From: joedees@bellsouth.net
Date: Sun Aug 11 2002 - 22:49:19 MDT
The Atlantic Monthly | September 2002
Books & Critics
Books
Lightness at Midnight
Stalinism without irony
by Christopher Hitchens
.....
Koba the Dread: Laughter and the Twenty Million
by Martin Amis
Talk Miramax Books, 306 pages, $24.95
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n his superb memoir, Experience (2000), Martin Amis almost
casually expends a terrific line in a minor footnote. Batting away a
critic he describes as "humorless," he adds, "And by calling him
humorless I mean to impugn his seriousness, categorically: such a
man must rig up his probity ex nihilo." A book in which such an
observation can occur in passing is a very rich and dense one.
Amis has won and held the attention of an audience eager for
something very like this in reverse”a synthesis of astonishing wit
and moral assiduity. Even the farcical episodes of his fiction are
set on the bristling frontiers of love and death and sex. With his
other hand, so to speak, he has raised the standard of essayistic
reviewing, mounting guard over our muscular but vulnerable
English language and registering fastidious pain whenever it is
hurt or insulted. It is no accident, because he intuits the strong
connection between linguistic and political atrocity, that he has
also composed short but concentrated meditations on the three
great collapses of twentieth-century modernism and civilization.
With Einstein's Monsters (1987), and its accompanying flight of
articles and polemics, he investigated the diseased relationship
between suicide and genocide that is disclosed by the preparation
of thermonuclear extinction. In Time's Arrow (1991) he made a
very assured attempt to find a new literary mode for the subject of
genocide tout court, and for the Nazi-generated race murder in
particular. Koba the Dread aims to complete this triptych by
interrogating the subject of Stalinism and the Great Terror.
Amis's two previous undertakings of this kind were reviewed
ungenerously in some quarters, either because they seemed
presumptuous in taking a familiar subject and presenting it as if
for the first time, or because they relied a little too much on a
senior source (Jonathan Schell in the first case, and Primo Levi in
the second). To this I would respond rather as Winston Smith does
when he has finished reading the occult "inner-party" book in
Nineteen Eighty-Four: "The best books ... are those that tell you
what you know already." Amis understands that cliché and
banality constitute a menace to even the most apparently self-
evident truths. "Holocaust" can become a tired synecdoche for war
crimes in general. Before one knows it, one is employing terms
like "nuclear exchange" and even "nuclear umbrella," and
committing the mental and moral offense of euphemism. One
must always seek for new means of keeping familiar subjects
fresh, and raw.
Stalinism was, among other things, a triumph of the torturing of
language. And, unlike Nazism or fascism or nuclear warfare, it
secured at least the respect, and sometimes the admiration, of
liberal intellectuals. Thus Amis's achievement in these pages is to
make us wince again at things that we already "knew" while
barely wasting a word or missing the implications of a phrase.
Here is a short section titled "Rhythms of Thought":
Stalin's two most memorable utterances are "Death solves
all problems. No man, no problem" and (he was advising
his interrogators on how best to elicit a particular
confession) "Beat, beat and beat again."
Both come in slightly different versions. "There is a man,
there is a problem. No man, no problem." This is less
epigrammatic, and more catechistic”more typical of
Stalin's seminarian style (one thinks of his oration at
Lenin's funeral and its liturgical back-and-forth).
The variant on number two is: "Beat, beat, and, once
again, beat." Another clear improvement, if we want a
sense of Stalin's rhythms of thought.
To that second paragraph Amis appends a footnote, saying:
If Stalin had been a modern American he would not have
used the word "problem" but the less defeatist and
judgmental "issue". Actually, when you consider what
Stalin tended to do to his enemies' descendants, the
substitution works well enough.
That is excellent: dry without being too detached. Next I would
instance Amis's citations from the various cruelties and torments
documented by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn.
This reader has endured none of them; and I will proceed
with caution and unease. It feels necessary because torture,
among its other applications, was part of Stalin's war
against the truth. He tortured, not to force you to reveal a
fact, but to force you to collude in a fiction.
