out of Kolyma in 1951...Then he wrote Kolyma Tales...One prisoner hangs himself in a tree fork "without even using a rope." Another finds that his fingers have been permanently molded by the tools he wields (he "never expected to be able to straighten out his hand again"). Another's rubber galoshes "were so full of pus and blood that his feet sloshed at every step--as if through a puddle." Men weep frequently, over a pair of lost socks, for instance, or from the cold (but not from hunger, which produces an agonizing but tearless wrath.) They all dream the same dream "of loaves of rye bread that flew past us like meteors or angels." And they are forgetting everything. A professor of philosophy forgets his wife's name. A doctor begins to doubt that he ever was a doctor... 156

...wiretaps reveal that Svetlana [Stalin's daughter] was having an affair with a Jewish scenarist called Alexei Kapler, whom Stalin promptly dispatched to Vorkuta (espionage: five years). "But I love him!" protested Svetlana. " 'Love!' screamed my father, with a hatred of the very word I can scarcely convey. And for the first time in his life he slapped me across the face, twice. 'Just look, nurse, how low she's sunk!' He could no longer restrain himself. 'Such a war going on, and she's busy the whole time fucking!' " 162

Three weeks after Stalin's death Vasily [son] suffered a demotion: he was, in fact, dismissed from the service (and forbidden to wear military uniform). He was thirty-two, and died nine years later. Krushchev found him uncontrollable. There were periods of prison and exile. He said that he was thinking of becoming the manager of a swimming pool. At the age of forty he was an invalid. There were four wives. 164

Stalin hated Yakov [son] because Yakov was Georgian...Yakov is said also to have been of a mild and gentle disposition, to his father's additional disgust...He spoke little Russian, and did so with a thick accent (like Stalin)...Yakov attempted suicide. He succeeded only in wounding himself; and when Stalin heard about the attempt he said, "Ha! He couldn't even shoot straight" (Volkogonov has him actually confronting his son with the greeting, "Ha! You missed!")...[Yakov] fought energetically until his unit was captured by the Reichswehr. This placed Stalin in a doubly embarrassing position. A law of August 1941 had declared that all captured officers were "malicious traitors" whose families were "subject to arrest."...As a kind of compromise, Stalin arrested Yakov's wife. When the Nazis tried to negotiate an exchange, Stalin refused ("I have no son called Yakov")...Yakov passed through three concentration camps--Hammelburg, Lubeck, Sachsenhausen--and resisted all intimidation. It was precisely to avoid succumbing (Volkogonov believes) that Yakov make his decisive move. In a German camp, as in a Russian, the surest route to suicide was a run at the barbed wife. Yakov ran. The guard did not miss. 165

Compromised by power (and by increasing isolation from unwelcome truths), his sense of reality was by now unquestionably very weak; but it would be wrong to think of him in a continuous state of cognitive disarray. This underestimates his vanity and his pedantry. 166

Purging was hard, and hardness was a Bolshevik virtue. Stalin was never really sure that he was the cleverest or the bravest or the most visionary or even the most powerful. But he knew he was the hardest. 167

Nearly every night there were screenings in the private projection rooms in the Kremlin or the various dachas. Krushchev says that Stalin was particularly keen on Westerns: "He used to curse them and give them proper ideological evaluation, but then immediately order new ones." 171

In later years, as we have already mentioned, Stalin's cinematic tastes narrowed. Out went the cowboy films, the comedies and musicals. Stalin preferred to watch propaganda: pseudo-newsreels about life on the collective farms. The boards groan with fruit and vegetables, with suckling pig, with enormous geese. After their banquet the reapers return singing to the fields... 172-173

...5 percent of the population had been arrested as some sort of enemy of the people...the members of those families were also subject to sentence: as members of the family of an enemy of the people. By 1939, it is fair to say, all the people were enemies of the people. 178

Santayana's definition of the fanatic: he redoubles his efforts while forgetting his aims. He doesn't want to think or to know. He just wants to believe. 178

...after a night-long interrogation, a ten-year-old boy admitted his involvement with a fascist organization from the age of seven (what happened to him? Before exacting the supreme penalty, did they wait for his twelfth birthday?); a twelve-year-old boy was raped by his interrogator, protested to the duty officer, and was duly shot... 179

Hitler confined his cultural interventions to the fields where he felt, wrongly, that he had competence: art and architecture. But Stalin's superbity was omnivorous. 180

Astronomy. Research on sunspots was felt to have taken an un-Marxist turn. In the years of the Terror more than two dozen leading astronomy disappeared. 182

