Koba the Dread

by Martin Amis

  In the descriptions of his absurd experiments and in his commentaries on them, in this mixture of ignorance and ratiocination, one can already detect that barely perceptible flaw which gave his later utterances something like a hint of quackery … Such was the fate of Chernyshevsky that everything turned against him: no matter what subject he touched there would come to light – insidiously, and with the most taunting inevitability – something that was completely opposed to his conception of it … Everything he touches falls to pieces. It is sad to read in his diaries about the appliances of which he tries to make use – scale-arms, bobs, corks, basins – and nothing revolves, or if it does, then according to unwelcome laws, in the reverse direction to what he wants: an eternal motor going in reverse – why, this is an absolute nightmare, the abstraction to end all abstractions, infinity with a minus sign, plus a broken jug into the bargain … it is amazing how everything bitter and heroic which life manufactured for Chernyshevsky was invariably accompanied by a flavouring of vile farce.

  But now we feel a freedom, do we not – a freedom from who-whom? Edmund Wilson, in his trundling way, might have expected Nabokov to harbour some distaste for his dispossessor and deracinator. And it isn’t so. Nabokov writes about Chernyshevsky with pity, with reverence, with artistic love. And I’m afraid that this is as far as we are ever going to get with the utopia and the earthly paradise. Only in art will the lion lie down with the lamb, and the rose grow without thorn.

  13 I searched without success for piatiletka in five end-of-monograph glossaries. Its clinching ‘internationalization’, then, didn’t last (although Hitler, and later Mao, took it up). Piatiletka means ‘five-year plan’.

  14 It would not have escaped Nabokov’s notice that Chernyshevsky’s centennial (1928) was the occasion of much lugubrious ceremony in the Soviet Union. Chernyshevsky was saluted as the grandsire of the ‘Socialist Realism’ that Stalin intended to impose on the country’s remaining writers.

  15 ‘Lenin’ is thought to derive from the River Lena. ‘Stalin’: man of steel. ‘Kamenev’: man of stone. ‘Molotov’: the hammer. ‘Trotsky’ (né Lev Bronstein) was the name on one of his false passports; it stuck.

  Insecure: More Background

  Considering that Trotsky

  Did not ski,

  It was a bit thick

  To fricassee his brains with an ice-pick.

  You could always joke about it. This was a contribution by Robin Ravensbourne to a clerihew competition in the New Statesman (another notable winner was Basil Ransome’s ‘Karl Marx / Provided the clerks / With a dialectical reason / For their treason’). A month later there was a Weekend Comp. where you had to think up the names of organizations whose acronyms mocked and betrayed them: Barnaby Rudge and Oliver Twist Hostel for Elderly Ladies, for example. Robert Conquest won first prize with, among others, Teachers’ Organization for Aiding Disoriented Youth, and Sailors’, Yachtsmen’s and Pilots’ Health Institute for Long Island Sound. (And I also admired Mr Ransome’s post-modernist Professional Institute of Registered Newspaper Typesetters.) But my father took the bays with the following: Institute of New Statesman Editors and Contributors for Underwriting the Russian Experiment. And once a month or so, upstairs, there was another Russian connection: our ballet critic, Oleg Kerensky, was the nephew of Alexander Kerensky, that ‘buffoon, charlatan and nincompoop’, as a contemporary relevantly described him, who headed the Provisional Government of 1917. An additional ten IQ points in Kerensky might have saved Russia from Lenin; and a similar elevation in Tsar Nicholas II might have saved Russia from Kerensky. It is now 1975, and Kerensky is not long dead, over in New York. And his nephew, Oleg (a homosexual of a familiar type: warm, courteous, and passionate about the arts), looks in once a month with his ballet column.

  Insecure. When you can joke about something, you’re meant to feel secure about it. And you could always joke about the USSR. Christopher Hitchens joked about the USSR. For instance … Two comrades are discussing the inexplicable failure of a luxurious, state-run, Western-style cocktail lounge, recently opened in Moscow. The place is going under, despite all the gimmicks: rock music, light shows, skimpily clad waitresses. Why? Is it the furnishings? No, it can’t be the furnishings: they were all imported from Milan, at startling cost. Is it the cocktails? No, it can’t be the cocktails: the booze is of the finest, and the bartenders are all from the London Savoy. Is it the waitresses, in their bustiers and cupless brassieres, their thongs, their G-strings? No, it can’t be the waitresses (‘The chicks it’s not,’ I remember Christopher saying). It can’t be the waitresses: they’ve all been loyal party members for at least forty-five years.

  This is a joke with a limited constituency (women are seldom amused by it), but it does point to one of the Bolsheviks’ most promethean projects. They intended to break the peasantry; they intended to break the church; they intended to break all opposition and dissent. And they also intended (as Conquest, writing of Stalin, put it) ‘to break the truth’.

  Sometimes, in our casual office arguments, I saw an acknowledgment of this in Christopher’s eyes. He could joke about it. But he wasn’t secure. How could he have been? Still, the truth, like much else, was postponable; there were things that, for now, were more important.16 Although I always liked Christopher’s journalism, there seemed to me to be something wrong with it, something faintly but pervasively self-limiting: the sense that the truth could be postponed. This flaw disappeared in 1989, and his prose made immense gains in burnish and authority. I used to attribute the change to the death of Christopher’s father, in late 1988, and to subsequent convulsions in his life. It had little or nothing to do with that, I now see. It had to do with the demise of the socialist possibility. The residue of a tiring aspiration had evaporated.

  We will all go on joking about it because there’s something in Bolshevism that is painfully, unshirkably comic. This became palpable when the Russian experiment entered its decadent phase: the vanity and high-bourgeois kleptomania of Brezhnev, the truly pitiful figure of Chernenko (an old janitor with barely enough strength to honour himself as a Hero of Socialist Labour). Both these men, and Andropov (the KGB highbrow), whom they flanked, presided over a great landmass of suffering. The country was living at African levels of poverty, malnutrition, disease and child mortality. (And Afghanistan, meanwhile, was having its next census slashed – indeed, almost halved.)17

  Throughout this period the Russian people heard nothing from their leaders but a drone of self-congratulation. And the truth, no longer postponable by the standard Bolshevik means (violence), screamed with laughter at what it saw. Napoleon said that power is never ridiculous (and despotic power is presumably doubly unsmiling); but Bolshevism, by this stage, was ridiculous. Glasnost, which was a euphemism for not lying, laughed the Bolsheviks off the stage. The poets had talked about the inhuman power of the lie – but there is an antithesis to that: the human power of the truth. Lying could no longer be enforced, and the regime fell. And the leaders had become too evolved, and were incapable of the necessary cruelty – the cruelty of Lenin and Stalin, which was not medieval so much as ancient in its severity.

  In Lenin’s Tomb David Remnick addresses himself to the squalid comedy of the Bolshevik disintegration:

  The exhibition of Economic Achievements, a kind of vast Stalinist Epcot Centre near the Moscow television tower, had for years put on displays of Soviet triumphs in the sciences, engineering, and space in huge neo-Hellenic halls. Vera Mukhina’s gigantic statue Worker and the Collective Farm Girl (jutting breasts and biceps, bulging eyes) presided at the entrance, providing citizens with a sense that they were now part of a socially and genetically engineered breed of muscular proletarians. But with glasnost, the directors grew humble and put up an astonishingly frank display, ‘The Exhibit of Poor-Quality Goods.’

  At the exhibit, a long line of Soviets solemnly shuffled past a dazzling display of stunning underachievement: putrid lettuce, ruptured shoes, rusted samovars, chipped stew pot
s, unravelled shuttlecocks, crushed cans of fish, and, the show-stopper, a bottle of mineral water with a tiny dead mouse floating inside. All the items had been purchased in neighbourhood stores.

  There is also something horribly comic in Remnick’s remark that the ‘leading cause of house fires in the Soviet Union was television sets that exploded spontaneously’. But the facts are of course intense. As the economist Anatoly Deryabin wrote in the official journal Molodoi Kommunist: ‘Only 2.3 per cent of all Soviet families can be called wealthy, and about 0.7 of these have earned that income lawfully … About 11.2 per cent can be called middle-class or well-to-do. The rest, 86.5 per cent, are simply poor.’ Towards the end of this chapter (‘Poor Folk’) Remnick visits a ghost village of the Collectivization in the Volgoda region, once a prosperous community, and now ‘little more than a few collapsed cabins, a graveyard, and wheel ruts in the mud’. An old woman told him: ‘The collective farms are a disaster. There’s nothing left. It’s all lost.’ And a neighbour adds:

  We were all supposed to be one big family after collectivization. But everyone was pitted against everyone else, everyone suspicious of everyone else. Now look at us, a big stinking ruin. Now everyone lives for himself … What a laugh, what a big goddam laugh.

  Back at the New Statesman, towards the end of 1975, V. S. Pritchett might have passed Oleg Kerensky on the stairs when he delivered his review of the second volume of The Gulag Archipelago. The laughter should have stopped around then. Why didn’t it?

  16 I would like to emphasize that Christopher (like James Fenton, and all other Trotskyists known to me) was, of course, strenuously anti-Stalinist. But as a socialist he needed to feel that October had not been an instantaneous – or indeed an intrinsic – disaster. Even in 1975 it was considered tasteless or mean-spirited to be too hard on the Soviet Union. No one wanted to be seen as a ‘red-baiter’ – or no one except my father.

  17 Sylvain Boulouque in The Black Book of Communism: ‘Out of a population of approximately 15.5 million, more than 5 million inhabitants have left for Pakistan and Iran, where they now live in miserable conditions … [M]ost observers agree that the war took between 1.5 million and 2 million lives, 90 per cent of whom were civilians. Between 2 million and 4 million were wounded.’ These figures are due for revision, post-2001.

  The Collapse of the Value of Human Life in Practice – 118

  Sir C. Eliot to Earl Curzon. – (Received 23 February.)

  (Telegraphic.)

  Vladivostok, 22 February 1919.

  ‘Following report of 71 Bolshevik victims [that is, victims of Bolsheviks] received from consular office at Ekaterinburg, dated 19th February:—

  ‘“Nos. 1 to 18 Ekaterinburg citizens (first three personally known to me) were imprisoned without any accusation being made against them, and at four in the morning of 29th June were taken (with another, making 19 altogether) to Ekaterinburg sewage dump, half mile from Ekaterinburg, and ordered to stand in line alongside of newly-dug ditch. Forty armed men in civil clothes, believed to be Communist militia, and giving impression of semi-intelligent people, opened fire, killing 18. The 19th, Mr Chistorserdow, miraculously escaped in general confusion. I, together with other consuls at Ekaterinburg, protested to Bolsheviks against brutality, to which Bolsheviks replied, advising us to mind our own business, stating that they had shot these people to avenge death of their comrade, Malishev, killed at front, against Czechs.

  ‘“Nos. 19 and 20 are 2 of twelve labourers arrested for refusing to support Bolshevik Government, and on 12th July thrown alive into hole into which hot slag deposits from works at Verhisetski near Ekaterinburg. Bodies were identified by fellow labourers.

  ‘“Nos. 21 to 26 were taken as hostages and shot at Kamishlof on 20th July.

  ‘“Nos. 27 to 33, accused of plotting against Bolshevik Government, arrested 16th December at village of Troitsk, Perm Government. Taken 17th December to station Silva, Perm railway, and all decapitated by sword. Evidence shows that victims had their necks half cut through from behind, head of No. 29 only hanging on small piece of skin.

  ‘“Nos. 34 to 36, taken with 8 others beginning of July from camp, where they were undergoing trench-digging service for Bolsheviks to spot near Oufalay, about 80 versts from Ekaterinburg, and murdered by Red Guards with guns and bayonets.

  ‘“Nos. 37 to 58, held in prison in Irbit as hostages, and 26th July murdered by gunshot, those not killed outright being finished off by bayonet. These people were shot in small groups, and murder was conducted by sailors and carried out by Letts, all of whom were drunk. After murder, Bolsheviks continued to take ransom money from relatives of victims, from whom they concealed crime.

  ‘“No. 59 was shot at village Klevenkinski, Verhotury district, 6th August, being accused of agitation against Bolsheviks.

  ‘“No. 60, after being forced to dig his own grave, was shot by Bolsheviks at village Mercoushinski, Verhotury district, 13th July.

  ‘“No. 61 murdered middle of July at Kamenski works for allowing church bells to be sounded contrary to Bolshevik orders, body afterwards found with others in hole with half head cut off.

  ‘“No. 62 arrested without accusation, 8th July, at village Ooetski, Kamishlov district. Body afterwards found covered with straw and dung, beard torn from face with flesh, palms of hands cut out, and skin incised on forehead.

  ‘“No. 63 was killed after much torture (details not given), 27th July, at station Anthracite.

