Koba the Dread

by Martin Amis

  It is perhaps controversial to suggest that Iosif Stalin in his last years was capable of further spiritual decline. But one is struck by the loss, the utter evaporation, of his historical self-consciousness, suggesting some sort of erasure in a reasonably important part of Stalin’s brain. ‘Anti-Semitism is counterrevolution.’ Anti-Semitism was the creed of the Whites, of the Tsarists – and of the Black Hundreds, the reactionary gangs with their knives and knuckledusters (sometimes equipped with guns – and vodka – by the gendarmerie), against whom the young Stalin might have stood in line on the streets of Russia’s cities. Anti-Semitism was for the rabble and the Right. In turning to it, the world’s premier statesman, as he then was, also squandered the vast moral capital that the USSR had accumulated during the war: Hitler’s conqueror, incredibly, became Hitler’s protégé. The various restrictions imposed on Soviet Jewry lacked the lewd pettines of some of the Nuremberg Laws of the 1930s;49 but Stalin’s signature is everywhere apparent. As his social fascism broadened to include ethnic fascism, Stalin added to his other innovations by becoming the first Holocaust-denier. It was dangerous to talk about ‘Jewish martyrdom’ (this was ‘national egotism’), and the regime concertedly heckled the notion that the fate of the Jews was a significant aspect of the Second World War.50 Chaotically Stalinesque, too, was the arrest of several Jews on the (probably trumped-up) charge of accusing the state of anti-Semitism.

  One last deformed irony emerges from the strange dance, the pas de deux performed by the little moustache and the big moustache. In his final convulsion, ‘the Doctors’ Plot’, the defendants (nearly all of them Jewish) were accused (falsely) of the quintessential, the defining, the exceptionalizing Nazi crime: medical murder.

  46 With 25 million dead, and another 25 million homeless, with the loss of 70,000 villages, 1,700 towns, 32,000 factories, and a third of the national wealth, with ‘banditism’ (armed insurrection) down the length of the western border (guerrilla warfare would continue into the 1950s), and a serious though unacknowledged famine, the USSR, in 1945, was thrown back through time. The next lumbering Five Year Plan, drafted in that year, had in effect the same object as the first, industrialization, and made the usual demands for sacrifice, discipline and vigilance. This would have been congenial to Stalin – to his nostalgia for struggle.

  47 On the other hand, one should not forget that support for Hitler was broad-based, and that Nazism had many distinguished admirers (among them Martin Heidegger and two Nobel Laureates in physics).

  48 ‘It was in the twelfth century,’ Cohn writes, ‘that [the Jews] were first accused of murdering Christian children, of torturing the consecrated wafer, and of poisoning the wells. It is true that popes and bishops frequently and emphatically condemned these fabrications; but the lower clergy continued to propagate them, and in the end they came to be generally believed.’ As in his other classic work, The Pursuit of the Millennium, Cohn identifies the semieducated clerisy as the natural constituency for militant utopians as well as anti-Semites – a constituency that Stalin (or Stalin’s mother) once hoped he would join. It was also Chernyshevsky’s.

  49 As part of an effort to improve the birth rate, German women, on each parturition, were awarded a crucifix tastelessly called the Mutterkreuz. Aryan households, at this time, were forbidden to employ any Jewess under the age of forty-five. No Mutterkreuz for her.

  50 Right up until 1989 the Auschwitz Museum itself was a monument to Holocaust denial. The part played by the Jews was deemphasized in favour of the Struggle Against Fascism. Similarly: ‘The report produced in Kiev on Babi Yar talked of the death of “peaceful Soviet citizens”, not of Jews’ (Overy).

  The Bedbug

  When he adopted the ‘reconciliation line’ at the Congress of Victors in 1934, Maxim Gorky was profoundly mistaken in thinking that ‘biographical therapy’ was the way to Stalin’s soul. Planetary preeminence didn’t soften him in 1945. A few more mendacious hosannahs wouldn’t have softened him in 1934. Stalin wasn’t that kind of animal.