Linguistics. In the early 1930s Stalin championed the teachings of N. Marr, who held a) that language was a class phenomenon (a superstructure over the relations of production), and b) that all words derived from the sounds "rosh", "sal", "ber" and "yon." Linguisticians who held otherwise were jailed or shot. 182

...it was the regime's extraordinary intention to stamp out private, even individual, worship too (aiming to replace "faith in God with faith in science and the machine")...church weddings were declared void (and funeral rites forbidden). 185

...Wehrmacht: the greatest war machine ever assembled, and heading straight for him. He knew that his citizens would not lay down their lives for socialism. What would they lay down their lives for? Consulting this sudden reality, Stalin saw that religion was still there--that religion, funnily enough, belonged to the real. 186

While I was getting through the shelf of books I have read about him, there were four occasions where Stalin made me laugh. Laugh undisgustedly and with warmth, as if he were a comic creation going enjoyably through his hoops. These are all things Stalin said. Nothing Stalin did makes you laugh. 192

When the news came through ("they are bombing our cities"), Stalin's psyche simply fell away. It prostrated him; he became a bag of bones in a gray tunic; he was nothing but a power vacuum. 194

The way Stalin saw it, the imperialist powers would embroil themselves in a marathon bloodbath in Europe, after which a strengthened Red Army would do some empire-building of its own among the ruins. This dream was rather seriously undermined when Hitler took France in six weeks--leaving Stalin pacing the floor and giving vent to many a "choice" obscenity (the adjective is Krushchev's). By June 1941 Hitler's war record went as follows: Poland in twenty-seven days, Denmark in twenty-four hours, Norway in twenty-three days, Holland in five, Belgium in eighteen, France in thirty-nine, Yugoslavia in twelve, and Greece in twenty-one. 195

All writers agree that Stalin underestimated Hitler's fanaticism. Germany, Stalin thought, would never risk a war on two fronts. 198

Meanwhile, across the border, Hitler's psychological trouble was revealing itself as clinical--as organic. In early 1941 he was already sufficiently "confident" to undertake the invasion of Russia a) without a war economy, and b) without antifreeze. The is to say, he gambled on victory in a single campaign: a physical impossibility. 209

After the briefcase-bomb attempt on his life (July 1944)...Having earlier lost his voice, Hitler, after the bomb attack, lost his hearing. His isolation was complete. 209-210

...Stalin's popularity was wholly--Hitler's merely largely--a matter of manipulation...There's the famous anecdote--the two men are meeting in the streets of Moscow, during the height of the Terror: "If only someone would tell Stalin!" and so on. And this was not a joke, and these were no ordinary Ivans. The two men were Ilya Ehrenburg and Boris Pasternak. 213

"Anti-Semitism is counterrevolution," Lenin had tersely decided. 217

...Jewish activists interrogated by the Cheka in 1939 "were treated very badly," but "the curses and imprecations never had any racial tone. When they were reinterrogated in 1942-1943, anti-Semitic abuse had become the norm." The shift in emphasis, like everything else, was top-down. 219

The proximate cause of the final delerium was evidently the emergence of the state of Israel in 1948 and the arrival, later that year, of the new ambassador, Golda Meir, who attracted a crowd of 50,000 Jews outside the Moscow synagogue. This was a shocking display of "spontaneity"; it also confronted Stalin with an active minority who owed allegiance other than to "the Soviet power." 221

The boy told him, inter alia, about the "mosquito treatment": these insects, like airborne piranha, could turn a man into a skeleton within hours. Prisoners were also strapped to logs and then bounced down the stone steps of the fortress. 227

On March 1 stirred at midday, as usual. In the panty the light came on: MAKE TEA. The servants waited in vain for the plodding instruction, BRING TEA IN. Not until 11 p.m. did the duty officers summon the nerve to investigate. Koba was lying in soiled pajamas on the dining-room floor near a bottle of mineral water and a copy of Pravda. His beseeching eyes were full of terror. When he tried to speak he could only produce "a buzzing sound"--the giant flea, the bedbug, reduced to an insect hum. No doubt he had had time to ponder an uncomfortable fact: all the Kremlin doctors were being tortured in jail, and his personal physician of many years, Vinogradov, was, moreover (at the insistence of Stalin himself), "in irons." 233

In 1948, Stalin made the following addition to his official biography, Short Course...Stalin then made this addition to that addition: "Although the performed his task of leader of the Party with commensurate skill and enjoyed the unreserved support of the entire Soviet people, Stalin never allowed his work to be marred by the slightest hint of vanity, conceit or self-adulation." 240