 |
The black farce of history
Why
laughter? The second
world war killed some 50 million human beings; the Bolshevik revolution
and the
Soviet state killed at least 20 million between 1917 and Stalin's death
in
1953. Why is Hitler no joke, while the deeds of Stalin (and Lenin) can
be
subjects for humour as well as horror? In
1999, Martin Amis went
to a meeting in the Conway Hall. It was about "Europe" and nothing to
do with Soviet crimes, but his best friend Christopher Hitchens was on
the
platform and at one point observed that he had spent many an evening in
this
hall with "many an old comrade". The meeting broke into knowing
guffaws, and Amis found himself laughing too. Afterwards, he asked
himself why
Hitler "elicits spontaneous fury and the other [Stalin,
"Bolshevism"] elicits spontaneous laughter". Partly, he thought,
it was self-mocking fondness for an old hope, an aid to forgetting the
20
million. But it was also the chasm between the nobility of the hope,
the
splendour of the propaganda about achievement, and the squalor of the
reality.
"It seems that humour cannot be evicted from the gap between words and
deeds." Amis consults Shakespeare and concludes that the story of This
book, coming after
Amis's memoir Experience, belongs to a process of autobiography. At one
level,
it is about history; Amis made himself read through a library about the
Amis
has loved two men who
have found reasons not to dismiss what happened after October 1917 in Logically
enough, Koba the
Dread ends with two letters: one to Hitchens and the other to his
father's
ghost. But Hitchens's voice, especially, turns up all through these
pages:
arguments in the 1970s when they both worked on the New Statesman,
phone calls
in moments of despair or bafflement. MA: "I'm wondering about the
distance
between Stalin's What
really was the
difference between the Little Moustache and the Big Moustache? Stalin
had more
time, more space, cold and darkness in which to kill more people than
Hitler.
Lenin destroyed civil society, which Hitler never achieved. But when
Amis admits
that he feels the Jewish Holocaust was "worse" than Stalin's crimes,
he qualifies it: "In attempting to answer the question why, one enters
an
area saturated with qualms." He quotes Orlando Figes, to the effect
that
Nazism "spat in the face of the Enlightenment", whereas the Russian
revolution was "an experiment which the human race was bound to make"
- and yet did not Stalin's betrayal of that experiment make him
"worse" ? Most
of Koba the Dread is
Martin Amis's own recapitulation of horrors: the massacres of the civil
war,
the famine of 1922, collectivisation and the "war" against the
peasantry, which ended in the Terror Famine of 1933, the great purges
of
1937-38, the show trials, the living death of the gulag and - after the
"Great Patriotic War"- the "rancid, crapulent phase" of
Stalinism which ended with the dictator's death as he prepared to
launch an
exterminatory purge against the Jews. He draws on many works, but above
all on
Solzhenitsyn and on the books of Robert Conquest, friend and counsellor
to
himself and his father. When Conquest's The Great Terror was first
published in
1968, it was coldly received on the left. Every homme civilisé, homme
de la
gauche claimed to know by then that Stalin had been a monster, guilty
of
dreadful crimes against innocent people - but wasn't Conquest just a
"cold
warrior", and was he not inflating the victim-figures for his own
political ends? He was not. As the truth oozed out, it became clear
that
Conquest had been entirely correct. When the publishers wondered about
a fresh
subtitle for the latest edition, Conquest suggested: "I Told You So,
You
Fucking Fools." He was richly, opulently entitled to say that. Amis
offers an anthology of
witnesses, to both the suffering of victims and the callousness of
executioners,
torturers and rulers - those who scribbled "Shoot them all!" at the
bottom of list after list of names. Many of those voices were once
heard
throughout the world - Eugenia Ginzburg, Varlam Shalamov, Nadezhda
Mandelstam,
Solzhenitsyn's Gulag Archipelago above all - but they are being rapidly
forgotten now. Amis is right to let them speak again, and he is haunted
by the
thought that the memory of the 20 million dead is fading too. But that
is more
the consequence of Russian indifference, in a country where there has
been no
coherent reckoning with the past, rather than of the west's uneasy
"laughter of forgetting". The west and its intellectuals are uneasy
because they do remember, and Amis is over the top in proclaiming that
"everybody knows of Auschwitz and Surprisingly,
the weakest
element in the book is its handling of Stalin. A brilliant novelist
reaches
into the dark for this creature but fails to reconstruct a character
out of the
slimy bits he can feel. Amis falls back on the weak idea that he was
mad, an
envious loner driven into homicidal lunacy by the taste of power, and
argues
that when he did sensible things, like defeating Hitler, he stopped
being mad.
"... The invasion [of 1941] pressed Stalin into a semblance of mental
health. Certainly, in August 1945, remission ended and the patient's
sanity
once again fell apart". Unhappily, Stalin was not mad. He was sane, but
callous and cruel on a scale so staggering that hopeful views of human
nature
crumple. In
a way, Amis recognises
this in several wonderful sentences about the two dictators.
"Hitler-Stalin tells us this, among other things: given total power
over
another, the human being will find his thoughts turn to torture". Or
this:
"Of the many characteristics shared by the two ideologies... one in
particular proved wholly corrosive: the notion that mercilessness is a
virtue". Or this: "Both these stories are full of terrible news about
what it is to be human." But the really terrible news is that you do
not
have to be in-sane to sacrifice the lives of millions for the vision of
a
better world. At
the end, Amis challenges
the two men who mean so much to him. He asks Hitchens: do you admire
Lenin's
and Trotsky's terror, which made Stalin possible? Even if they had
created
paradise, would you want to live in it at the price of 15 million
lives? And to
his father's shade: your emotional need to believe in the brotherhood
of man,
the possible · Neal
Ascherson's Stone Voices: The Search for |