Koba the Dread

by Martin Amis

  The Beginnings of the Search for Decorum

  One evening in the autumn of 1999 my wife and I, together with the Conquests, attended a political meeting at Conway Hall in Red Lion Square, Holborn, London, just over the road from the old New Statesman offices in Lincoln’s Inn Fields. We had come to hear the Hitchens brothers, Christopher (pro) and Peter (anti), discussing the European Union. So: a very boring subject indeed. But the debate was lively, and the audience passionately interactive: fierce questions posed in fierce regional accents, drunken braying by ‘name’ journalists, and, from various rotund politicos, the occasionally resonant ‘hear hear’ – which, if I remember my James Fenton aright (he was evoking a lethargic afternoon in the House of Commons), sounded like ‘erdle erdle’ and made you think of an enormous stomach digesting an enormous meal. At one point, reminiscing, Christopher said that he knew this building well, having spent many an evening in it with many ‘an old comrade’. The audience responded as Christopher knew it would (his remark was delivered with a practised air): the audience responded with affectionate laughter.

  Afterwards I asked Conquest, ‘Did you laugh?’

  ‘Yes,’ he said.

  And I said, ‘And so did I.’

  Why is it? Why is it? If Christopher had referred to his many evenings with many ‘an old blackshirt’, the audience would have … Well, with such an affiliation in his past, Christopher would not be Christopher – or anyone else of the slightest distinction whatsoever. Is that the difference between the little moustache and the big moustache, between Satan and Beelzebub? One elicits spontaneous fury, and the other elicits spontaneous laughter? And what kind of laughter is it? It is, of course, the laughter of universal fondness for that old, old idea about the perfect society. It is also the laughter of forgetting. It forgets the demonic energy unconsciously embedded in that hope. It forgets the Twenty Million.

  And this isn’t right:

  Everybody knows of Auschwitz and Belsen. Nobody knows of Vorkuta and Solovetsky.

  Everybody knows of Himmler and Eichmann. Nobody knows of Yezhov and Dzerzhinsky.

  Everybody knows of the 6 million of the Holocaust. Nobody knows of the 6 million of the Terror-Famine.10

  Yet I know, and I laughed. And Conquest laughed. Why won’t laughter do the decent thing? Why won’t laughter excuse itself and leave the room?

  Let us go back, for a moment, to Tibor Szamuely. Given eight years in the gulag for privately referring to Georgi Malenkov as a ‘fat pig’, Tibor was imprisoned en route to Vorkuta. This is my father’s account from his Memoirs:

  The big daily event in a Soviet gaol is the delivery of the copy of Pravda, and it was Tibor’s right and duty, as the Professor, to read the contents out to the cell [which contained several dozen inmates] … It appeared that Stalin had protested in person to the UN or one of its offshoots about the inhuman conditions under which some Greek Communist prisoners were being held at the end of the civil war there – inadequate exercise, meagre rations, food parcels only once a week, gross overcrowding on a scale comparable with (say) Czarism, insufficient visiting, and suchlike enormities. After a moment’s stunned silence, every prisoner broke into hysterical laughter, the tears running down their faces, embracing, rolling over and over on the floor, old feuds forgotten, for minutes. Indeed, the mood of euphoria lasted not for minutes but, in short bursts, for days. A careless spray of urine over one of the sleepers nearest the bucket would bring not the usual howl of rage, or worse, but a cry from the offender of, ‘Now, now, Comrade! Remember the sufferings of our Greek fellow-fighters for peace against the Western oppressor!’ and an answering guffaw.11

  Russia, 1917–53: what is its genre? It is not a tragedy, like Lear, not an anti-comedy, like Troilus and Cressida, nor yet a problem comedy, like Measure for Measure. It is a black farce, like Titus Andronicus. And the black farce is very Russian, from Dead Souls to Laughter in the Dark … It seems that humour cannot be evicted from the gap between words and deeds. In the USSR, that gap covered eleven time zones. The enemy of the people was the regime. The dictatorship of the proletariat was a lie; Union was a lie, and Soviet was a lie, and Socialist was a lie, and Republics was a lie. Comrade was a lie. The Revolution was a lie.