Here is his close reading of the last paragraph of Trotsky's History
of the Russian Revolution. Trotsky's closing stave reads,
The language of the civilised nations has clearly marked
off two epochs in the development of Russia. Where the
aristocratic culture introduced into the world parlance such
barbarisms as tsar, pogrom, knout, October has
internationalised such words as Bolshevik, soviet, and
piatiletka. This alone justifies the proletarian revolution, if
you imagine that it needs justification.
Amis's first comment on this ensues directly. He adds to Trotsky's
bombast the words "Which leaves you wondering if piatiletka is
Russian for 'summary execution,' perhaps, or 'slave camp.'" There
follows a footnote. (Like Gibbon, Amis seems to like to reserve
the best for the footnotes.)
I searched without success for piatiletka in five end-of-
monograph glossaries. Its clinching "internationalisation,"
then, didn't last (although Hitler, and later Mao, took it
up). Piatiletka means "five-year plan."
There is a very slight waste of words here, because the mordancy
of Amis's second observation makes the first one seem merely
taunting and sarcastic. But lapses of this kind are infrequent.
When Amis summarizes a crux, it stays summarized. One doesn't
have to have suffered torture and solitary confinement to get the
point that is being made here:
The confession was in any case merely part of a more or
less inevitable process. When it was their turn to be
purged, former interrogators (and all other Chekists)
immediately called with a flourish for the pen and the
dotted line.
One also wouldn't absolutely have to know which regime was
under discussion: the potency of that aperçu derives from its
disclosing of our animal nature. Indeed, and as in his other work
on murder and tyranny, Amis has a better than approximate idea
of what we as a species might get up to if given a chance. "Arma
virumque cano, and Hitler-Stalin tells us this, among other things:
given total power over another, the human being will find that his
thoughts turn to torture."
This is an insight of extreme, frigid bleakness, amounting almost
to despair, but it also involves a minor waste of words. We knew
this, after all, before we knew of Hitler or Stalin. Again to cite
Orwell, there is a tendency for all stories of cruelty and atrocity to
resemble one another. For this reason some overfamiliar or
recycled accounts provoke boredom or disbelief, and can be made
to seem propagandistic. (The classic example is the way the
British fabrication of German outrages during World War I had
the paradoxical effect of turning skeptics into cynics when they
heard the initially incredible news of Nazi innovations in that
terrible sphere.) Orwell was on guard against this blunting
tendency. He thought it probable that given moral breakdown, the
same hellish desires would replicate and repeat themselves. He
also believed the worst about Stalin's system, and much earlier
than most "enlightened" people, precisely because he found its
public language so crude and brutal.
>From the archives:
"Cloud, Castle, Lake" (June 1941)
"He began to imagine that this trip, thrust upon him by a feminine
Fate in a low-cut gown, this trip which he had accepted so
reluctantly, would bring him some wonderful, tremulous
happiness." A short story by Vladimir Nabokov
"The Aurelian" (November 1941)
"What he craved, with a fierce, almost morbid intensity, was to
net himself the rarest butterflies of distant countries, to see them
in flight with his own eyes." A short story by Vladimir Nabokov
In a particularly luminous and funny passage on the
correspondence between Vladimir Nabokov and Edmund Wilson,
Amis puts his entire trust in Nabokov's ability to employ language
with care and discrimination, and shows that Wilson's journeyman
prose practically rigged itself to trap him, and others, into a more
comforting "explanation" of the titanic misery and failure of the
Stalin years. (Amis doesn't make as much as he might of the fact
that Nabokov produced his diamond-hard phrases in English,
whereas his first language was Russian, while Wilson offered in
return some thoughts about Russia that were trudging even in
English.)
Stalin was no fool when he said that the death of one person is a
tragedy, whereas the death of a million people is a statistic. Marx
and Engels had always shuddered at the gross, enormous crudity
of the steppe and the taiga, the illimitable reserves of primeval
backwardness that they contained; and European liberalism had
long been mesmerized by the Asiatic horror of Russian autocracy.
