Martin Amis - Koba the Dread

It Happens in Russia , published in England in 1951.

One still encounters the resilient superstition that it is right-wing to give high figures. Conquest and Pipes were Cold Warriors (Conquest advised Thatcher, Pipes advised Reagan); their figures are therefore ‘Cold Warrior’ figures, inflated for the purposes of propaganda. But Conquest and Pipes are world-renowned historians; they are under oath. When Conquest sent me a copy of his Kolyma , he wrote on the dedication page: ‘NB Chapter 9 is obsolete .’ And under the chapter heading itself (‘The Death Roll’) he added: ‘This is now known to be less than these reports indicate.’ Conquest’s figure for the executions in the Great Terror, on the other hand, has gone up, and is close to a ferocious 2 million for 1937–38… The mass graves now being discovered can present additional difficulties of tabulation. In Night of Stone Catherine Merridale writes: ‘The bodies, a twisted mass in death, have rotted now, and the skeletons are impossible to separate. It is inadvisable to rely on a skull-count because most of the skulls were damaged, if not shattered, by the executioners’ bullets… When you have finished, you count the femurs and divide by two. In most cases, the figure will run into thousands.’

The Memorial Society, an agency of Russian remembrance, prints its lists of the dead in books the size of telephone directories.

Except at the highest level. We read of an exhausted Dzerzhinsky’s costly rest cures in European spas.

This is more or less true of Iago, Claudius and Edmund (to take only the major tragedies). But we are left staring at the fact that Macbeth did not stop short – that he was, indeed, a usurping dictator who ruled by terror (and terror, perhaps, is always a confession of illegitimacy). ‘Each new morn, / New widows howl, new orphans cry…’ The fullest evocation of a terrorized society is given to the minor, linking character of Ross; but it has its points:

Macbeth incidentally contains an annihilating definition of the reality of War Communism (and Lenin’s slogan, ‘The worse the better’). It consists of seven words and is chanted by the Witches in unison (I.i.11): ‘Fair is foul, and foul is fair…’

We cannot leave the ward without at least looking in on Vladimir Ilyich. He is a scowl that occasionally allows itself a refreshing cackle. Lenin was courteous to good Bolsheviks who agreed with him, and more than courteous to his wife, sister, and ‘mistress’ (all of them good Bolsheviks who agreed with him). Other people, though: they were not merely of no interest; they didn’t even faintly register. Lenin was a moral aphasic, a moral autist… When I read someone’s prose I reckon to get a sense of their moral life. Lenin’s writing mind is cross-eyed in its intensity of focus, painfully straitened and corseted, indefatigable in its facetiousness and iteration, and constantly strafed by microscopic pedantries.

From Colin Thubron’s In Siberia . During blizzards whole camps were known to perish. Everyone died. Even the guards. Even the dogs.

The word for this is agonism : the permanent struggle of the self-appointed martyr. Militant Islam is obviously and proclaimedly agonistic.

At the same point in the Bukharin trial two years later the ‘folk poet’ D. Dzhambul contributed a similar piece called ‘Annihilate’.

He merits only two passing references in John Reed’s Ten Days That Shook the World , and the book was later banned in the USSR for that reason. ‘His name does not occur in any document relating to those historic days and nights’ (Volkogonov).

With hindsight we may think that Stalin was hardly the automatic choice for such a role. His real job was to cordon Lenin off from the new power vacuum, which the Politburo was immediately and unsentimentally jockeying to fill.

During the mid-1980s David Remnick, with appropriately heartless persistence, badgered Kaganovich for an interview. He found what he expected to find: a twitching amnesiac on a state pension. This was the charge against Mikhail: he was Hitler’s candidate for leading a fascist Russia. The Kaganoviches were Jewish.

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.

Do their deaths become them? Tucker quotes a witness to the following exchange, as the two men faced their executioners. Zinoviev: ‘This is a fascist coup!’ Kamenev: ‘Stop it, Grisha. Be quiet. Let’s die with dignity.’ Zinoviev: ‘No!… Before my death I must state plainly that what has happened in our country is a fascist coup.’ (Tucker goes on to argue that ‘fascist coup’ was a reasonable analysis.) Volkogonov gives this, via one of the prison guards: ‘Although they had both written to Stalin many times begging for mercy and were apparently expecting it (he had after all promised), they sensed this was the end. Kamenev walked along the corridor in silence, nervously pressing his palms. Zinoviev became hysterical and had to be carried.’

Bukharin died with defiant dignity. On balance he perhaps deserves the cadences of Arthur Koestler’s fictional conclusion in Darkness at Noon :

A shapeless figure bent over him, he smelt the fresh leather of the revolver belt; but what insignia did the figure wear on the sleeves and shoulder-straps of its uniform – and in whose name did it raise the dark pistol barrel?

A second smashing blow hit him on the ear. Then all became quiet. There was the sea again with its sounds. A wave slowly lifted him up. It came from afar and travelled sedately on, a shrug of eternity.

Bukharin’s wife spent six months in a small cell ankle-deep in water and went on to serve eighteen years. Their daughter survived. His first wife and all her close family were wiped out.

The peasants, now tied to their collective farms, continued to be despised as essentially ‘unsocialist’ well into the 1960s.

This is more or less the consensus view. Malia dissents from it; he sees Collectivization as structural to the Lenin-Stalin continuum, and he is eloquent. ‘For a Bolshevik party the real choice in 1929 was not between Stalin’s road and Bukharin’s; it was between doing approximately what Stalin did and giving up the whole Leninist enterprise’ ( The Soviet Tragedy ). The question remains: how approximately do we take the word ‘approximately’?

A poem of 1936 about Collectivization pictured Stalin on an ebony steed: