"Koba the Dread," by Martin Amis

The subtitle of Amis' book is "Laughter and the Twenty Million." The query that runs through the book, never fully answered, is how is it that we can laugh at Bolshevism but not at Nazism? That premise isn't entirely sound. Though their crimes weren't funny, the Nazis lent themselves to ridicule, being humorless, dogmatic and possessing accents that could easily be adapted for comic effect. And Jewish writers and comics have made much of the Holocaust as the latest episode in the endless, cosmic suffering of Jews. Perhaps only a Jew could have come up with Mel Brooks' peerless definition of the difference between comedy and tragedy: "Tragedy is I cut my finger. Comedy is if you fall into an open manhole and die." (A friend who has many family members who died in the camps and some who survived had among the latter an uncle who, faced with something like a cut finger or a hangnail, would exclaim, "First the Holocaust, and now this!")

"It seems," writes Amis, "that the Twenty Million will never command the sepulchral decorum of the Holocaust ... It would not be so unless something in the nature of Bolshevism allowed it to be so." I'd like to suggest that this has something to do with the inversions exemplified by Orwell's slogans, the total annihilation of meaning, of even the ability to define which side you are on.

The black humor of the terror is present throughout "Journey Into the Whirlwind." It's the absurdity reserved for true believers betrayed. Ginzburg is not the only inmate in Stalin's prisons who, at first, can't help but believe that her fate is a mistake that will soon be rectified by the party. Another prisoner even attempts to get her to give up the names of all those she knows who oppose Stalin, reasoning that the more names the party possesses of people who are against Stalin, the quicker the party will be to realize that all these good, loyal communists can't be wrong. (Ginzburg refuses.) At one point Ginzburg is told by a fellow inmate that she was right not to answer some questions from other inmates because "Who knows which of them is really an enemy, and which are the victims of a mistake, like you and me?" It would, as Oscar Wilde said, take a heart of stone not to laugh.

It would be false optimism to detect any hope in that sort of laughter. But perhaps this bleak mirth does indicate that, even in Stalin's Russia, there was the possibility of some sort of truth-telling, however covert. And above all, what Amis is trying to do in "Koba the Dread" is to clear the mental decks, to synthesize what various sources have to tell us about the reality of a major episode of 20th century history and to disdain any attempt to apologize for it or explain it away. That he does not consider himself especially political may be why his tone is so even (though firm), why he's without either the guilt or the fury that ex-believers feel in having allowed themselves to be deceived. Amis is asking if we can finally talk about this as logical, sensible, morally sentient adults.

You could fill books with the literary friendships that have broken up over arguments about communism. It may be that Amis' friendship with Christopher "Lenin was ... a great man" Hitchens is one of them. Toward the end of the book is a long open letter to "Comrade Hitchens" in which Amis writes, "So it is still obscure to me why you wouldn't want to put more distance between yourself and these events than you do, with your reverence for Lenin and your unregretted discipleship of Trotsky ... Why? An admiration for Lenin and Trotsky is meaningless without an admiration for terror. They would not want your admiration if it failed to include an admiration for terror. Do you admire terror? I know you admire freedom."

The letter is not without affection. But it is also very sly, Amis having chosen to air this disagreement with his friend in public. No doubt Hitchens' hatchet job lamenting his friend's inadequate grasp of history, theory, the horrors of capitalism, ad nauseam, is still to come. But the question Amis asks him -- "Do you admire terror?" -- is not easily ducked. And it's the question that Amis is asking of all the apologists, all the infatuated.

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