This howling wilderness and boundless hinterland were
themselves factors of "historical materialism." So, "in the
execution of the broad brushstrokes of his hate," as Amis phrases
it, Stalin "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, tires explode and larch
trees shower sparks at the touch of an axe ..."
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.
He had space: the great imperium with its eleven time
zones, the distances that gave their blessing to exile and
isolation...
And, most crucially, Stalin had time.
In making the inescapable comparison with Hitler, who killed
many fewer people (and even killed many fewer Communists)
than Stalin, Amis is guided mostly by the view of Robert
Conquest. He also relies, in varying degrees, on Martin Malia,
Richard Pipes, and Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. In Conquest's
opinion, the visceral reaction to Nazism entails a verdict that it
was morally worse than Stalinism, even if its eventual hecatomb
was a less colossal one. This distinction rests on the sheer
intentionality and obscenity of the Shoah, or Final Solution. Those
who were killed in Ukraine, by a state-sponsored famine, were not
killed as Ukrainians in quite the same way as the Ukrainian Jews
of Babi Yar were later killed as Jews. The slave system of the
gulag did not have as its primary objective the turning of living
people into corpses. The huge callousness of the system simply
allowed vast numbers to be treated as expendable.
The distinction is certainly worth preserving. As Amis phrases it,
"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." To this one might
add that Germany was a literate, democratic, and advanced
civilization before the Nazis got to it, whereas Russia at the time
of the 1905 revolution was in a condition more like that of
Turkey, or Iran, or even (in some areas) Afghanistan today. It did
have a "Westernized" industrial and intellectual element, but it
was from exactly this stratum that Marxism drew most of its
followers. And many of them regarded the mass of the Russian
people in much the way that a British official in early colonial
Bengal might have viewed the benighted natives. Probably, if we
look for explanations for the indulgence shown toward Stalinism
by men like George Bernard Shaw and H. G. Wells, we will find
part of the answer in the quasi-eugenic and quasi-anthropological
approach they took to most questions. (Fabian socialism, in the
same period, emphasized the progressive aspects of social
engineering in the British Empire.) But Amis, who briefly mocks
the gullibility of the Bloomsbury and New Statesman tradition,
also forgets that the grand prix for prescience here belongs to the
atheist, socialist, and anti-imperialist Bertrand Russell, whose The
Practice and Theory of Bolshevism (1920) was the first and in
many ways the most penetrating critique.
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don't know if it was at this point or a slightly later one that I
realized that Amis was exhibiting a tendency to flail. There is
certainly merit in restating Stalin's exorbitant and lustful
criminality, which stands comparison to that of the most paranoid
and sanguinary moments of antiquity as well as of modernity.
(The title Koba the Dread is an amalgam of Stalin's nickname and
the more straightforward Russian meaning of "the Terrible," as in
Ivan.) But we have grown up reading Solzhenitsyn, Joseph Berger,
Eugenia Ginzburg, Lev Kopelev, Roy Medvedev, and many other
firsthand chroniclers of the nightmare. Names like Vorkuta and
Kolyma are not as familiar to most people as Treblinka or
Birkenau, but the word "gulag" (one of the many hateful acronyms
of the system) does duty for the whole, and is known to
everybody. Amis appears to deny this when he says that a general
recognition of the toll of Stalinist slavery and murder "hasn't
happened," and that "in the general consciousness the Russian
dead sleep on." He should have hesitated longer before taking the
whole weight of responsibility for this memory, and our memory,
on his shoulders.