  10 When Austria’s Haider praises one of Hitler’s employment policies, Europe spits him out, convulsively, as if he were a bad oyster. Russia’s Putin praises Stalin, echoes Stalin (‘to liquidate the oligarchs as a class’), and proposes to mint coins bearing Stalin’s profile. He is welcomed at Downing Street, and has tea with the Queen … More substantively, between 1945 and 1966, writes Solzhenitsyn, ‘eighty-six thousand Nazi criminals had been convicted in West Germany … And during the same period, in our country (according to the reports of the Military Collegium of the Supreme Court), about ten men have been convicted.’ In the 1980s, Molotov and Kaganovich, two elderly Eichmanns, were living on state pensions in Moscow.

  11 Solzhenitsyn recalls a quaveringly passionate speech by a Greek writer, in Moscow, on behalf of the imprisoned Communists. Maybe he ‘did not understand the shamelessness of his appeal, and maybe, too, in Greece they do not have the proverb: “Why grieve for others when there is sobbing at home?”’

  Butyrki Nights

  I too, now, am obliged to confess – not to a lie but to a sin, and a chronic one.

  The Butyrki was the best prison in Moscow. (A curious statement, some may well feel; but this is a confession I find I am having to back my way into.) Or, to put it another way, there were worse prisons in Moscow than the Butyrki (sometimes transliterated as Butyrka). The Butyrki was the largest of the three main prisons for ‘politicals’ only, and less feared than the other two, the Lubyanka and (especially) the Lefortovo. More feared than the Lefortovo was Sukhanovka, called ‘the dacha’ (it was coincidentally close to Lenin’s Gorky estate). Solzhenitsyn knows of only one coherent survivor of Sukhanovka, a place, it seems, of strenuously enforced silence and continual torture.12 The Butyrki, built by the Tsars to contain the Pugachev rebels, was cleaner and better-run than the Taganka and other prisons where politicals cohabited with ordinary crooks and urkas. Solzhenitsyn, again, had some stimulating times in the Butyrki. The standard of prisoner was astonishingly high, with academicians and scientists (and novelists) milling about the cells. It was like the sharashka (a laboratory behind barbed wire in the gulag) described in The First Circle: any physicist would have been proud to work there.

  Fate had it that one evening I was alone in the house with my six-month-old daughter. (Another curious statement, perhaps, at this juncture, but I am slowly getting to the point.) Without preamble she embarked on a weeping fit that began at the outer limit of primordial despair, and then steadily escalated. Far from soothing her, my kisses and murmurings might as well have been molten pincers, skilfully applied. After an hour I was relieved by the nanny I had summoned from her home. The weeping ceased at once. I staggered into the garden and started weeping myself. Her cries had reminded me of the clinically explicable anguish of my younger boy, who, at the age of one, was an undiagnosed asthmatic. She had reminded me of the perfect equipoise of nausea and grief, as the parent contemplates inexpressible distress.

  ‘The sounds she was making,’ I said unsmilingly to my wife on her return, ‘would not have been out of place in the deepest cellars of the Butyrki Prison in Moscow during the Great Terror. That’s why I cracked and called Caterina.’

  If I had been better informed, at that point, I would have said Sukhanovka instead of Butyrki, and that would have been the end of it. For Butyrki, I am afraid, is now established as one of my daughter’s chief nicknames, along with its diminutives, Butyrklet, the Butyrkster, the Butyrkstress, and so on. The cognomen is widely current in the family; Butyrki’s four-year-old sister uses it – with an excellent and out-of-nowhere Russian accent (these days, even Butyrki can say ‘Butyrki’); and what a sigh went up in our household, one morning, when I drew attention to Eugenia Ginzburg’s chapter heading, ‘Butyrki Nights’
…

  It isn’t right, is it? My youngest daughter has passed her second birthday, and her cries are not particularly horrifying any more, and I still call her Butyrki. Because the name is now all braided through with feeling for her. Nearly always, when I use it, I imagine a wall-eyed skinhead in a German high-rise (and I’m sure such a person exists) with a daughter called Treblinka. Treblinka was one of the five ad hoc death camps, with no other function (unlike Auschwitz). I am not as bad as the wall-eyed skinhead. But the Butyrki was a place of inexpressible distress. In 1937 it held 30,000 prisoners crushed together. And it isn’t right. Because my daughter’s name is Clio: muse of history.

