Books we like ... and books we're not too fussed about
Martin Amis
Vintage 2003
This is not an easy book to read but I believe it is a book that should be read. It does two things: it sets out, in sickening detail, the life and times of Josef Stalin, and it questions how Amis’s friends, his father (in his early Communist incarnation), and the liberal intelligentsia in general could have been so complacent about crimes which differed little from Hitler’s (and, in terms of numbers and years, could even be said to exceed them in their magnitude and horror). From a distillation of Amis’s reading on the subject we learn about the Terror, the show trials, the enforced starvation and the camps, the relentless horror of what is described as Stalin’s war against the Russian people, and his manipulation of all aspects of society that left no-one safe or secure. Lenin and Trotsky, both in the past claimed by the left as the acceptable faces of Soviet communism, are not let off the hook either. They enthusiastically set up the instruments of the police state and the chilling disregard for human life that Stalin built on so brutally; their own versions of the Terror and mass starvation in the early twenties were dry runs for later, even more devastating versions. In the end, though, this is a book about Stalin - it is his face that smiles out from the cover; it is his childhood nickname that gives it its title – and the impression it left me with was of a dictator whose indifference, cruelty and manipulation was not used with a view to creating the perfect society - not that that would have excused any of it for a second. It was simply the ghastly expression of his paranoia and sense of inferiority, a madness that infected the whole nation. The result was just about as far from a perfect society as it is possible to get.
Amis’s attempts to link all this to aspects of his own life (the death of his sister, his friendship with Christopher Hitchens, even his baby daughter’s crying) have been widely mocked and don’t really work. However, they do provide an interesting addendum to his excellent memoir Experience, and don’t detract too much from the impact of this powerful book.
http://www.martinamisweb.com/
6th April 2007
See also: The Second Plane; House of Meetings; The Pregnant Widow ;
Stalin: The Court of the Red Tsar
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