The clue to this hubris comes in the second part of his title, with
its allusion to mirth. Amis is acutely, vibrantly sensitive to the
different registers of laughter. He knows that it can be the most
affirming and uniquely human sound, and also the most sinister
and animalistic one. He understands every note of every octave
that separates the liberating shout of mirth from the cackle of a
bully or the snigger of a sadist. (Nabokov's title "Laughter in the
Dark" provides a perfect pitch here.) So he's in confident form
when he describes the servile laughter that greeted Stalin when he
was "forcibly" induced to take the stage at the Bolshoi Theater in
1937, and modestly agreed to be a candidate in the upcoming
"election." Here is some of the transcript, according to Dmitri
Volkogonov:
Of course, I could have said something light about
anything and everything. [laughter] ... I understand there
are masters of that sort of thing not just in the capitalist
countries, but here, too, in our Soviet country. [laughter,
applause]...
Many surviving eyewitnesses of many tyrannical courts have told
us that the most exacting and nerve-straining moments come
when the despot is in a good mood. Stalin had perhaps the most
depraved and limited humor of the lot. In addition to being a
grand-opera widow-and-orphan manufacturer, and widow-and-
orphan slayer, he was a sniggerer and a bad chuckler. Amis
observes of the foul scene above:
Ground zero of the Great Terror”and here was the Party,
joined in a panic attack of collusion in yet another
enormous lie. They clapped, they laughed. Did he laugh?
Do we hear it”the "soft, dull, sly laugh," the "grim, dark
laughter, which comes up from the depths"?
However, Amis also refers to laughter of a somewhat different
sort, and here, having called attention to the splendors of this little
book, I am compelled to say where I think it fails. And by
"compelled" I suppose I must mean "obliged," since it appears on
the author's own warrant that the book's shortcomings are mostly
my fault. In the fall of 1999 Amis attended a meeting in London
where I spoke from the platform. The hall was one of those
venues (Cooper Union, in New York, might be an analogy) where
the rafters had once echoed with the rhetoric of the left. I made an
allusion to past evenings with old comrades, and the audience
responded with what Amis at first generously terms "affectionate
laughter." But then he gives way to the self-righteousness and
superficiality that let him down.
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 mustache and the big
mustache, 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.
This isn't right:
Everybody knows of Auschwitz and Belsen. Nobody
knows of Vorkuta and Solovetski.
Everybody knows of Himmler and Eichmann. Nobody
knows of Yezhov and Dzerdzhinsky.
Everybody knows of the six million of the Holocaust.
Nobody knows of the six million of the Terror-Famine.
George Orwell once remarked that certain terrible things in Spain
had really happened, and "they did not happen any the less
because the Daily Telegraph has suddenly found out about them
when it is five years too late." Martin Amis can be excused for
coming across some of the above names and numbers rather late
in life, but he cannot hope to get away with accusing others of
keeping these facts and names from him, or from themselves. He
tells me that this fairly unimportant evening was what kick-started
his book, and in an open letter to me on the preceding pages he
contemptuously, even proudly, asserts his refusal even to glance at
Isaac Deutscher's biographical trilogy on Leon Trotsky. Well, I
have my own, large differences with Deutscher. But nobody who
read his Prophet Outcast, which was published more than three
decades ago, could possibly be uninstructed about Vorkuta or
Yezhov. In other words, having demanded to know "Why is it?" in
such an insistent tone, he doesn't stay to answer his own question,
instead replacing it with a vaguely peevish and "shocked,
shocked" version of "How long has this been going on?" The
answer there is, longer than he thinks.
With infinitely more distress I have to add that Amis's newly
acquired zeal forbids him to see a joke even when (as Bertie
Wooster puts it) it is handed to him on a skewer with béarnaise
sauce. The laughter in that hall was slightly shabby, I am quite
prepared to agree. But it was the resigned laughter that "sees" a
poor jest, and recognizes the fellow sufferer. In related anecdotes
that are too obviously designed to place himself in a good light,
Amis also recounts some aggressive questions allegedly put by
him to me and to James Fenton in our (James's and my) Trotskyist
years, when all three of us were colleagues at The New Statesman.
The questions are so plainly wife-beating questions, and the
answers so clearly intended to pacify the aggressor by offering a
mocking agreement, that I have to set down a judgment I would
once have thought unutterable. Amis's want of wit here, even
about a feeble joke, compromises his seriousness.