  12 The Gulag Archipelago: ‘Sukhanovka was the most terrible prison [the Cheka] had. Its very name was used to intimidate prisoners; interrogators would hiss it threateningly. And you’d not be able to question those who had been there: either they were insane and talking only disconnected nonsense, or they were dead.’

  The Forty Days of Kengir

  There was that time in December 1975, when V. S. Pritchett (perhaps passing Oleg Kerensky on the stairs) came to the offices of the New Statesman in Lincoln’s Inn Fields with his review of The Gulag Archipelago (Parts III-IV, which comprise Volume Two of the trilogy)13 tucked under his arm. Pritchett’s piece went first to the literary editor, Claire Tomalin, and then to me, her deputy. Having read its conclusion—

  Exactness and an exacting, unceasing irony is Solzhenitsyn’s aim: the camps made him a self-searching man and when people say to him, ‘Why drag all that up from the bad times?,’ his answer is that a country’s or a dogma’s evasion of its own past, on this excuse or that, is as fatal to the quality of life as it is to the private heart. He is not a political; he is without rhetoric or doublethink; he is an awakener.

  —I turned back to see if Claire had provided a title. She had: ‘When We Dead Awaken’ (the reference is to the Ibsen play). I remember I gave a sudden nod and thought: the argument is over now. We can move on from the argument. To what? Well, to remembrance, naturally. And also, perhaps, to a search for decorum.

  On page 13 of Volume One, in self-lacerating mood, Solzhenitsyn writes: ‘We didn’t love freedom enough.’ Then: ‘We purely and simply deserved everything that came after.’ In the Preface to Volume Three he is less severe, and more persuasive: the Communist regime survived ‘not because there has not been any struggle against it from inside, not because people docilely surrendered to it, but because it is inhumanly strong, in a way as yet unimaginable to the West’. Among the elements of the state’s strength was its capacity to astonish, to dumbfound – and thus to delude. As Conquest says, ‘the reality of Stalin’s activities was often disbelieved because they seemed to be unbelievable. His whole style consisted of doing what had previously been thought morally or physically inconceivable.’

  In 1949 Stalin decided partly to isolate the politicals, the ‘fascists’, in special camps (known as the Special Camps), presumably to protect the common criminals from ideological contamination. The decision backfired because the ‘whole system of oppression in his reign’, as Solzhenitsyn writes, ‘was based on keeping malcontents apart, preventing them from reading each other’s eyes’. In the Special Camps the politicals became political; and the result was rebellion. Their first move expressed a terrible logic: they started to kill all the stoolies. They called it chopping, but the process was surgical and cold-blooded – a masked man with a knife in the middle of the night. The stoolies no longer strolled to the camp mailbox with their denunciations, no longer named names for the commandants (even under savage interrogation). And the terror from below continued: ‘You whose conscience is unclean – this night you die!’ Soon the trusties ‘started escaping into the Disciplinary Barracks’, where they sought safety in the Isolators, gratefully agreeing ‘never again to breathe clean air or see sunlight’. The authorities responded with typical enterprise: suspected ringleaders were singled out and delivered to the stoolies for beatings and torture in the prison within the prison.

  Solzhenitsyn himself, at Ekibastuz in 1952, took part in an extraordinary protest: a work strike and a hunger strike. Even the goners – the wicks, the garbage-eaters – joined this fast of the starving. With only one year left to serve, and the near-certain prospect, now, of a fresh sentence, Solzhenitsyn nonetheless entered into the unreadable afflatus: defiance, despair, elation, and, most dizzyingly, a moral nausea, a perverse fear of freedom. At the end of the third day came a shout from the window – ‘Hut nine! … Nine has surrendered! … Nine’s going to the mess hall!’ Solzhenitsyn magnificently proceeds:

  Two hundred and fifty pathetic little figures, darker than ever against the sunset, cowed and crestfallen, were trailing slantwise across the camp … Some, feebler than the rest, were led by the arm or the hand, and so uncertain were their steps that they looked like blind men with their guides. Many, too, held mess tins or mugs in their hands, and this mean prisonware, carried in expectation of a supper too copious to gulp down onto constricted stomachs, these tins and cups held out like begging bowls, were more degrading and slavish and pitiable than anything else about them.

  I felt myself weeping. I glanced at my companions as I wiped away my tears, and saw theirs.

  Hut No. 9 had spoken, and decided for us all …

  We went away from the windows without a word.

