"Koba the Dread," by Martin Amis

Anti-communism has, in some essential way, never been accepted as the moral equivalent of anti-fascism. When Paul Mazursky's film "Moscow on the Hudson" came out in 1984, a friend of mine, a Canadian who has lived in the United States for years, praised it in print only to have friends back in Canada ask him, "What's happened to you there?" -- "there" being Reagan's America. His acceptance of even Mazursky's gentle portrait of a USSR with all sorts of shortages and the KGB menacing citizens who didn't toe the party line was seen as succumbing to grotesque capitalist propaganda.

Amis comes close to explaining the enduring allure of communism in the letter to his late father that ends the book. Quoting his father's essay "Why Lucky Jim Turned Right," he finds this sentence about the elder Amis' goodbye to the faith. "The ideal of the brotherhood of man, the building of the Just City, is one that cannot be discarded without lifelong feelings of disappointment and loss."

As Amis the younger points out, that sentence embodies the naiveté that leads many to communism in the first place. "Just what this Just City?" he asks. "What would it look like? What would its citizens be saying to each other and doing all day? What would laughter be like, in the Just City? (And what would you find to write about in it?)" Amis is saying that the desire for an "ideal" society is, of course, a desire for the totalitarian state. And that desire is the first step toward a willingness to put ends before means.

"Don't fall for moral equivalence," Hitchens warns his friend when Amis tells him he's wondering about the distance between Hitler's Germany and Stalin's Russia. Inevitably, Amis' attempt to put the latter on a moral par with the former comes up against the question of "Which was worse?" Too often, the answer has been decided by tallying up the dead. By that measure, Stalin's 20 million wins handily over Hitler's 6 million Jews (the number rises significantly if you add in the rest of the Nazi's victims). But morally, counting bodies is a mug's game.

It wasn't so long ago that the loaded number of 6 million was used to argue that the killing going on in the former Yugoslavia wasn't as bad as it could have been and therefore didn't merit American intervention; it was bad enough, and beyond a certain point, scale is irrelevant. Amis quotes Robert Conquest, who was asked in an interview if he thought the crimes of the Holocaust were worse than the crimes of Stalin. "I answered yes, I did, but when the interviewer asked why, I could only answer honestly with 'I feel so.'" Amis writes: "In attempting to answer the question why, one enters an area saturated with qualms."

After some unsatisfying (though not irrelevant) preliminaries (Marxism appealed to the intellect, Nazism "yellow, tabloidal, of the gutter," appealed to "the reptile brain"), Amis comes up with as good an answer as any. Much simplified, his answer is that Stalin's ends -- collectivization, industrialization, even the attainment of absolute power -- were at least comprehensible (which is not to say right, desirable or even thought-out), although the means he used to achieve them were barbaric. Hitler employed rational, industrialized means (one could even call them "neat," and therein lies part of the offense) toward an irrational end: the physical elimination of every Jew.

It seems insane, given two nearly incomprehensible events, events that take place outside of the accepted notions of what it is to be human, to say which is worse. Instead, Amis attempts to get at the particular character of each terror. It was easier, for example, in Nazi Germany to know who the enemy was. Describing one of the interrogations recorded in "Journey Into the Whirlwind," Eugenia Ginzburg writes, "A communist held by the Gestapo -- I would have known exactly how to behave. But here? Here I had to determine who these people were who kept me imprisoned. Were they fascists in disguise? Or victims of some super-subtle provocation, some fantastic hoax? And how should a communist behave 'in prison in his own country,' as the Major had put it?"

"Nazism," Amis writes, "did not destroy civil society. Bolshevism did destroy civil society." When you read "I Will Bear Witness, " Victor Klemperer's diary of being a Jew in Nazi Germany, you're struck by the bit-by-bit degradation of everyday life, but there is still some vestigial sense of normal life. The accounts of Stalinist Russia are best summed up by the slogans of "1984" -- "WAR IS PEACE," "FREEDOM IS SLAVERY," "IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH" -- representing as they do the complete eradication of meaning.

Next Page: Calling "Comrade Hitchens" on the carpet

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