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would be as solipsistic as he is if I persisted too long with this, so
I redirect attention. In the excerpt above has he made up his mind
about the moral equivalence between Stalin and Hitler? Or has he
reserved the right to use the cudgel according to need? When he
speaks of Ivan the Terrible and Joseph Stalin, does he mean to say
that there was something comparable in their "Great Russian"
ancestry? When he dilates upon torture and forced confessions, or
upon the practice of eliminating even the families of opponents, is
he suggesting that such terror was unknown to humanity before
1917? He states at one point, "Until I read Man Is Wolf to Man:
Surviving Stalin's Gulag I had never heard of a prisoner, en route,
lying crushed and ground on a section of rough wood and
receiving a succession of monstrous splinters up and down his
back." One would not need to refer him to the Nazi transports
from Salonika or Vichy. An allusion to the Middle Passage, or to
the hell ships that populated Australia's "Fatal Shore," would be
enough. Moral equivalence is not intended here. But moral
uniqueness requires a bit more justification.
I do not mean these to sound like commissar questions, or wife-
beating questions either. On the first and perhaps most important
one posed by Amis, for example, I find that I never quite know
what I think myself about this moral equivalence. Nor did I quite
know when I was still a member of a Marxist/post-Trotskyist
group, when such matters were debated from dawn until dusk,
often with furious or thuggish Communists. However, I do know
from that experience, which was both liberating and confining,
that the crucial questions about the gulag were being asked by left
oppositionists, from Boris Souvarine to Victor Serge to C.L.R.
James, in real time and at great peril. Those courageous and
prescient heretics have been somewhat written out of history (they
expected far worse than that, and often received it), but I can't
bring myself to write as if they never existed, or to forgive anyone
who slights them. If they seem too Marxist in tendency, one might
also mention the more heterodox work of John Dewey, Sidney
Hook, David Rousset, or Max Shachtman in exposing "Koba's"
hideous visage. The "Nobody" at the beginning of Amis's
sentences above is an insult, pure and simple, and an insult to
history, too.
History is more of a tragedy than it is a morality tale. The will to
power, the will to use human beings in social experiments, is to be
distrusted at all times. The impulse to create, or even to propose,
what Amis calls "the perfect society" is likewise to be suspected.
At several points he states with near perfect simplicity that
ideology is hostile to human nature, and implies that teleological
socialism was uniquely or particularly so. I would no longer
disagree with him about this. Corruptio optimi pessima: no greater
cruelty will be devised than by those who are sure, or are assured,
that they are doing good. However, one may come to such a
conclusion by a complacent route or by what I would still dare to
call a dialectical one. Does anybody believe that had the 1905
Russian Revolution succeeded, it would have led straight to the
gulag, and to forced collectivization? Obviously not. Such a
revolution might even have forestalled the Balkan wars and World
War I. Yet that revolution's moving spirits were Lenin and
Trotsky, defeated by the forces of autocracy, Orthodoxy, and
militarism. Excuse me, but nobody can be bothered to argue much
about whether fascism might have turned out better, given more
propitious circumstances. And there were no dissidents in the
Nazi Party, risking their lives on the proposition that the Führer
had betrayed the true essence of National Socialism. As Amis half
recognizes, in his en passant compliment to me, the question just
doesn't come up.