  It was then that I learned the meaning of Polish pride, and understood their recklessly brave rebellions. The Polish engineer Jerzy Wegierski … was now in our team. He was serving his ninth and last year. Even when he was a work assigner no one had ever heard him raise his voice. He was always quiet, polite, and gentle.

  But now – his face was distorted with rage, scorn, and suffering, as he tore his eyes away from that procession of beggars, and cried in an angry, steely voice:

  ‘Foreman! Don’t wake me for supper! I shan’t be going!’

  He clambered up onto the top bunk, turned his face to the wall – and didn’t get up again. That night we went to eat – but he didn’t get up! He never received parcels, he was quite alone, he was always short of food – but he wouldn’t get up. In his mind’s eye the steam from a bowl of mush could not veil the ideal of freedom.

  After Stalin’s death in March 1953 came the ‘Voroshilov amnesty’; ‘utterly faithful to the spirit of the deceased’, it liberated not the politicals but the urkas. There was a riot in Camp Division No. 12 in Karlag, and ‘a major rebellion’ at Norilsk. But the seismic disturbances really began with the fall (and execution) of Beria, in July.14 That month there was a full-scale strike at Vorkuta. Machine guns were mounted; the men went back to work; but Pit 29, shielded by a hill from the rest of the camp, refused to believe that the strike had collapsed. These men were called out on to the parade ground, where they faced eleven truckloads of soldiers. Threatened with ‘harsh measures’ unless they picked up their tools, the prisoners in the front line linked arms and stood their ground. There were three volleys, and sixty-six dead.

  Beria’s fall, and his execution on criminal charges, was an affront to the prestige of every Chekist, and so was the dramatic wage cut that followed it. The response, again, had a brutal symmetry: to prove their usefulness they started to foment disorder by openly and randomly killing innocent prisoners. This terror from halfway up – the terror of the janitoriat – seems to have been especially unignorable at the prison complex in Kengir, near Karaganda in Kazakhstan. They killed a young girl who hung her stockings out to dry ‘near’ the perimeter fence. They would lure others to the boundary, with the promise of tobacco, say, and shoot them down. They riddled a returning work team with dumdum bullets. And it worked. In The Gulag Archipelago the chapter called ‘The Forty Days of Kengir’ runs to fifty pages. The disturbances would blossom into the greatest and most heroic rebellion in the history of the camps.

  Yet again, and as always, the authorities reacted with maximum cunning, perfidy, and miscalculation15 – though not yet with maximum violence. The year, remembe
r, is 1954. They injected 650 urkas into troublous Section Three. They would turn it around, would steal, would rape (a women’s camp was by now part of the rebellion), would wound, would murder, would set man against man, which was always the whole idea. But it was different now, in the camps, in Kengir (and elsewhere); there was bursting esprit; the old camp ethos, perfunctorily yet profoundly expressed in the motto ‘You die today, me I’ll wait a bit,’ was undergoing revolution. And what appeared was, of all things, a little universalist utopia (so this is what it looks like), with equality and respect between all persons, and nothing to be gained by preferment. Naturally the dawning utopia, which was incarcerated and doomed to extreme punishment, had its iron fist. When the urkas were trucked in, their leaders were visited by a delegation from the politicals’ military wing. You are outnumbered, they said, and we have changed. Join us, or we will kill you all. The urkas joined, and were purified. In May/June 1954, Section Three became a civil society.

  Everyone at Kengir knew what awaited them. And to take on the enemy, the state, at that level, second-generation and downward-selected and now enraged, an enemy of lead and steel. On 22 June it was announced that the rebels’ demands would be met. On 25 June, in the early dawn, the Cheka came in with snipers, artillery, aircraft, machine guns and tanks. There were over 700 dead and wounded. Then the normal course of resentencings and executions …

  Let us remember, as Solzhenitsyn does, the Socialist Revolutionaries of Vyatka Prison in 1923, who ‘barricaded themselves in a cell, poured kerosene over all the mattresses and incinerated themselves’. And the hunger-striker Arnold Rappaport, who ‘starved until he could see the light through his hands’. And, at Kengir, the young couple who threw themselves beneath the tracks of the tank, the women who formed a human shield around the men and received the bayonets, the old zeks on the barricade who ripped off their shirts, ‘pointed to their bony chests and ribs, and shouted to the machine gunners: “Come on, then, shoot! Strike down your fathers!’”