  Writers were pushed, sometimes physically, sometimes spiritually, into all kinds of unfamiliar shapes by the Bolsheviks. Isaac Babel, shot in 1940, Osip Mandelstam, losing his mind en route to Kolyma in 1938 (‘Am I real and will death really come?’): these men could tell themselves that they were martyrs to their art; and they were, and so were hundreds of others. Some more or less genuine writers tried to work ‘towards’ the Bolsheviks. Their success depended inversely on the size of their talent. Talentless writers could flatter the regime. Talented writers could not flatter the regime, or not for long. One thinks of Mayakovsky. His tough-guy verses about bayonets and pig-iron statistics have a smile somewhere behind them; and his play The Bedbug (a satire on bureaucratism) was considered subversive enough to be quietly quashed. But he compromised his talent, minor though it was. And it seems that you just can’t do that. He killed himself in 1930.51 The strangest and perhaps the sourest destiny of all, however, was that of Maxim Gorky.

  ‘I despise and hate them more and more,’ he wrote of the Bolsheviks, in June 1917. Gorky was not a ‘hereditary proletarian’, but he was certainly a hereditary plebeian: early poverty was followed by orphanhood; he took his first job at the age of nine. By the mid-1890S he was world-famous, and still in his twenties. His revolutionary credentials were also excellent. He was an enemy of the old regime, and had done time in prison. A friend of Lenin’s since 1902, Gorky donned the black leather tunic and the knee-high boots for the failed revolution of 1905.52 During the war his large apartment in Petersburg became a Bolshevik HQ. Gorky’s disillusionment was gradual but steady. Two weeks after October he wrote the following:

  Lenin and Trotsky do not have the slightest idea of the meaning of freedom or the Rights of Man. They have already become poisoned with the filthy venom of power, and this is shown by their shameful attitude towards freedom of speech, the individual, and all those other civil liberties for which the democracy struggled.

  In A People’s Tragedy Orlando Figes uses Gorky as a moral anchor. In the typhoon of unreason, his is the voice of suffering sanity.

  He was also a superenergetic philanthropist, saving many lives and easing many hardships during the Red Terror and the Civil War. Lenin, for a little while longer, was still listening to him, even though Gorky’s newspaper, Novaia zhin’ (new world), had been suppressed in 1918. It is extraordinary how many of Lenin’s most-quoted utterances are to be found in his correspondence with Gorky: the one about the ‘unutterable vileness’ of all religion; the one about intellectuals being society’s ‘shit’; the one about the ‘marvellous Georgian’. In power, Lenin grew sterner with his friend. Gorky’s letters are now forceful pleas for particular leniencies and general moderation. Lenin fights his corner in his usual style, with the kind of debating tricks that would embarrass even the Oxford Union, and crowingly delivered:

  Reading your frank opinions on this matter, I recall a remark of yours: ‘We artists are irresponsible people.’ Exactly! You utter incredibly angry words – about what? About a few dozen (or perhaps even a few hundred) Kadet and near-Kadet gentry spending a few days in jail to prevent plots53 … which threaten the lives of thousands of workers and peasants. A calamity indeed! What injustice. A few days, or even weeks, in jail for intellectuals in order to prevent the massacre of thousands of workers and peasants! ‘Artists are irresponsible people.’

  Quite easily done.54 Lenin’s letters started to include threats. ‘I cannot help saying: change your circumstances radically, your environment, your abode, your occupation, – otherwise life may disgust you for good’ (July 1919). Italics added. To bring about the inevitable rift it would take the death of two poets and a famine.

  When Moscow eventually started to admit that a quarter of the peasantry was dying of starvation, Gorky was chosen to lead the call for aid. When the famine was over, Lenin arrested all but two of the relief committee and told Gorky to go abroad ‘for his health’. Then there were the deaths of the poets, Alexande
r Blok and Nikolai Gumilev. After a brief enthusiasm for October, and two famous poems in celebration of it, Blok wrote nothing after 1918, and died of hunger and despair in August 1921. Days later, Gumilev (the former husband of Anna Akhmatova) was arrested by the Petrograd Cheka – for monarchist sympathies, which he indeed professed. Gorky went at once to Moscow and obtained from Lenin an order for Gumilev’s release. When he got back to Petrograd he found that Gumilev had already been shot, without trial. On being told of this, Gorky coughed up blood. His health was in any case poor. He emigrated in October.

