Koba the Dread: Laughter and the Twenty Million

A brilliant weave of personal involvement, vivid biography and\npolitical insight,Koba the Dread_is the successor to Martin\nAmis’s award-winning memoir,_Experience.

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_Koba the Dread_captures the appeal of one of the most\npowerful belief systems of the 20th century — one that spread\nthrough the world, both captivating it and staining it red. It\naddresses itself to the central lacuna of 20th-century thought: the\nindulgence of Communism by the intellectuals of the West. In\nbetween the personal beginnings and the personal ending, Amis gives\nus perhaps the best one-hundred pages ever written about Stalin:\nKoba the Dread, Iosif the Terrible.

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The author’s father, Kingsley Amis, though later reactionary in\ntendency, was a “Comintern dogsbody” (as he would come to put it)\nfrom 1941 to 1956. His second-closest, and then his closest friend\n(after the death of the poet Philip Larkin), was Robert Conquest,\nour leading Sovietologist whose book of 1968,The Great\nTerror, was second only to Solzhenitsyn’s_The Gulag\nArchipelago_in undermining the USSR. The present memoir explores\nthese connections.

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Stalin said that the death of one person was tragic, the death\nof a million a mere “statistic.”Koba the Dread, during whose\ncourse the author absorbs a particular, a familial death, is a\nrebuttal of Stalin’s aphorism.

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From the Hardcover edition.

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