Martin Amis - Koba the Dread

Wilson was not lastingly gulled by Stalin, but he could never give up on the essential purity of October. So he played his part in the great intellectual abasement. To explain this abasement certain historical conditions are often adduced. They are: the generational wound of World War I (a war successfully branded as ‘imperialist’ and therefore capitalist), the Great Depression of 1929–34, the rise of fascism and then Nazism (and their combined involvement in the Spanish Civil War), and, later, the moral force of the Russian losses in World War II. But the fact remains that despite ‘more and more voluminous and unignorable evidence’ to the contrary (as my father put it, writing of the mid-1950s), the USSR continued to be regarded as fundamentally progressive and benign; and the misconception endured until the mid-1970s. What was it? From our vantage it looks like a contagion of selective incuriosity, a mindgame begun in self-hypnosis and maintained by mass hysteria. And although the aberration was of serious political utility to Moscow, we still tend to regard it as a bizarre and embarrassing sideshow to the main events. We must hope to find a more structural connection.

In 1935 Wilson journeyed to the USSR and wrote about it in Travels in Two Democracies (1956), which, as Professor Karlinsky puts it,

is an affecting mixture of his own naive expectations and the harsh realities he does his best to explain away… Unlike such Western travelers as G. B. Shaw, who visited the USSR at the height of the post-collectivization famine and declared after his return that Soviet citizens were the best-fed people in Europe, Wilson perceived enough of Soviet realities to make him see that this was not the free and idealistic utopia, run by workers and peasants, which he had hoped to find.

Now: let us consider this utopia, the fully achieved utopia that Wilson hoped to find. Ten seconds of sober thought will decisively inform you that such a place is not heaven but a species of hell; that such a place is alien to us; that such a place is non-human. The ‘Potemkin villages’ occasionally rigged up to deceive foreign VIPs, with the appearances of plenitude trucked in from the cities, and labourers and cowgirls impersonated by the secret police, and imported trees wedged into slots on the road-side: such a setting is an appropriate figure for utopia, any utopia, because it is farce, because it is travesty.

Wilson shepherded his illusions into his grave (1972). I want to quote some extracts from Nabokov’s great letter of 23 February 1948: 1948. In its opening sentences you can hear Nabokov rolling his sleeves up, and you can feel the prose moving a notch towards his high style:

Dear Bunny,

You naively compare my (and the ‘old Liberals”) attitude towards the Soviet regime ( sensu lato [broadly]) to that of a ‘ruined and humiliated’ American Southerner towards the ‘wicked’ North. You must know me and ‘Russian Liberals’ very little if you fail to realize the amusement and contempt with which I regard Russian émigrés whose ‘hatred’ of the Bolsheviks is based on a sense of financial loss or class degringolade . It is preposterous (though quite in line with Soviet writings on the subject) to postulate any material interest at the bottom of a Russian Liberal’s (or Democrat’s or Socialist’s) rejection of the Soviet regime.

Despite his palpable warmth of feeling, Nabokov is here showing restraint. For Wilson has clearly delivered a gross injury to his friend and to their friendship. Nabokov is bearing in mind that Wilson, not understanding the Bolshevik reality, does not understand the insult, either.

Ominously gathering force, the letter continues. Nabokov reminds, or informs, Wilson that the opposition to Bolshevism was and is pluralistic. There follows a comparatively playful elucidation (‘[i]ncidental but very important’) on the exact constituency of the Russian ‘intelligentsia’ (they were, definingly, professionals: ‘In fact a typical Russian intelligent would look askance at an avant-garde poet’); Nabokov lists their strengths and virtues (we feel VN Senior as a powerful exemplum here), and firmly proceeds:

But of course people who read Trotsky for information anent Russian culture cannot be expected to know all this. I have also a hunch that the general idea that avant-garde literature and art were having a wonderful time under Lenin and Trotsky is mainly due to Eisenstadt [Eisenstein] films – ‘montage’ – things like that – and great big drops of sweat rolling down rough cheeks. The fact that pre-Revolution Futurists joined the party has also contributed to the kind of (quite false) avantgarde atmosphere which the American intellectual associates with the Bolshevik Revolution.

Nabokov starts a new paragraph. This letter impresses me further every time I read it. I like the even cadences, now, as the writer reasserts the decorum of friendship: ‘I do not want to be personal, but here is how I explain your attitude…’ There follows a perceptive and generous and near-universal analysis (one I will hope to add something to) of the kind of conditions that would facilitate such a severe cognitive dissonance. In 1917 Wilson was twenty-two; the Russian ‘experiment’ – remote and largely obscure – spoke to his natural ardour.

Your concept of pre-Soviet Russia came to you through a pro-Soviet prism. When later on (i.e., at a time coinciding with Stalin’s ascension) improved information, a more mature judgment and the pressure of inescapable facts dampened your enthusiasm and dried your sympathy, you somehow did not bother to check your preconceived notions in regard to old Russia while, on the other hand, the glamor of Lenin’s reign retained for you the emotional iridescence which your optimism, idealism and youth had provided… The thunderclap of administrative purges [1937–38] woke you up (something that the moans of Solovki or at the Lubianka had not been able to do) since they affected men on whose shoulders St Lenin’s hand had lain.

Solovki: cradle of the gulag (and established under Lenin). The Lubyanka was the Cheka’s headquarters in Moscow; its dates are 1918–91.

‘I am now going to state a few things,’ writes Nabokov, winding up, ‘which I think are true and I don’t think you can refute.’ The letter ends with two encapsulations. Pre-1917:

Under the Tsars (despite the inept and barbarous character of their rule) a freedom-loving Russian had incomparably more possibility and means of expressing himself than at any time during Lenin’s and Stalin’s regime. He was protected by law. There were fearless and independent judges in Russia. The Russian sud [legal system] after the Alexander reforms was a magnificent institution, not only on paper. Periodicals of various tendencies and political parties of all possible kinds, legally or illegally, flourished and all parties were represented in the Duma. Public opinion was always liberal and progressive.

Post-1917:

Under the Soviets, from the very start, the only protection a dissenter could hope for was dependent on governmental whims, not laws. No parties except the one in power could exist. Your Alymovs [Sergei Alymov was a showcase hack poet] are specters bobbing in the wake of a foreign tourist. Bureaucracy, a direct descendant of party discipline, took over immediately. Public opinion disintegrated. The intelligentsia ceased to exist. Any changes that took place between November [1917] and now have been changes in the decor which more or less screens an unchanging black abyss of oppression and terror.

‘ Intellectual’ is a word commonly applied to the Bolshevik leaders (and it is often said that Stalin was ‘the only non-intellectual’ among them). They qualified, one supposes, as intellectuals of the radical fringe, in that they were half-educated in history and political economy, and in nothing else. As Nabokov has just explained, however, a Russian intellectual is a professional; and it was a rare Old Bolshevik who ever presented himself for gainful employment (though Lenin, earlier, lost a couple of cases as a lawyer). We have seen, too, that the revolutionary vanguard developed an abnormal aversion to the intellectuals, who were, as Lenin said, ‘shit’. And in 1922 Lenin threw himself into the business of what Solzhenitsyn, establishing a metaphor for the gulag, calls ‘sewage disposal’. Some were executed or internally exiled, and scores of thousands were deported. American commentators ‘saw us’, writes Nabokov, ‘merely as villainous generals, oil magnates, and gaunt ladies with lorgnettes’, but the émigrés were very broadly the intelligentsia. They were the civil society.