  In 1932 Gorky was induced to return to the USSR, from Italy, by Comrade Stalin. This was a propaganda coup for the regime, which made much of the deliverance of the great writer from ‘fascist Italy’. He was awarded the Order of Lenin; a little palace in Moscow was made available for him, and a dacha (into which, on hearing of Gorky’s difficulties with the stairs, Stalin sensitively installed an elevator); Tverskaia Street became Gorky Street, and his native Nizhnyi Novgorod became Gorky: this was large-scale lionization.55 It must have been clear to Stalin that Gorky would eventually give him trouble. There would be a man, there would be a problem. Stalin, I am sure, was excited by the idea of breaking this big cat: breaking the talent, breaking the integrity, breaking the man.

  As early as June 1929, during the second of his five reintroductory summer trips to Russia, Gorky comprehensively defiled himself. To counter the recent publication, in England, of a book about Solovki (An Island Hell: A Soviet Prison in the Far North), Gorky was sent on a visit to the cradle of the gulag. The camp was hurriedly Potemkinized. As Solzhenitsyn tells it, however, Gorky secured an uninvigilated ninety-minute conversation with a fourteen-year-old boy in the Children’s Colony. He left the barracks ‘streaming tears’.56 In the Visitors’ Book he praised ‘the tireless sentinels of the Revolution, [who] are able, at the same time, to be remarkably bold creators of culture’; these views were published worldwide. ‘Hardly had [Gorky’s] steamer pulled away from the pier than they shot the boy’ (Solzhenitsyn).

  The second spectacular self-abasement occurred in 1933–34, when Gorky edited The White Sea-Baltic Canal (his co-editors included the Deputy Chief of the gulag). In the summer of 1933 a delegation of 120 writers visited the canal, which had just been completed, and thirty-six of them contributed to the volume, which lauded the project as ‘a uniquely successful effort at the mass transformation of former enemies of the proletariat’. Built by slave labour (mostly kulaks), the canal was meant to connect the two fleets by a mighty waterway. In the end it cost perhaps 150,000 lives, and it was useless.57 Gorky had long been a close friend of the hard-line but candid and realistic Kirov, the Leningrad boss, in whose fief the canal was built. The book itself was evidence enough: manifestly and monotonously fraudulent, sickly and craven. Gorky’s incidental pronouncements, around now, are unrecognizable. He speaks the dialect of the regime in a tone of icy triumphalism.

  It was the murder of Kirov (December 1934) that penetrated Gorky’s spiritual coma. Stalin expected this. A matter of hours after the killing, Cheka troops ringed Gorky’s Crimean villa – to protect him, or to contain him lest he speak out? The parallel tracks now entered the chicane. Urged by Stalin to join the condemnation of individual terror (after the Kirov killing), Gorky replied that he condemned state terror too: this amounted to an accusation of murder. When Gorky returned to Moscow the organs moved in closer. He told friends that he was under ‘house arrest’. His quarantine was bizarrely symbolized by the fact that the copies of Pravda he saw were specially rigged up for him (‘reports of arrests,’ as Tucker notes, ‘were replaced by news about the crab catch and the like’). Isolation increased in May 1935 when his adopted son, Maxim Peshkov, who acted as his go-between, died mysteriously after a minor illness. Gorky’s own pulmonary trouble grew worse. Stalin, accompanied by Molotov and Voroshilov, paid a visit to his bedside. He died on 18 June 1936, and was buried with full honours. Two months later his old friend Kamenev came to the dock (and to eventual execution) in a trial that Gorky had been expected to denounce.

  No personage in history, we may think, has a weaker claim to the benefit of the doubt, but Stalin is less thoroughly implicated in the death of Gorky (and Gorky’s son) than in the death of Kirov. Moving from the ‘quiet terror’ of Party expulsions to the percussion of the Great Terror itself, Stalin was now at his most anarchically improvisational, a mad gymnast of multiple deceit, filling a hole here, plugging a gap there, in the vibrating edifice of his reality. In the later trial of Bukharin and others (1938) it was claimed that Gorky was killed by his doctors, who were themselves the creatures of head Chekist Yagoda. Yagoda was of course executed; and so were Drs Levin and Kazakov.58 The Gorky ‘murder’, a bumbling, piecemeal business (the doctors induced him to stand near bonfires and to visit people who had colds), sounds embarrassingly feeble, and drenches the event in an undeserved improbability. The entire case feels extemporized: Yagoda’s plot was presented as a terroristic move against the leadership, and so Gorky (his shade would not have been happy to learn) was liquidated as one of the stauncher Stalinists. Anyway, there seems to be a rule, and it may be metaphysical: when Stalin wished for a death, then that wish came true.

