Arguably: Selected Essays (98 page)

Amis’s two previous undertakings of this kind were reviewed ungenerously in some quarters, either because they seemed presumptuous in taking a familiar subject and presenting it as if for the first time, or because they relied a little too much on a senior source (Jonathan Schell in the first case, and Primo Levi in the second). To this I would respond rather as Winston Smith does when he has finished reading the occult “inner-party” book in
Nineteen Eighty-four:
“The best books … are those that tell you what you know already.” Amis understands that cliché and banality constitute a menace to even the most apparently self-evident truths. “Holocaust” can become a tired synecdoche for war crimes in general. Before one knows it, one is employing terms like “nuclear exchange” and even “nuclear umbrella,” and committing the mental and moral offense of euphemism. One must always seek for new means of keeping familiar subjects fresh, and raw.

Stalinism was, among other things, a triumph of the torturing of language. And, unlike Nazism or fascism or nuclear warfare, it secured at least the respect, and sometimes the admiration, of liberal intellectuals. Thus Amis’s achievement in these pages is to make us wince again at things that we already “knew” while barely wasting a word or missing the implications of a phrase. Here is a short section titled “Rhythms of Thought”:

Stalin’s two most memorable utterances are “Death solves all problems. No man, no problem” and (he was advising his interrogators on how best to elicit a particular confession) “Beat, beat and beat again.”

Both come in slightly different versions. “There is a man, there is a problem. No man, no problem.” This is less epigrammatic, and more catechistic—more typical of Stalin’s seminarian style (one thinks of his oration at Lenin’s funeral and its liturgical back-and-forth).

The variant on number two is: “Beat, beat, and, once again, beat.” Another clear improvement, if we want a sense of Stalin’s rhythms of thought.

To that second paragraph Amis appends a footnote, saying:

If Stalin had been a modern American he would not have used the word “problem” but the less defeatist and judgmental “issue.” Actually, when you consider what Stalin tended to do to his enemies’ descendants, the substitution works well enough.

That is excellent: dry without being too detached. Next I would instance Amis’s citations from the various cruelties and torments documented by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn.

This reader has endured none of them; and I will proceed with caution and unease. It feels necessary because torture, among its other applications, was part of Stalin’s war against the truth. He tortured, not to force you to reveal a fact, but to force you to collude in a fiction.

Here is his close reading of the last paragraph of Trotsky’s
History of the Russian Revolution
. Trotsky’s closing stave reads,

The language of the civilised nations has clearly marked off two epochs in the development of Russia. Where the aristocratic culture introduced into the world parlance such barbarisms as
tsar, pogrom, knout
, October has internationalized such words as
Bolshevik, soviet
, and
piatiletka
. This alone justifies the proletarian revolution, if you imagine that it needs justification.

Amis’s first comment on this ensues directly. He adds to Trotsky’s bombast the words “Which leaves you wondering if
piatiletka
is Russian for ‘summary execution,’ perhaps, or ‘slave camp.’ ” There follows a footnote. (Like Gibbon, Amis seems to like to reserve the best for the footnotes.)

I searched without success for
piatiletka
in five end-of-monograph glossaries. Its clinching “internationalisation,” then, didn’t last (although Hitler, and later Mao, took it up).
Piatiletka
means “five-year plan.”

There is a very slight waste of words here, because the mordancy of Amis’s second observation makes the first one seem merely taunting and sarcastic. But lapses of this kind are infrequent. When Amis summarizes a crux, it stays summarized. One doesn’t have to have suffered torture and solitary confinement to get the point that is being made here:

The confession was in any case merely part of a more or less inevitable process. When it was their turn to be purged, former interrogators (and all other Chekists) immediately called with a flourish for the pen and the dotted line.

One also wouldn’t absolutely have to know which regime was under discussion: The potency of that
aperçu
derives from its disclosing of our animal nature. Indeed, and as in his other work on murder and tyranny, Amis has a better than approximate idea of what we as a species might get up to if given a chance.
“Arma virumque cano
, and Hitler-Stalin tells us this, among other things: given total power over another, the human being will find that his thoughts turn to torture.”