Amis says he doesn't wish that World War II had gone the other
way, which is good of him (though there were many Ukrainians
and Russians who took their anti-Stalinism to the extent of
enlistment on the Nazi side). However, it would be nice to know if
he wishes that the Russian civil war, and the wars of intervention,
had gone the other way. There are some reasons to think that had
that been the case, the common word for fascism would have been
a Russian one, not an Italian one. The Protocols of the Learned
Elders of Zion was brought to the West by the White emigration;
even Boris Pasternak, in Doctor Zhivago, wrote with a shudder
about life in the White-dominated regions. Major General William
Graves, who commanded the American Expeditionary Force
during the 1918 invasion of Siberia (an event thoroughly
airbrushed from all American textbooks), wrote in his memoirs
about the pervasive, lethal anti-Semitism that dominated the
Russian right wing and added, "I doubt if history will show any
country in the world during the last fifty years where murder
could be committed so safely, and with less danger of punishment,
than in Siberia during the reign of Admiral Kolchak." Thus "the
collapse in the value of human life," as Amis describes the
situation in post-revolutionary Russia, had begun some time
before, perhaps in the marshes of Tannenberg, and was to make
itself felt in other post-World War I societies as well.
Some confrontation with this line of thinking”I hesitate to use
the word "context"”is essential if one is to avoid the merely one-
dimensional or propagandistic. It might be concluded that upon
reflection and analysis, the Bolshevik Revolution was the worst
possible of the many available postwar outcomes, none of which
(unlike Germany in 1933) included the prospect of parliamentary
pluralism. It might also be concluded that Stalinism was the
ineluctable and even the intended outcome of 1917, though this
would involve some careful reasoning about whether things are or
are not products of "historical inevitability." Yet Amis simply
evades the question with a couple of sneers, saying that my
argument "would have more weight behind it if (a) there had been
a similar collapse (i.e., total, and lasting thirty-five years) in any
other combatant country, and if (b) a single Old Bolshevik had
spent a single day at the front, or indeed in the army." Well, even
the collapse of postwar Germany into the arms of first the
Freikorps and then their successors doesn't seem to meet his first
exacting condition, at least in point of duration (though the
enforced shortening of the Nazi period did involve some fairly
harsh decisions about the value of human life). As for the second
sneer, is Amis telling us that he hasn't read, for example, Isaac
Babel's Red Cavalry? Bolshevism was in some ways a product of
the hard-line front fighters. Indeed, its very militarization was one
of the several reasons for its ugliness.
Hard work is involved in the study of history. Hard moral work,
too. We don't get much assistance in that task from mushy
secondhand observations like this one:
Accounting, as a Catholic, for his belief in evil as a living
force, the novelist Anthony Burgess once said, "There is
no A.J.P. Taylor-ish explanation for what happened in
Eastern Europe during the war." Nor is there.
Oh, yes. And what might the Catholic explanation be? The
Church is still trying to find new ways of apologizing for its role
in these events, and for things like the Nazi puppet regime in
Slovakia, which was actually headed by a priest. Of course,
original sin would be just as persuasive a verdict as any other the
Church might offer. But tautology is the enemy of historical
inquiry: if we are all evil, then everything becomes a matter of
degree. Amis for some reason has a special horror of Bolshevik
anti-clericalism, and writes as if the Czarist Russian Orthodox
Church was some kind of relief organization run by nuns. If he
would look even at the recent performance of state-sponsored
militant Orthodoxy in Bosnia ... Incidentally, do not the Churches
also insist on trying to perfect the imperfectible, and on forcing
the human shape into unnatural attitudes? Surely the "totalitarian"
impulse has a common root with the proselytizing one. The
"internal organs," as the Cheka and the GPU and the KGB used to
style themselves, were asked to police the mind for heresy as
much as to torture kulaks to relinquish the food they withheld
from the cities. If there turns out to be a connection between the
utilitarian and the totalitarian, then we wretched mammals are in
even worse straits than we suspect.
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mis might have profited from studying the novelistic gold
standard here, which is Arthur Koestler's Darkness at Noon.