  Gorky, then, was trying to regain his integrity. But why did he lose it in the first place? Solzhenitsyn is unsparing:

  I used to ascribe Gorky’s pitiful conduct after his return from Italy and right up to his death to his delusions and folly. But his recently published correspondence of the 1920s provides a reason for explaining it on lesser grounds: material self-interest. In Sorrento Gorky was astonished to discover that no world fame had accrued to him, nor money either … It became clear that both for money and to revive his fame he had to return to the Soviet Union and accept all the attached conditions … And Stalin killed him to no purpose, out of excessive caution: Gorky would have sung hymns of praise to 1937 too.

  We understand Solzhenitsyn’s anger (that last sentence contains two definitive insults), but we cannot quite accede to it. Vanity, venality – perhaps; but Gorky was stumbling, groping, suffering. He returned to Russia because on some level he felt, perhaps conceitedly, that he could moderate the system – moderate Stalin – from within. He pawned his soul, and then tried to redeem it.

  Anomalously, Gorky was allowed a last trip to the Crimea – for his health. One night, escaping the supervision of his doctors, he climbed out of a window and crept into the garden. Tucker writes (he is paraphrasing his source): ‘Gorky looked up at the sky. Then he walked to a tree, clasped its branches in his arms, and stood there weeping.’ He had much to weep about. In general, writers never find out how strong their talent is: that investigation begins with their obituaries. In the USSR, writers found out how good they were when they were still alive. If the talent was strong, only luck or silence could save them. If the talent was weak, they could compromise and survive. Thus, for the writers, the Bolsheviks wielded promethean power: they summoned posterity and inserted it into the here and now.

  A certain document was found among Gorky’s papers. On reading it Yagoda swore and said, ‘No matter how much you feed a wolf, he keeps looking back towards the woods.’ (This is a unique occurrence: Yagoda, here, is more generous than Solzhenitsyn.) In the document Gorky had imagined Stalin as a flea – a flea that had grown to vast and uncontrollable proportions, ‘insatiable for humanity’s blood’ (in Conquest’s gloss) ‘yet essentially parasitical’. And perhaps we should make that giant flea a giant bedbug, for Stalin craved, and brought about, the politicization of sleep. He murdered sleep.

  With a solemnity that can be easily imagined, Stalin himself led Gorky’s funeral march. The passionate friendship the two men shared now established itself in Soviet myth. A fortnight later the three journals Gorky edited were closed down and their staffs arrested, along with others of his entourage.

  Demian Bedny: Demian the Poor. Maxim Gorky: Maxim the Bitter. Iosif Grozny: Iosif the Terrible.

  51 It was only
after his suicide that Mayakovsky’s work ‘began to be introduced forcibly, like potatoes under Catherine the Great,’ noted Pasternak: ‘This was his second death.’ Pasternak survived, without compromise. His lover, Olga Ivinskaya, was interrogated and sent to the gulag. The child she was carrying was stillborn in jail.

  52 The Bolsheviks persisted with this outfit long after taking power. The squeak-and-glisten look, it seems, was admired by all the putschists of the first half of the twentieth century.

  53 This is Lenin’s thumbnail sketch of the Red Terror. Again, for perspective (and this applies to the years 1917–24): ‘it is possible that more people were murdered by the Cheka than died in the battles of the civil war’ (Figes).

  54 This letter of Lenin’s has an equivalent in the Stalin archive: the one to Mikhail Sholokhov (who, according to Solzhenitsyn, didn’t write And Quiet Flows the Don) about the peasantry. In rather more languid tones, Stalin assures his ‘esteemed’ comrade that the ‘worthy reapers’, whom he had only minimally inconvenienced, were not as worthy as they seemed: they were using terrorism to starve the towns.

  55 Other things were named after Gorky – a weaving factory, for instance, and an airplane (the world’s largest), which crashed. Solzhenitsyn, who is maximally hard on Maxim, eagerly reports that camps were named after him too – posthumously, no doubt. One of Stalin’s rare jokes.