This is an insight of extreme, frigid bleakness, amounting almost to despair, but it also involves a minor waste of words. We knew this, after all, before we knew of Hitler or Stalin. Again to cite Orwell, there is a tendency for all stories of cruelty and atrocity to resemble one another. For this reason some overfamiliar or recycled accounts provoke boredom or disbelief, and can be made to seem propagandistic. (The classic example is the way the British fabrication of German outrages during the First World War had the paradoxical effect of turning skeptics into cynics when they heard the initially incredible news of Nazi innovations in that terrible sphere.) Orwell was on guard against this blunting tendency. He thought it probable that given moral breakdown, the same hellish desires would replicate and repeat themselves. He also believed the worst about Stalin’s system, and much earlier than most “enlightened” people, precisely because he found its public language so crude and brutal.

In a particularly luminous and funny passage on the correspondence between Vladimir Nabokov and Edmund Wilson, Amis puts his entire trust in Nabokov’s ability to employ language with care and discrimination, and shows that Wilson’s journeyman prose practically rigged itself to trap him, and others, into a more comforting “explanation” of the titanic misery and failure of the Stalin years. (Amis doesn’t make as much as he might of the fact that Nabokov produced his diamond-hard phrases in English, whereas his first language was Russian, while Wilson offered in return some thoughts about Russia that were trudging even in English.)

Stalin was no fool when he said that the death of one person is a tragedy, whereas the death of a million people is a statistic. Marx and Engels had always shuddered at the gross, enormous crudity of the steppe and the taiga, the illimitable reserves of primeval backwardness that they contained; and European liberalism had long been mesmerized by the Asiatic horror of Russian autocracy. This howling wilderness and boundless hinterland were themselves factors of “historical materialism.” So, “in the execution of the broad brushstrokes of his hate,” as Amis phrases it, Stalin “had weapons that Hitler did not have”:

He had cold: the burning cold of the Arctic. “At Oimyakon [in the Kolyma] a temperature has been recorded of −97.8 F. In far lesser cold, steel splits, tires explode and larch trees shower sparks at the touch of an axe …”

He had darkness: the Bolshevik sequestration, the shockingly bitter and unappeasable self-exclusion from the planet, with its fear of comparison, its fear of ridicule, its fear of truth.

He had space: the great imperium with its eleven time zones, the distances that gave their blessing to exile and isolation …

And, most crucially, Stalin had time.

In making the inescapable comparison with Hitler, who killed many fewer people (and even killed many fewer Communists) than Stalin, Amis is guided mostly by the view of Robert Conquest. He also relies, in varying degrees, on Martin Malia, Richard Pipes, and Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. In Conquest’s opinion, the visceral reaction to Nazism entails a verdict that it was morally worse than Stalinism, even if its eventual hecatomb was a less colossal one. This distinction rests on the sheer intentionality and obscenity of the
Shoah
, or Final Solution. Those who were killed in Ukraine, by a state-sponsored famine, were not killed as Ukrainians in quite the same way as the Ukrainian Jews of Babi Yar were later killed as Jews. The slave system of the Gulag did not have as its primary objective the turning of living people into corpses. The huge callousness of the system simply allowed vast numbers to be treated as expendable.