Koestler's theory of Stalin's grim success, which was that some of
his old Bolshevik victims half feared that "Koba" might be correct
after all, is only partly superseded by the "beat, beat and beat
again" account, which itself is an insufficient explanation for the
actual capitulation of the defend- ants. (A handful of the old
comrades, after all, never cracked.) But his theory allowed for a
very illuminating fictional dramatization of the relationship of
ideas to outcomes. And Koestler put such persuasive words into
the mouth of the interrogator Gletkin”his version of the Grand
Inquisitor”that some English and French readers (John Strachey
most notably) were actually persuaded by them. That unintended
consequence was obviously limited. But it points to an essential
difference. Koestler exposed the ghastliness of Stalinism by
means of a sophisticated deployment of historical irony, whereas
Amis”and again I startle myself by saying this”has decided to
dispense with irony altogether. (He mentions, with all the gravity
of one returning from a voyage of discovery, that the sailors of
Kronstadt fought against the Bolsheviks under red flags and with
revolutionary slogans. He even italicizes the word
"revolutionaries," as if this point were at the expense of the left
opposition. As Daniel Bell pointed out decades ago, the only real
argument among members of the old left was about the point at
which their own personal "Kronstadt" had occurred. Bell was
proud to say that Kronstadt itself had been his "Kronstadt.")
Writing toward the very end of his life, a life that had included
surprising Stalin himself by a refusal to confess, and the
authorship of a novel”The Case of Comrade Tulayev”that
somewhat anticipated Darkness at Noon, Victor Serge could still
speak a bit defensively about the bankruptcy of socialism in the
"midnight of the century" represented by the Hitler-Stalin pact.
But he added,
Have you forgotten the other bankruptcies? What was
Christianity doing in the various catastrophes of society?
What became of Liberalism? What has Conservatism
produced, in either its enlightened or its reactionary form?
... If we are indeed honestly to weigh out the bankruptcies
of ideology, we shall have a long task ahead of us.
In the best sections of this book Amis makes the extraordinary
demand that, in effect, the human species should give up on
teleology and on all forms of "experiment" on fellow creatures.
He is being much more revolutionary here than perhaps he
appreciates. Had he allowed himself to ponder the implications,
he might have engaged fruitfully with some of his own earlier
work on fascism and on thermonuclear gamesmanship”two
absolutist theories and practices that had in common the view that
Leninism was the main enemy. If it matters, I now agree with him
that perfectionism and messianism are the chief and most lethal of
our foes. But I can't quite write as if a major twentieth-century
tragedy had been enacted to prove that I was correct in the first
place. And I don't say this just because I wasn't correct. After all,
the most valiant of the historians and the resisters in our own time
was undoubtedly Solzhenitsyn, who has now descended into a sort
of "Great Russian" spiritual and political quackery, replete with
nostrums about the national "soul" and euphemisms about
pogroms and anti-Semitism. Amis should be self-aware enough to
admit that this is an "ideology" too.
His is a short work, and one cannot ask for a complete theory of
modern ideology and the various deathtraps it sets for the body
and the mind. However, much of the space that could have been
devoted to a little inquiry is instead given over to some rather odd
reflections on Amis's family life, featuring some vignettes about
his offspring and a meditation on the sadly short term that was set
to the life of his younger sister. Few people could be more
sympathetic to his children than I am (one of those children is my
godson). But what is this doing? A baby daughter screams
inconsolably one night and forces her father to summon the
nanny.
"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."
>From darkness at noon to ... lightness at midnight. There's quite a
lot more in the same vein. I find it inexplicable, partly because I
can easily imagine the scorn with which Amis would write about
anyone else who employed the Terror for purposes of relativism.
His own purpose, presumably, is to refute Stalin's foul inhumanity
by showing that an individual, too, can be a considerable
"statistic." But the transition from macro- to micro-humanity is
uneasy at its best.
Slightly easier to take is his letter to his late father, who was a
believing Communist for many of the Stalin years, and whose
irrational dogmatism is set down, probably rightly, to a series of
emotional and attitudinal and familial complexes. In Experience,
in contrast, we saw old Kingsley as he declined into a sort of
choleric, empurpled Blimpishness, culminating in his
denunciation of Nelson Mandela as a practitioner of Red Terror.
The lessons here ought to have been plain: Be very choosy about
what kind of anti-communist you are, and be careful not to
confuse the state of the world with that of your family, or your
own "internal organs."
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