Martin Amis - Koba the Dread

In 1968 the world seemed to go further left than it had ever gone before and would ever go again. But this left was the New Left: it represented, or turned out to represent, revolution as play. The ‘redeemer’ class was no longer to be found in the mines and factories; it was to be found in the university libraries and lecture halls. There were demonstrations, riots, torchings, street battles in England, Germany, Italy, Japan and the USA. And remember the Paris of 1968: barricades, street theatre, youth-worship (‘The young make love; the old make obscene gestures’), the resurgence of Marcuse (the wintry dialectician), and Sartre standing on street corners handing out Maoist pamphlets… The death throes of the New Left took the form of vanguard terrorism (the Red Brigades, the Baader-Meinhof gang, the Weathermen). And its afterlife is anarchistic, opposing itself to the latest mutation of capital: after imperialism, after fascism, it now faces globalization. We may note here that militant Islam cannot be made to fit into this ‘model’ – or into any other.

But red wasn’t dead, in 1968. During my time at Oxford they used to come to your room: the believers, the steely ones – the proselytizing Communists. One might adapt the old joke. Q: What’s the difference between a Communist car and a Communist proselytizer? A: You can close the door on a Communist proselytizer. To glance quickly at a crucial dissonance: it has always been possible to joke about the Soviet Union, just as it has never been possible to joke about Nazi Germany. (Hitler attracts mockery, but his actions repel it). This is not merely a question of decorum. In the German case, laughter automatically absents itself. Pace Adorno, it was not poetry that became impossible after Auschwitz. What became impossible was laughter. In the Soviet case, on the other hand, laughter intransigently refuses to absent itself. Immersion in the facts of the Bolshevik catastrophe may make this increasingly hard to accept, but such an immersion will never cleanse that catastrophe of laughter…

I have to say that for a while I rather creepily, but very loyally, toed my father’s line on Vietnam. Soon I changed my mind and we argued about it, often bitterly, for thirty years. [3] Conquest was strongly anti-Vietcong, but his support for the American conduct of the war was never emphatic, and has evolved in the direction of further deemphasis. (Here we may recall that, despite his donnish accent and manner, Conquest is an American. Well, American father, English mother; born in the UK; dual nationality; now a resident of California.) Kingsley was never less than 100 per cent earnest on Vietnam, right up until his death in 1995. As I now see it, America had no business involving itself in a series of distant convulsions where the ideas, variously interpreted, of a long-dead German economist were bringing biblical calamity to China, North Korea, Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia. The prosecution of the war by America, I came to think, was clearly intolerable, impossible, not only because of what it was doing to Vietnam, but also because of what it was doing to America. There was a ghostly epiphany, a ghostly confirmation, when, in the late 1980s, the number of home casualties in the war was officially exceeded by the number of suicides among its veterans. That is strong evidence of an ideological brutalization of the motherland. The veterans returned, as we know, not to flowers and embraces, but to isolation.

The Szamuelys. All four Szamuelys – Tibor, Nina, Helen and George – were staying at the fascist mansion on the day I drove from there to Oxford, in 1972, to be orally judged for my degree. When it was over I crowed the news home by telephone, and returned to a scene of celebration. At about one o’clock that night I made a cordially unrequited pass at Helen Szamuely and then blacked out on the chaise longue in the drawing room. I awoke at about five, and stood up wonderingly, and headed for the door. When I opened it, all the fascist burglar alarms went off and I roused everyone in the house, my father, stepmother, step-uncle, and all four Szamuelys.

Having analysed a particularly violent tackle by a particularly violent player, the ex-footballer Jimmy Greaves remarked: ‘Put it this way. He’s a lovely boy when he’s asleep.’ With the Bolsheviks, there was no such respite. In 1910 a political opponent said of Lenin that you couldn’t deal with a man who ‘for twenty-four hours of the day is taken up with the revolution, who has no other thoughts but thoughts of the revolution, and who, even in his sleep, dreams of nothing but revolution’. The actual Revolution, of course, had no effect on this habit. As the young secretary Khrushchev said to a cheering audience of Party members, ‘A Bolshevik is someone who feels himself to be a Bolshevik even when he’s sleeping!’ That’s how a Bolshevik felt about sleep,

Sleep was just another opportunity to feel like a Bolshevik.

But that is what they want, the believers, the steely ones, that is what they live for: the politicization of sleep. They want politics to be going on everywhere all the time, politics permanent and circumambient. They want the ubiquitization of politics; they want the politicization of sleep.

Soon we will look at what Stalin did to the Meyerholds: the extreme example of the politicization of sleep.

This is from a letter addressed to Maxim Gorky concerning the status of intellectuals under the new regime:

The intellectual strength of workers and peasants grows in the struggle to overturn the bourgeoisie and their acolytes, those second-rate intellectuals and lackeys of capitalism, who think they are the brains of the nation. They are not the brains of the nation. They’re its shit.

That isn’t Stalin. (That is Lenin.) Stalin hated intellectuals too, but he cared about what we call creative writing and had an uneasy feel for it. His famous and much-mocked remark, ‘writers are the engineers of human souls’, is not just a grandiose fatuity: it is a description of what he wanted writers to be under his rule. He didn’t understand that talented writers cannot go against their talent and survive, that they cannot be engineers. Talentless writers can, or they can try; it was a very good thing to be a talentless writer in the USSR, and a very bad thing to be a talented one.

Stalin personally monitored a succession of novelists, poets and dramatists. In this sphere he wavered as in no other. He gave Zamyatin his freedom: emigration. He menaced but partly tolerated Bulgakov (and went to his play Days of the Turbins fifteen times, as the theatre records show). He tortured and killed Babel. He destroyed Mandelstam. He presided over the grief and misery of Anna Akhmatova (and of Nadezhda Mandelstam). He subjected Gorky to a much stranger destiny, slowly deforming his talent and integrity; next to execution, deformity was the likeliest outcome for the post-October Russian writer, expressed most eloquently in suicide. He endured Pasternak; he silenced him, and took a lover and a child from him; still, he spared him (‘Do not touch this cloud-dweller’). But this is what he did to the Meyerholds.

The world-famous Vsevolod Meyerhold had displeased Stalin, at the height of the Great Terror, with his production of a play about the Civil War. Meyerhold was savaged by Pravda (that was a ritual, something like a promissory note of disaster) and his theatre was shut down. After a while he was given some employment and protection by Stanislavsky. Stanislavsky died in August 1938. Just under a year later Meyerhold was given an official opportunity to recant at a conference organized by the Committee on Art Affairs. He did not recant. He said, among other things: