Koba the Dread

by Martin Amis

  Stalin’s rule, for all its dynamic radicalism in the brutal collectivisation programme, the drive to industrialisation, and the paranoid phase of the purges, was not incompatible with a rational ordering of priorities and attainment of limited and comprehensible goals, even if the methods were barbarous in the extreme and the accompanying inhumanity on a scale defying belief. Whether the methods were the most appropriate to attain the goals in view might still be debated, but the attempt to force industrialisation at breakneck speed on a highly backwards economy and to introduce ‘socialism in one country’ cannot be seen as irrational or limitless aims.

  Well, the case is just about capable of being made; and no one would attempt anything of the kind on behalf of Hitler. When you read Alan Bullock’s thousand-page Hitler and Stalin: Parallel Lives, in which the protagonists are considered in roughly alternating chapters, you feel like a psychiatric-ward inspector unerringly confronted by the same two patients. The German patient exhibits a florid megalomania of the manic variety. Hitler, indeed, created a whole new style of insanity – in which the simulacrum of preternatural self-assurance is repeatedly dispersed in a squall of saliva. Giving his arguments for an immediate attack on Poland (22 August 1939), Hitler addressed his top brass at the Berghof:

  First of all, two personal factors: my own personality and that of Mussolini. All depends on me, on my existence, because of my political talent. Probably no one will ever again have the confidence of the whole German people as I have. There will probably never again be a man with more authority than I have. My existence is therefore a factor of great value.

  Three days later (this is the account of a German diplomat):

  Suddenly he stopped and stood in the middle of the room staring. His voice was blurred and his behaviour that of a completely abnormal person. He spoke in staccato phrases: ‘If there should be war, then I shall build U-boats, build U-boats, U-boats, U-boats.’ His voice became more indistinct and finally one could not follow him at all. Then he pulled himself together, raised his voice as though addressing a large audience and shrieked: ‘I shall build aeroplanes, build aeroplanes, aeroplanes, aeroplanes, and I shall annihilate my enemies.’ He seemed more like a phantom from a story-book than a real person. I stared at him in amazement and turned to see how Göring was reacting, but he did not turn a hair.

  Because Göring was used to it. This was the mad energy Hitler sometimes harnessed in his demagoguery. After Stalingrad he suffered an inflammation of the brain. His general symptoms, now, included spectacular headaches, one trembling arm, one dragging leg, untreatable insomnia, and acute and chronic depression (though he still managed frequent tantrums). His medication bespeaks him: the Hitlerian urine sample would duly reveal that he was on hormone injections plus eight to sixteen doses, daily, of a patented medicine called ‘Dr Koester’s Antigas Tablets’ (oh for an l), which turned out to consist largely of two poisons, strychnine and atropine, thus greatly stoking the internal furnace. In mid-April 1945 Goebbels sent for the horoscope of the Führer, which prophesied victory. Hitler married for the first time on the last full day of his life: 30 April … The other case, the Soviet patient, as we shall go on to see, is much harder to read. This is a case of inscrutable introversion, and of violent episodes. Here, though, is a madman of much greater self-control – indeed, here is a madman with patience.39

  (viii.)

  Stalin, unlike Hitler, did his worst. He did his worst, applying himself over a mortal span. In the year of his death he was developing what had every appearance of being another major terror, succumbing, at the age of seventy-three, to a recrudescent and semi-senile anti-Semitism. Hitler, by contrast, did not do his worst. Hitler’s worst stands like a great thrown shadow, and implicitly affects our sense of his crimes. Had it come about, ‘mature’ Nazism would have meant, among other things, a riot of eugenics on a hemispherical scale (there were already plans, in the early 1940s, for further refinement of the Aryan stock). Josef Mengele’s laboratory at Auschwitz would have grown to fill a continent. The Hitlerian psychosis was ‘non-reactive’, responding not to events but to its own rhythms. It was also fundamentally suicidal in tendency. Nazism was incapable of maturation. Twelve years was perhaps the natural lifespan for such preternatural virulence.

  (ix.)

  Bolshevism was exportable, and produced near-identical results elsewhere. Nazism could not be duplicated. Compared to it, the other fascist states were simply amateurish.

  (x.)

  At the end of his career Hitler faced defeat and suicide. ‘When Stalin celebrated his seventieth birthday in 1949,’ writes Martin Malia, staggeringly, ‘… he indeed appeared as the “father of the peoples” to about a third of humanity; and it seemed as if the worldwide triumph of Communism was possible, perhaps even imminent.’

  (xi.)

  Historians refer to it as the Sonderweg thesis: Germany’s ‘special path’ to modernity – or, rather, Germany’s special path to Hitler. But Russia has a special path too, and so does every other country, including the imaginary ‘model’ state from whose evolution Germany is thought to have diverged. The German combination of advanced development, high culture and bottomless barbarity is of course very striking. And yet we cannot wall off Nazism as inimitably German; and Bolshevism, clearly, cannot be quarantined as inimitably Russian. The truth is that both these stories are full of terrible news about what it is to be human. They arouse shame as well as outrage. And the shame is deeper in the case of Germany. Or so I feel. Listen to the body. When I read about the Holocaust I experience something that I do not experience when I read about the Twenty Million: a sense of physical infestation. This is species shame. And this is what the Holocaust asks of you.

  (xii.)

  But Stalin, in the execution of the broad brushstrokes of his hate, had weapons that Hitler did not have.

  He had cold: the burning cold of the Arctic. ‘At Oimyakon [in the Kolyma] a temperature has been recorded of – 97.8 F. In far lesser cold, steel splits, tyres explode and larch trees shower sparks at the touch of an axe. As the thermometer drops, your breath freezes into crystals, and tinkles to the ground with a noise they call “the whispering of the stars”’.40

  He had darkness: the Bolshevik sequestration, the shockingly bitter and unappeasable self-exclusion from the planet, with its fear of comparison, its fear of ridicule, its fear of truth.41

  He had space: the great imperium with its eleven time zones, the distances that gave their blessing to exile and isolation, steppe, desert, taiga, tundra.

  And, most crucially, Stalin had time.

  35 One still encounters the resilient superstition that it is right-wing to give high figures. Conquest and Pipes were Cold Warriors (Conquest advised Thatcher, Pipes advised Reagan); their figures are therefore ‘Cold Warrior’ figures, inflated for the purposes of propaganda. But Conquest and Pipes are world-renowned historians; they are under oath. When Conquest sent me a copy of his Kolyma, he wrote on the dedication page: ‘NB Chapter 9 is obsolete.’ And under the chapter heading itself (‘The Death Roll’) he added: ‘This is now known to be less than these reports indicate.’ Conquest’s figure for the executions in the Great Terror, on the other hand, has gone up, and is close to a ferocious 2 million for 1937–38 … The mass graves now being discovered can present additional difficulties of tabulation. In Night of Stone Catherine Merridale writes: ‘The bodies, a twisted mass in death, have rotted now, and the skeletons are impossible to separate. It is inadvisable to rely on a skull-count because most of the skulls were damaged, if not shattered, by the executioners’ bullets … When you have finished, you count the femurs and divide by two. In most cases, the figure will run into thousands.’

  36 The Memorial Society, an agency of Russian remembrance, prints its lists of the dead in books the size of telephone directories.

  37 Except at the highest level. We read of an exhausted Dzerzhinsky’s costly rest cures in European spas.

  38 This is more or less true of Iag
o, Claudius and Edmund (to take only the major tragedies). But we are left staring at the fact that Macbeth did not stop short – that he was, indeed, a usurping dictator who ruled by terror (and terror, perhaps, is always a confession of illegitimacy). ‘Each new morn, / New widows howl, new orphans cry …’ The fullest evocation of a terrorized society is given to the minor, linking character of Ross; but it has its points:

  Alas, poor country!

  Almost afraid to know itself. It cannot

  Be call’d our mother, but our grave; where nothing,

  But who knows nothing, is once seen to smile;

  Where sighs, and groans, and shrieks that rend the air

  Are made, not mark’d; where violent sorrow seems

  A modern ecstasy [an everyday emotion]: the dead man’s knell

  Is there scarce asked for who; and good men’s lives

  Expire before the flowers in their caps …

  Macbeth incidentally contains an annihilating definition of the reality of War Communism (and Lenin’s slogan, ‘The worse the better’). It consists of seven words and is chanted by the Witches in unison (I.i.11): ‘Fair is foul, and foul is fair …’

  39 We cannot leave the ward without at least looking in on Vladimir Ilyich. He is a scowl that occasionally allows itself a refreshing cackle. Lenin was courteous to good Bolsheviks who agreed with him, and more than courteous to his wife, sister, and ‘mistress’ (all of them good Bolsheviks who agreed with him). Other people, though: they were not merely of no interest; they didn’t even faintly register. Lenin was a moral aphasic, a moral autist … When I read someone’s prose I reckon to get a sense of their moral life. Lenin’s writing mind is cross-eyed in its intensity of focus, painfully straitened and corseted, indefatigable in its facetiousness and iteration, and constantly strafed by microscopic pedantries.

  40 From Colin Thubron’s In Siberia. During blizzards whole camps were known to perish. Everyone died. Even the guards. Even the dogs.

  41 The word for this is agonism: the permanent struggle of the self-appointed martyr. Militant Islam is obviously and proclaimedly agonistic.

  PART II

  IOSIF THE TERRIBLE:

  SHORT COURSE

  Census

  There was a national census in 1937, the first since 1926, which had shown a population of 147 million. Extrapolating from the growth figures of the 1920s, Stalin said that he expected a new total of 170 million. The Census Board reported a figure of 163 million – a figure that reflected the consequences of Stalin’s policies. So Stalin had the Census Board arrested and shot. The census result went undisclosed, but the board was publicly denounced as a nest of spies and wreckers, despite the fact that it had delivered its report to Stalin and not (say) to the London Times.

  In 1939 there was another census. This time the Census Board contrived the figure of 167 million, which Stalin personally topped up to 170. Perhaps the Census Board added a rider to its report, saying that if Stalin found the figure too low, then it would have to be lowered still further: Stalin would have to subtract the membership of the Census Board.

  The architects of the 1937 Census Board were shot for ‘treasonably exerting themselves to diminish the population of the USSR’.

  There it is – Stalinism: negative perfection.

  * * *

  Georgia

  Accounts of the childhoods of the great historical monsters are always bathetic. Instead of saying something like ‘X was raised by crocodiles in a septic tank in Kuala Lumpur,’ they tell you about a mother, a father, a brother, a sister, a house, a home. It can be admitted that the family atmosphere at the Dzhugashvilis’, in Gori, Georgia, left much to be desired. Iosif’s mother and father hit each other and they both hit Iosif. But there is nothing in the early life that prefigures Stalin’s inordinateness. It is the same with Hitler. He too was born on the periphery of the country he would rule (Upper Austria), and to peasant parents (though their situation would improve to the point where Hitler’s status resembled Lenin’s: a scion of imperial officialdom); both Adolf and Iosif served as choirboys; and both would grow to a height of five feet four. Hitler’s father (somehow very appropriately) was more and more obsessed, as he grew older, by bee-keeping. Stalin’s father was a semiliterate cobbler, and he drank.

  Young Iosif Vissarionovich was the kind of kid who gives himself a nickname. The nickname was ‘Koba’. Koba was the hero of a popular novel called, suggestively, The Patricide; but Koba was not the eponym. The main thing about Koba was that he was a Robin Hood figure, a taker from the rich and giver to the poor. Stalin had another nickname, ‘Soso’ (the Georgian diminutive of Iosif), which at this point might sum him up more accurately. Apart from his memory (obligatorily described as ‘phenomenal’), he was an ordinary little boy. ‘Stalin’, of course, was another self-imposed nickname. Man of Steel. The Steel One.

  He began learning Russian at the age of eight or nine (his parents were Georgian monoglots). In 1894, at the age of fifteen, he left the Gori Church School and won a kind of scholarship to the Tiflis Theological Seminary. He was expelled, or he dropped out, five years later. Thereafter he became a full-time revolutionary.

  Two details from a boyhood. A schoolfriend later said that he had never seen Iosif cry. One thinks of the famous phrase that would gain fresh currency in the 1930s: Moscow does not believe in tears. On the other hand, Koba was a poet. These lines, for example, are thought to be from his pen:

  Know that he who fell like ash to the earth

  Who long ago became enslaved

  Will rise again, winged with bright hope,

  Above the great mountains.