The distinction is certainly worth preserving. As Amis phrases it, “When I read about the Holocaust I experience something that I do not experience when I read about the Twenty Million: a sense of physical infestation. This is species shame.” To this one might add that Germany was a literate, democratic, and advanced civilization before the Nazis got to it, whereas Russia at the time of the 1905 revolution was in a condition more like that of Turkey, or Iran, or even (in some areas) Afghanistan today. It did have a “Westernized” industrial and intellectual element, but it was from exactly this stratum that Marxism drew most of its followers. And many of them regarded the mass of the Russian people in much the way that a British official in early colonial Bengal might have viewed the benighted natives. Probably, if we look for explanations for the indulgence shown toward Stalinism by men like George Bernard Shaw and H. G. Wells, we will find part of the answer in the quasi-eugenic and quasi-anthropological approach they took to most questions. (Fabian socialism, in the same period, emphasized the progressive aspects of social engineering in the British Empire.) But Amis, who briefly mocks the gullibility of the Bloomsbury and
New Statesman
tradition, also forgets that the
grand prix
for prescience here belongs to the atheist, socialist, and anti-imperialist Bertrand Russell, whose
The Practice and Theory of Bolshevism
(1920) was the first and in many ways the most penetrating critique.

I don’t know if it was at this point or a slightly later one that I realized that Amis was exhibiting a tendency to flail. There is certainly merit in restating Stalin’s exorbitant and lustful criminality, which stands comparison to that of the most paranoid and sanguinary moments of antiquity as well as of modernity. (The title
Koba the Dread
is an amalgam of Stalin’s nickname and the more straightforward Russian meaning of “the Terrible,” as in Ivan.) But we have grown up reading Solzhenitsyn, Joseph Berger, Eugenia Ginzburg, Lev Kopelev, Roy Medvedev, and many other firsthand chroniclers of the nightmare. Names like Vorkuta and Kolyma are not as familiar to most people as Treblinka or Birkenau, but the word “Gulag” (one of the many hateful acronyms of the system) does duty for the whole, and is known to everybody. Amis appears to deny this when he says that a general recognition of the toll of Stalinist slavery and murder “hasn’t happened,” and that “in the general consciousness the Russian dead sleep on.” He should have hesitated longer before taking the whole weight of responsibility for this memory, and our memory, on his shoulders.

The clue to this hubris comes in the second part of his title, with its allusion to mirth. Amis is acutely, vibrantly sensitive to the different registers of laughter. He knows that it can be the most affirming and uniquely human sound, and also the most sinister and animalistic one. He understands every note of every octave that separates the liberating shout of mirth from the cackle of a bully or the snigger of a sadist. (Nabokov’s title
Laughter in the Dark
provides a perfect pitch here.) So he’s in confident form when he describes the servile laughter that greeted Stalin when he was “forcibly” induced to take the stage at the Bolshoi Theater in 1937, and modestly agreed to be a candidate in the upcoming “election.” Here is some of the transcript, according to Dmitri Volkogonov:

Of course, I could have said something light about anything and everything. [laughter] … I understand there are masters of that sort of thing not just in the capitalist countries, but here, too, in our Soviet country. [laughter, applause]

Many surviving eyewitnesses of many tyrannical courts have told us that the most exacting and nerve-straining moments come when the despot is in a good mood. Stalin had perhaps the most depraved and limited humor of the lot. In addition to being a grand-opera widow-and-orphan manufacturer, and widow-and-orphan slayer, he was a sniggerer and a bad chuckler. Amis observes of the foul scene above:

Ground zero of the Great Terror—and here was the Party, joined in a panic attack of collusion in yet another enormous lie. They clapped, they laughed. Did
he
laugh? Do we hear it—the “soft, dull, sly laugh,” the “grim, dark laughter, which comes up from the depths”?

However, Amis also refers to laughter of a somewhat different sort, and here, having called attention to the splendors of this little book, I am compelled to say where I think it fails. And by “compelled” I suppose I must mean “obliged,” since it appears on the author’s own warrant that the book’s shortcomings are mostly my fault. In the fall of 1999 Amis attended a meeting in London where I spoke from the platform. The hall was one of those venues (Cooper Union, in New York, might be an analogy) where the rafters had once echoed with the rhetoric of the left. I made an allusion to past evenings with old comrades, and the audience responded with what Amis at first generously terms “affectionate laughter.” But then he gives way to the self-righteousness and superficiality that let him down.