Koba the Dread: Laughter and the Twenty Million, by Martin Amis. Talk Miramax Books, 2002. 306 pp (small ones). $24.95.

Q: What do twenty million victims of Stalin’s Great Terror and Martin Amis’s sister have in common?

A: They’re dead.

And they both get a lot of ink in Martin Amis’s new book. And that’s about it. Wherein lies the problem. Amis keeps trying to explain the Great Terror, the largest mass slaughter of all time going away, in personal terms, when there’s really nothing personal about it. To begin with the obvious objection: Stalin’s policies were essentially a logical continuation of Lenin’s, yet the revolutionary atheist intellectual and the insecure ex-seminarian bureaucrat were not alike, personally, at all. Lenin veered off the strictly collectivist path with the New Economic Policy, but Stalin had his occasional zigs and zags as well, most notably in 1936-37, with a brief economic liberalization that he actually called “perestroika.” Stalinism is consolidated Leninism. Amis acknowledges this objection, once, in a footnote, without ever really answering it.

[Martin] Malia [author of The Soviet Tragedy]…dissents from [the view that nobody was keen on collectivization of agriculture in the late 1920s, which Amis calls, mistakenly, “the consensus view”]; he sees Collectivization as structural to the Lenin-Stalin continuum, and he is eloquent. “For a Bolshevik party the real choice in 1929 was not between Stalin’s road and Bukharin’s; it was between doing approximately what Stalin did and giving up the whole Leninist enterprise.” The question remains: how approximately do we take the word “approximately”?

He loads the dice, but even here Malia wins on points.
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