Martin Amis - Koba the Dread

In another sense, of course, the revolutionaries were professionals: avowedly and disastrously, they were ‘professional revolutionaries’, just as Chernyshevsky had enjoined them to be, ‘fulltime revolutionaries’, with their leather jackets, revolvers, hideouts, trysts, schisms, conspiracies, passwords, false beards, false names. [15] ‘Lenin’ is thought to derive from the River Lena. ‘Stalin’: man of steel. ‘Kamenev’: man of stone. ‘Molotov’: the hammer. ‘Trotsky’ ( né Lev Bronstein) was the name on one of his false passports; it stuck. Watched, trailed, shadowed, menaced, detained, searched, infiltrated, provoked, arrested, imprisoned, interrogated, tried, sentenced: when, in the course of a single evening, these undergrounders found themselves at the commanding heights, how could it be otherwise than who-whom ? (in Lenin’s famous question)? Who will vanquish whom? Who will destroy whom?

Nabokov’s ‘Life of Chernyshevsky’, which comprises about a hundred pages of The Gift , is serious (and comic) and scholarly, and based on deep reading. And poor Nikolai Gavrilovich, of course, emerges as a Gogolian grotesque (obsessed by perpetual-motion machines and encyclopedias), a shambling cuckold, and a literary anti-talent (who, with his ‘agonisingly circumstantial’ style, was ‘a person ridiculously alien to artistic creation’). The following lines take on wide application, if we regard Chernyshevsky as the tutelary spirit, the jinx or genius of Bolshevism and its transformative dream:

In the descriptions of his absurd experiments and in his commentaries on them, in this mixture of ignorance and ratiocination, one can already detect that barely perceptible flaw which gave his later utterances something like a hint of quackery… Such was the fate of Chernyshevsky that everything turned against him: no matter what subject he touched there would come to light – insidiously, and with the most taunting inevitability – something that was completely opposed to his conception of it… Everything he touches falls to pieces. It is sad to read in his diaries about the appliances of which he tries to make use – scale-arms, bobs, corks, basins – and nothing revolves, or if it does, then according to unwelcome laws, in the reverse direction to what he wants: an eternal motor going in reverse – why, this is an absolute nightmare, the abstraction to end all abstractions, infinity with a minus sign, plus a broken jug into the bargain… it is amazing how everything bitter and heroic which life manufactured for Chernyshevsky was invariably accompanied by a flavouring of vile farce.

But now we feel a freedom, do we not – a freedom from who-whom ? Edmund Wilson, in his trundling way, might have expected Nabokov to harbour some distaste for his dispossessor and deracinator. And it isn’t so. Nabokov writes about Chernyshevsky with pity, with reverence, with artistic love. And I’m afraid that this is as far as we are ever going to get with the utopia and the earthly paradise. Only in art will the lion lie down with the lamb, and the rose grow without thorn.

You could always joke about it. This was a contribution by Robin Ravensbourne to a clerihew competition in the New Statesman (another notable winner was Basil Ransome’s ‘Karl Marx / Provided the clerks / With a dialectical reason / For their treason’). A month later there was a Weekend Comp. where you had to think up the names of organizations whose acronyms mocked and betrayed them: Barnaby Rudge and Oliver Twist Hostel for Elderly Ladies, for example. Robert Conquest won first prize with, among others, Teachers’ Organization for Aiding Disoriented Youth, and Sailors’, Yachtsmen’s and Pilots’ Health Institute for Long Island Sound. (And I also admired Mr Ransome’s post-modernist Professional Institute of Registered Newspaper Typesetters.) But my father took the bays with the following: Institute of New Statesman Editors and Contributors for Underwriting the Russian Experiment. And once a month or so, upstairs, there was another Russian connection: our ballet critic, Oleg Kerensky, was the nephew of Alexander Kerensky, that ‘buffoon, charlatan and nincompoop’, as a contemporary relevantly described him, who headed the Provisional Government of 1917. An additional ten IQ points in Kerensky might have saved Russia from Lenin; and a similar elevation in Tsar Nicholas II might have saved Russia from Kerensky. It is now 1975, and Kerensky is not long dead, over in New York. And his nephew, Oleg (a homosexual of a familiar type: warm, courteous, and passionate about the arts), looks in once a month with his ballet column.

Insecure. When you can joke about something, you’re meant to feel secure about it. And you could always joke about the USSR. Christopher Hitchens joked about the USSR. For instance… 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 (‘The chicks it’s not,’ I remember Christopher saying). It can’t be the waitresses: they’ve all been loyal party members for at least forty-five years.

This is a joke with a limited constituency (women are seldom amused by it), but it does point to one of the Bolsheviks’ most promethean projects. They intended to break the peasantry; they intended to break the church; they intended to break all opposition and dissent. And they also intended (as Conquest, writing of Stalin, put it) ‘to break the truth’.

Sometimes, in our casual office arguments, I saw an acknowledgment of this in Christopher’s eyes. He could joke about it. But he wasn’t secure. How could he have been? Still, the truth, like much else, was postponable; there were things that, for now, were more important. [16] I would like to emphasize that Christopher (like James Fenton, and all other Trotskyists known to me) was, of course, strenuously anti-Stalinist. But as a socialist he needed to feel that October had not been an instantaneous – or indeed an intrinsic – disaster. Even in 1975 it was considered tasteless or mean-spirited to be too hard on the Soviet Union. No one wanted to be seen as a ‘red-baiter’ – or no one except my father. Although I always liked Christopher’s journalism, there seemed to me to be something wrong with it, something faintly but pervasively self-limiting: the sense that the truth could be postponed. This flaw disappeared in 1989, and his prose made immense gains in burnish and authority. I used to attribute the change to the death of Christopher’s father, in late 1988, and to subsequent convulsions in his life. It had little or nothing to do with that, I now see. It had to do with the demise of the socialist possibility. The residue of a tiring aspiration had evaporated.

We will all go on joking about it because there’s something in Bolshevism that is painfully, unshirkably comic. This became palpable when the Russian experiment entered its decadent phase: the vanity and high-bourgeois kleptomania of Brezhnev, the truly pitiful figure of Chernenko (an old janitor with barely enough strength to honour himself as a Hero of Socialist Labour). Both these men, and Andropov (the KGB highbrow), whom they flanked, presided over a great landmass of suffering. The country was living at African levels of poverty, malnutrition, disease and child mortality. (And Afghanistan, meanwhile, was having its next census slashed – indeed, almost halved.) [17] Sylvain Boulouque in The Black Book of Communism : ‘Out of a population of approximately 15.5 million, more than 5 million inhabitants have left for Pakistan and Iran, where they now live in miserable conditions… [M]ost observers agree that the war took between 1.5 million and 2 million lives, 90 per cent of whom were civilians. Between 2 million and 4 million were wounded.’ These figures are due for revision, post-2001.