Martin Amis - Koba the Dread

I, for one, find the work of our theatres pitiful and terrifying… Go to the Moscow theatres and look at the colourless, boring productions which are all alike and differ only in their degree of worthlessness… In your effort to eradicate formalism, you have destroyed art!

A few days later he was arrested. The file on Meyerhold contains his letter from prison to Molotov:

The investigators began to use force on me, a sick, sixty-five-year-old man. I was made to lie face down and then beaten on the soles of my feet and my spine with a rubber strap… For the next few days, when those parts of my legs were covered with extensive internal haemorrhaging, they again beat the red-blue-and-yellow bruises with the strap and the pain was so intense that it felt as if boiling water was being poured on these sensitive areas. I howled and wept from the pain… [which] caused my eyes to weep unending streams of tears. Lying face down on the floor, I discovered that I could wriggle, twist and squeal like a dog when its master whips it… When I lay down on the cot and fell asleep, after eighteen hours of interrogation, in order to go back in an hour’s time for more, I was woken up by my own groaning and because I was jerking about like a patient in the last stages of typhoid fever.

You know that your sleep has been politicized – when that is what wakes you. The interrogator, he added, urinated in his mouth. Meyerhold wrote this letter on 13 January 1940, having confessed to whatever it was they wanted him to confess to (spying for the British and the Japanese, among other charges). Stalin needed confessions; he followed the progress of certain interrogations (lasting months or even years), and couldn’t sleep until confessions were secured. So his sleep, of course, was also politicized.

A few days after Meyerhold’s arrest his young wife, the actress Zinaida Raikh, was found dead in their apartment. She had seventeen knife wounds. The neighbours had heard her screams; they thought she was rehearsing . It is reported that her eyes, presumably closed in sleep when the doorbell rang, had been cut out.

Meyerhold was shot on 2 February 1940.

Ihad just begun this book when I came across the following, in an account of the Soviet-exported Hungarian ‘revolution’ of 1919:

With some twenty of ‘Lenin’s Boys’ [the terror wing of the Revolutionary Council], Tibor Szamuely… executed several locals accused of collaborating with the Romanians… One Jewish schoolboy who tried to plead for his father’s life was killed for calling Szamuely a ‘wild beast’… Szamuely had requisitioned a train and was travelling around the country hanging any peasant opposed to collectivization…

My first thought was to fax Bob Conquest with the question: ‘Was Tibor Szamuely related to Tibor Szamuely?’ Then I recalled the piece about Tibor, our Tibor, written by my father in his Memoirs . I settled down to it, thinking that I knew Tibor’s story pretty well, and thinking, moreover, that it was a happy story, a story of struggle, heroic cunning, luck, escape, subversive triumph. And I finished the piece with a pain in my throat. This is not a Meyerhold story; but it is another story about the politicization of sleep.

Tibor Szamuely was Tibor Szamuely’s uncle , and a famous associate of Lenin’s. Tibor, our Tibor, ‘had a framed photograph, prominently displayed, of the two monsters side by side facing a crowd from a platform’, my father writes. It was, then, as a scion of an émigré Hungarian political family that Tibor was born in Moscow in 1925. When he was eleven his father disappeared into the mouth of 1936. Tibor fought in the Red Army while still in his teens. In the early 1950s Tibor happened to say, in the hearing of somebody he thought he could trust, that he was sick of the sight of that ‘fat pig’ Georgi Malenkov (Prime Minister of the USSR, 1953–55). Representatives of ‘the Organs’ came for him in the middle of the night. He got eight years, to be served in the northern camp of Vorkuta – a name that means as much to a Russian, perhaps, as the name Dachau means to a Jew. Or means more. I choose Dachau advisedly and maybe pusillanimously. Many people died in it but Dachau did not have time to become a death camp (its gas chambers were built too late). Vorkuta was not a death camp. The gulag had no death camps of the Nazi type, no Belzec, no Sobibor (though it had execution camps). But all the camps were death camps, by the nature of things. Those not immediately killed at Auschwitz, which was a slave camp and a death camp, tended to last three months. Two years seems to have been the average for the slave camps of the gulag archipelago.

‘Write to your mother’ were Tibor’s last words to his wife as he was led away at three o’clock in the morning. It used to be his boast that he was the only prisoner ever freed by Stalin – by Stalin personally. Nina Szamuely’s mother had apparently had close relations with Hungary’s Stalinist dictator Matyas Rakosi. Stalin was duly called or cabled by the Stalinist; orders were dispatched to Vorkuta. The KGB man sent to liberate Tibor apologized to him, on the railway platform by kissing his shoes . The convicted slanderer of the state was now in favour. And Tibor, by a series of wonderful feints and flukes, escaped to the England he had visited as a boy. He escaped with his wife, his two children, and also (a great coup) his vast and irreplaceable library. So this was a happy story, I thought: a happy story.

It didn’t take Tibor long to establish himself: historian, academic, journalist, USSR-watcher. When his naturalization papers came through, the fascists held a celebratory lunch. Of his new citizenship he later said to my father, ‘You know, this means I have no more worries. Nothing matters to me now. Not even dying. I’ll be able to say to myself, well, at least it’s in England.’ And it was in England: two years later, at the age of forty-seven. And Nina died two years after that: the same day, the same cancer. I remember her with greater clarity and feeling than I remember him. I used to smile at it: her air of worry, her constant activity of worry. And I remember her funeral, too, and ‘one of the most harrowing sights imaginable,’ as my father writes, ‘that of the two young orphaned children, Helen and George, there at the top of the church steps to greet the mourners, standing completely alone…’

Tibor was an unusually late riser, and Kingsley once complained to Nina about it. She said that her husband sometimes needed to see the first signs of dawn before he could begin to contemplate sleep. Even in England. He needs, said Nina, ‘to be absolutely certain that they won’t be coming for him that night’.

We cannot understand it, and there is no reason why we should. It takes a significant effort of imagination to guess at the ‘fear that millions of people find insurmountable’, in the words of Vasily Grossman, ‘this fear written up in crimson letters over the leaden sky of Moscow – this terrible fear of the state’.

‘Hugh MacDiarmid: what a bastard,’ said my father in about 1972, referring to the man widely believed to be the greatest Scottish poet of the twentieth century. ‘He became a Communist in 1956 – after Hungary.’

‘And what’s his stuff like?’ I asked.

‘Oh, you know. Nothing but Marxist clichés interspersed with archaic “Scotch” expletives.’

‘For instance?’

He thought for a moment. My memory exactly vouches for lines two and four, though it can’t do the same for lines one and three, where, for that matter, any old rubbish would have done. He said something like:

Every political system is a superstructure over a determining