Martin Amis - Koba the Dread

Other doctors were implicated, and in such numbers (Conquest tells us) that they were collectively known as ‘Gorkyists’ in the prisons and camps.

This and subsequent quotes are from an account by Sir Jerome Horsey of the Muscovy Company in London.

‘All saving his king, which by no means he could make stand in his place with all the rest upon the plain board’ (Horsey’s note, which sounds too good to be true).

Stalin, it seems, drank moderately by Russian standards. But he postponed giving up smoking (cigarettes and pipe) until the fruitlessly late date of 1952.

N. V. Krylenko (who was prosecutor at the SR trial, and sometime Commissar of Justice) held that laws were hypocritical. ‘It is one of the most widespread sophistries of bourgeois science to maintain that the court… is an institution whose task it is to realize some sort of special “justice” that stands above classes… “Let justice prevail in courts” – one can hardly conceive more bitter mockery of reality than this.’ In July 1938 Stalin was given a list of 138 names; the words ‘Shoot all 138’ accompany his signature. Krylenko’s name was on that list. His trial lasted twenty minutes (the paperwork minimum), and the protocol ran to nineteen lines. Was that unhypocritical enough for him?

This crescendo of indignation could have continued. Kamenev’s wife was arrested in 1935 and shot in 1941; his older son was arrested in 1937 and shot in 1939 (his younger son survived a Cheka orphanage and the gulag). Zinoviev’s three brothers were shot, as was one of his sisters; three other sisters, together with three nephews (one of whom was shot), a niece, a brother-in-law and a cousin were sent to camp; his son Stefan was shot.

The Gulag Archipelago , Volume Two, pp. 119–20.

Partido Obrero de Unificatión Marxista , the heretical sect of Catalonia, savaged by the Cheka during the Spanish Civil War for its Trotskyist bent.

‘I’m very sorry, but I can be of no help.’ ‘I don’t know anything.’

The Nabokov quote is naturally another matter, but American readers should be told that the word being quibbled with here means, in English, something like ‘moronic bastard’, and has no sexual connotation.

Liddie Neece, the fourth Mrs Robert Conquest. ‘Liddie and I are getting married,’ he told my father. ‘Bob, you can’t do that. Not again ’ ‘Well, I thought – one for the road.’ That was twenty-two years ago.

These feelings are described in Autopsy for an Empire . Volkogonov died shortly after completing it, in 1995.

Dates of publication in Russia. They appeared in reverse order in the West.

The Kronstadt sailors, and other groups, actually called themselves revolutionaries and fought under the red flag.

‘Above all, it was Trotsky,’ writes Niall Ferguson in The Pity of War , ‘who in December 1918 ordered the formation of “blocking units” equipped with machine guns, whose role was simply to shoot front-line soldiers who attempted to retreat.’

When Austria’s Haider praises one of Hitler’s employment policies, Europe spits him out, convulsively, as if he were a bad oyster. Russia’s Putin praises Stalin, echoes Stalin (‘to liquidate the oligarchs as a class’), and proposes to mint coins bearing Stalin’s profile. He is welcomed at Downing Street, and has tea with the Queen… More substantively, between 1945 and 1966, writes Solzhenitsyn, ‘ eighty-six thousand Nazi criminals had been convicted in West Germany… And during the same period, in our country (according to the reports of the Military Collegium of the Supreme Court), about ten men have been convicted.’ In the 1980s, Molotov and Kaganovich, two elderly Eichmanns, were living on state pensions in Moscow.

Solzhenitsyn recalls a quaveringly passionate speech by a Greek writer, in Moscow, on behalf of the imprisoned Communists. Maybe he ‘did not understand the shamelessness of his appeal, and maybe, too, in Greece they do not have the proverb: “Why grieve for others when there is sobbing at home?”’

The Gulag Archipelago : ‘Sukhanovka was the most terrible prison [the Cheka] had. Its very name was used to intimidate prisoners; interrogators would hiss it threateningly. And you’d not be able to question those who had been there: either they were insane and talking only disconnected nonsense, or they were dead.’

In his introduction to the abridged single-volume Gulag (first published in 1999, and recommended only as a kind of crib), Edward E. Ericson gives the following American sales figures: 2,244,000 for Volume One, 500,000 for Volume Two, and 100,000 for Volume Three. These figures are representative worldwide, and point to the limits of our stamina and appetite. In fact, The Gulag Archipelago simply goes on getting better, and, of course, achieves an impregnable unity.

The Politburo moved against Beria with extreme wariness. The man chosen to arrest him was no lesser figure than the war-winner, Marshal Zhukov.

To risk bathos, we should incidentally consider, as an illustration of the Chekist personality, the matter of Khrushchev’s car. When the cabal figureheaded by a trembling Brezhnev (who once fainted before Kaganovich’s wrath) finally ousted him, Khrushchev lived on in disgraced and much-monitored retirement (the bathroom, too, was bugged, and Khrushchev stoutly denounced the Politburo for spending good rubles just ‘to eavesdrop on my farts’). They gave Khrushchev a car. Much thought had gone into Khrushchev’s car. It was a low-to-middling kind of car, and went wrong all the time (which was meant to be humiliating). But the point was that the car had private plates, and not government plates. This was intended to suggest that Khruschev was corrupt . You want to say, ‘Make your point’ Either a reeking rattletrap with government plates, or, with private plates, a burnished limousine.

The poem’s ‘tone may give it the appearance of a commentary after the event [reads my father’s note]; in fact Binyon wrote it within the first few weeks of war’. Like Kipling at the same stage, he seemed to grasp the dimensions of what was about to unfold.