  ‘“No. 67 murdered, 13th August, near village of Mironoffski.

  ‘“No. 68 shot by Bolsheviks before his church at village of Korouffski, Kamishlov district, before eyes of villagers, his daughters and son, date not stated.

  ‘“Nos. 69 to 71, killed at Kaslingski works near Kishtin, 4th June, together with 27 other civilians. No. 70 had head smashed in, exposing brains. No. 71 had head smashed in, arms and legs broken, and two bayonet wounds.

  ‘“Dates in this telegram are 1918.’”

  Sir C. Eliot to Earl Curzon. – (Received 25 February.)

  (Telegraphic.)

  Vladivostok, 24 February 1919.

  ‘My telegram of 22nd February.

  ‘Following from consul at Ekaterinburg:

  ‘“Nos. 72 to 103 examined, 32 civilians incarcerated and taken away by Bolsheviks with 19 others at various dates between 9th July, 7th August, 27th July, all 51 having been declared outlaws. Official medical examination of 52 bodies (of which 32 examined, Nos. 72 to 103 not identified), found in several holes; 3 from Kamishlof revealed that all had been killed by bayonet, sword, and bullet wounds. Following cases being typical: No. 76 had 20 light bayonet wounds in back; No. 78 had 15 bayonet wounds in back, 3 in chest; No. 80, bayonet wounds in back, broken jaw and skull; No. 84, face smashed and wrist hacked; No. 89 had 2 fingers cut off and bayonet wounds; No. 90, both hands cut off at wrist, upper jaw hacked, mouth slit both sides, bayonet wound shoulder; No. 98, little finger off left hand and 4 fingers off right hand, head smashed; No. 99 had 12 bayonet wounds; No. 101 had 4 sword and 6 bayonet wounds.

  ‘“These victims are distinct from 66 Kamishlof hostage children shot by machine guns near Ekaterinburg beginning of July, names not obtainable.’”

  18 All this is taken from The Russian Revolution, 1917 in the always-fascinating ‘Uncovered Editions’ series. I have followed punctuation and house style. And I confront the reader with what follows not for its detail but for its overall effect.

  Nicholas the Last

  Charles I and Louis XVI were publicly executed after open trials. Nicholas II was secretly shot in a provincial basement along with his immediate family (and four members of his staff). It was a small room and it contained eleven victims and eleven killers. They were supposed to concentrate on one victim each, but the killers were soon firing at random. Those still alive when the gunsmoke cleared were disposed of by bayonet or further shots to the head. The bodies were transported by truck to a disused goldmine; sulphuric acid was poured on their faces before buria
l elsewhere – to make the Romanovs harder to identify.

  In his ‘Introduction, 1971’, as we have seen, Edmund Wilson was forced to give ground on the question of Lenin’s amiability and benevolence (his words). It may seem sadistic to go on quoting him, but Wilson was distinguished and representative and by no means the worst offender (he is by now allowing that he ‘had no premonition that the Soviet Union was to become one of the most hideous tyrannies that the world had ever known, and Stalin the most cruel and unscrupulous of the merciless Russian tsars’). Towards the end of the piece, however, Wilson is still trying to account for Lenin’s bad manners. Were they attributable, perhaps, to the poor breeding of Lenin’s father? ‘Lenin himself, although his mother came from a somewhat superior stratum, and though Lenin distinguished himself as a scholar, had always rude and rather vulgar traits.’ Wilson regretfully adds:

  … I have found that it was not true, as I had been led to suppose – this matter was hushed up in the Soviet Union – that Lenin knew nothing about and had not approved the execution of the royal family. Trotsky – and, one imagines, also Lenin – were both extremely cold-blooded about this …

  He then quotes, without comment, Trotsky’s page-long rationalization of the murders. Indeed, Wilson writes as if regicide – and bad manners – were Lenin’s only blemishes; and maybe he was ‘led to believe’ that there were no others. It is a bizarre emphasis. The clouds of ignorance part, revealing the solar fire of archaic snobbery.

  Trotsky had half a point when he said (elsewhere) that the Romanov children paid the price for the monarchical principle of succession. This would certainly apply to the Tsarevich, Alexis; but the four girls could expect no such inheritance – and neither could the doctor, the valet, the maid, the cook, or the dog.19 Wilson quotes Trotsky’s Diary in Exile (1935):