  Robert Conquest once suggested that ‘a curious little volume might be made of the poems of Stalin, Castro, Mao and Ho Chi Minh, with illustrations by A. Hitler’. At the age of twenty, his artistic dreams frustrated, Hitler was a tramp: park benches, soup queues. Given just a little more talent, perhaps, he would have killed himself, not in the bunker, but in a cosy little studio in Klagenfurt.

  We don’t know how Stalin felt about his childhood. But we know how he felt about Georgia. Why take it out on your parents, when you can take it out on a province?

  In 1921, with Stalin’s full support, Lenin reannexed Georgia (which had been granted independence the year before) by invasion. Stalin went down south to attend a plenum of the new administration: his first visit for nine years. He addressed a group of railway workers and was heckled into silence with cries of ‘renegade’ and ‘traitor’. At a later meeting he harangued the local Bolshevik leaders:

  You hens! You sons of asses! What is going on here? You must draw a white-hot iron over this Georgian land! … It seems to me you have already forgotten the principle of the dictatorship of the proletariat. You will have to break the wings of this Georgia! Let the blood of the petit bourgeois flow until they give up all their resistance! Impale them! Tear them apart!

  Lenin was now favouring a softer line on the nationalities question, and especially on Georgia. Stalin was for maximum force.

  In 1922 Stalin’s violent highhandedness, his display of ‘Great Russian chauvinism’ (Lenin’s phrase) on the matter of Georgia came close to ending his career: itself amazing testimony that the strength of his feelings now outweighed his self-interest. (Power, as we shall see, had an instantly deranging effect on Stalin; during the Civil War he was chronically insubordinate and trigger-happy; it took many years before he learned to control the glandular excitements that power roiled in him.) The Georgia question would have unseated Stalin – if Lenin’s health had held. In May 1922 Lenin began to be buffeted by strokes, a month after his fifty-second birthday (he had also stopped three Russian bullets, we may recall, in 1918, and one of them was still lodged in his neck). I feel persuaded of Lenin’s intention, not from all the references to Stalin’s ‘rudeness’ (grubost: coarseness, grossness, crassness), but from this conversation between Lenin and his sister, Maria. Stalin had asked Maria to intercede for him; he played on her feelings, say
ing that he couldn’t sleep because Lenin was treating him ‘like a traitor’. Lenin’s talk with his sister ended:

  [‘Stalin says he loves you. And he sends warm greetings. Shall I give him your regards?’]

  ‘Give them.’

  ‘But Volodya, he’s very intelligent.’

  ‘He’s not in the least intelligent.’

  This is said ‘decisively’ though ‘without any irritation’, suggesting that Lenin had long ceased to consider Stalin as a viable confederate. It is generally agreed that even a half-fit Lenin would have sidelined him, though Richard Pipes, in Three ‘Whys’ of the Russian Revolution, suggests that ‘Stalin was far ahead in the competition for Lenin’s post, possibly as early as 1920 but certainly by 1922.’

  In 1935 Stalin went to see his mother, whom he had installed in the palace of the Tsar’s Viceroy in the Caucasus (where she kept to a single room). It is thought that this much-publicized visit was part of a pro-family campaign to combat the falling birthrate. He asked her, inter alia, about the beatings she had given him in his childhood. She answered: ‘That’s why you turned out so well.’

  In 1936, when old Ekaterina died, Stalin scandalized the remains of Georgian public opinion by failing to attend her funeral.

  In 1937 the Great Terror reached Transcaucasia: ‘Nowhere were victims subjected to more atrocious treatment,’ writes Robert C. Tucker, ‘than in Georgia.’ Of the 644 delegates to the Georgian party congress, in May, 425 were either shot or dispatched to the gulag (the gulag was at its deadliest in 1937–38). Mamia Orakhelashvili, a founder of the republic, had his eyes put out and his eardrums perforated while his wife was forced to watch. The party chief Nestor Lakoba had already been poisoned and buried with honours in 1936; he was now exhumed as an enemy of the people, and his wife was tortured to death in the presence of their fourteen-year-old son (who was sent to the gulag with three young friends. ‘When, later, they wrote to Beria requesting release to resume their studies,’ writes Tucker, ‘he ordered them returned to Tiflis and shot’). Budu Mdivani, the ex-premier, was arrested, tortured for three months, and shot. His wife, their four sons and their daughter were all shot.