Martin Amis - Koba the Dread

How much did the Oxford comrades know, in 1941? There were public protests in the West about the Soviet forced-labour camps as early as 1931. There were also many solid accounts of the violent chaos of Collectivization (1929–34) and of the 1933 famine (though no suggestion, as yet, that the famine was terroristic). And there were the Moscow Show Trials of 1936–38, which were open to foreign journalists and observers, and were monitored worldwide. In these pompous and hysterical charades, renowned Old Bolsheviks ‘confessed’ to being career-long enemies of the regime (and to other self-evidently ridiculous charges). The pubescent Solzhenitsyn was ‘stunned by the fraudulence of the trials’. And yet the world, on the whole, took the other view, and further accepted indignant Soviet denials of famine, enserfment of the peasantry, and slave labour. ‘There was no reasonable excuse for believing the Stalinist story. The excuses which can be advanced are irrational,’ writes Conquest in The Great Terror . The world was offered a choice between two realities; and the young Kingsley, in common with the overwhelming majority of intellectuals everywhere, chose the wrong reality.

The Oxford Communists would certainly have known about the Soviet decree of 7 April 1935, which rendered children of twelve and over subject to ‘all measures of criminal punishment’, including death. This law, which was published on the front page of Pravda and caused universal consternation (reducing the French CP to the argument that children, under socialism, became grownups very quickly), was intended, it seems, to serve two main purposes. One was social: it would expedite the disposal of the multitudes of feral and homeless orphans created by the regime. The second purpose, though, was political. It applied barbaric pressure on the old oppositionists, Kamenev and Zinoviev, who had children of eligible age; these men were soon to fall, and their clans with them. The law of 7 April 1935 was the crystallization of ‘mature’ Stalinism. Imagine the mass of the glove that Stalin swiped across your face; imagine the mass of it. [2] It will be as well, here, to get a foretaste of his rigour. The fate of Mikhail Tukhachevsky, a famous Red commander in the Civil War, was ordinary enough, and that of his family was too. Tukhachevsky was arrested in 1937, tortured (his interrogation protocols were stained with drops of ‘flying’ blood, suggesting that his head was in rapid motion at the time), farcically arraigned, and duly executed. Moreover (this is Robert C. Tucker’s précis in Stalin in Power: The Revolution from Above, 1928–41 ): ‘His wife and daughter returned to Moscow where she was arrested a day or two later along with Tukhachevsky’s mother, sisters, and brothers Nikolai and Aleksandr. Later his wife and both brothers were killed on Stalin’s orders, three sisters were sent to camps, his young daughter Svetlana was placed in a home for children of “enemies of the people” and arrested and sent to a camp on reaching the age of seventeen, and his mother and one sister died in exile.’

On 7 April 1935, my father was nine days away from his thirteenth birthday. Did he ever wonder, as he continued to grow up, why a state should need ‘the last line of defence’ (as a secret reinforcing instruction put it) against twelve-year-olds?

Perhaps there is a reasonable excuse for believing the Stalinist story. The real story – the truth – was entirely unbelievable.

It was in the following summer of 1969, I think, that I sat for an hour in the multi-acre garden of the fascist mansion in southern Hertfordshire with Kingsley Amis and Robert Conquest. A scrap of the conversation sticks in my mind, because I pulled off a mildly successful witticism at a time when I was still (rightly) anxious about my general seaworthiness in adult company. Kingsley and Bob (a.k.a. ‘Kingers’ and ‘Conquers’, just as Bob’s future translatee, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, would be referred to as ‘Solzhers’ – pronounced soldiers ), were deploring a recent production of Hamlet in which the Prince was homosexual and Ophelia was played by a man. In retrospect that sounds almost staid, for 1969. Anyhow, I said, ‘Get thee to a monastery.’ No great thing; but it seemed to scan.

In 1967 Kingsley had published the article called ‘Why Lucky Jim Turned Right’. The ex-Communist was developing into a reasonably active Labourite – before becoming (and remaining) a markedly noisy Tory. In 1968 Bob had published The Great Terror , his classic study of Stalin’s purges of the 1930s, and was on the way to assembling a body of work that would earn him the title, bestowed at a plenum of the Central Committee in Moscow in 1990, of ‘anti-Sovietchik number one’. Both Kingsley and Bob, in the 1960s, were frequently referred to as ‘fascists’ in the general political debate. The accusation was only semi-serious (as indeed was the general political debate, it now seems. In my milieu, policemen and even traffic wardens were called fascists). Kingers and Conquers referred to their own weekly meetings, at Bertorelli’s in Charlotte Street, as ‘the fascist lunch’; here they would chat and carouse with other fascists, among them the journalist Bernard Levin, the novelists Anthony Powell and John Braine (an infrequent and much-feared participant), and the defector historian Tibor Szamuely. What united the fascist lunchers was well-informed anti-Communism. Tibor Szamuely knew what Communism was. He had known them: purge, arrest, gulag.

I didn’t read The Great Terror in 1968 (I would have been more likely, at that time, to have read Conquest’s poetry). But I spent an hour with it, and never forgot the cold elegance of the following remark about ‘sources’: ‘1. Contemporary official accounts require little comment. They are, of course, false as to essentials, but they are still most informative. (It is untrue that Mdivani was a British spy, but it is true that he was executed.)’ I have recently read the book twice, in the first edition (which I must have successfully stolen from my father), and in its revised, post- glasnost form, The Great Terror: A Reassessment . When asked to suggest a new title for the revised work, Conquest told his publisher, ‘How about I Told You So, You Fucking Fools? ’ Because the book, itself revolutionary at the time of its appearance, has since been massively vindicated. In the mid-1960s I joined in hundreds of conversations like the following (the interlocutors here are my father and A. J. Ayer):

‘In the USSR, at least they’re trying to forge something positive.’

‘But it doesn’t matter what they’re trying to forge, because they’ve already killed five million people.’

‘You keep going back to the five million.’

‘If you’re tired of that five million, then I’m sure I can find you another five million.’

And one can, now. One can find another 5 million, and another, and another.

Alongside all this there was, in England then, a far hotter debate: the one about Vietnam. A certain urbanity was maintained in arguments about the USSR. It was in arguments about Vietnam that people yelled, wept, fought, stalked out. I watched my father forfeit two valuable friendships over Vietnam (those of A. Alvarez and Karl Miller). For he, and most but not all of the frequenters of the fascist lunch, broadly backed American policy. And this was, of course, the position of a minuscule and much-disliked minority. In my first term at Oxford (autumn, 1968) I attended a demonstration against the resuppression of Czechoslovakia. About a hundred people were there. We heard speeches. The mood was sorrowful, decent. Compare this to the wildly peergroup-competitive but definitely unfakeable emotings and self-lacerations of the crowds outside the American Embassy in Grosvenor Square, where they gathered in their tens of thousands.