Memory hole: why the left wants to forget Uncle Joe.

• Author: Freund, Charles Paul
• Position: Martin Amis on Joseph Stalin - Interview

JOSEPH STALIN MADE Martin Amis-laugh four times.

Amis reports that he read "yards" of books about Stalin to write Koba the Dread: Laughter and the Twenty Million (Miramax), a meditation on the monstrousness of Stalin and the consequent historical vulnerability of a left that has never fully dealt with its past complicity in mass murder. Indeed, much of the left is still able to laugh nostalgically about the Soviet Union despite its unspeakably horrific past, and that, thinks Amis, makes it morally guilty.

"Nothing Stalin did makes you laugh," writes Amis. Rather, it's the things Stalin was capable of saying, "as if he were a comic creation going through his hoops." Amis laughs "undisguisedly and with warmth" when Stalin blames a 1927 grain shortfall on "a kulak strike," because the dictator so sure-handedly combines a pair of scapegoat categories into a single conspiratorial event. He laughs when a rueful Stalin bemoans Hitler's double cross, saying, "Ech, together with the Germans we would have been invincible." It's what's packed into that Ech that gets Amis.

Amis laughs a third time when Stalin speaks of the miserable Pavel Morozov. A teenage peasant, Morozov was a Soviet icon, a hero renowned for turning his father in to the authorities. Stalin himself exalted the boy, though he was heard to say privately, "What a little swine, denouncing his own father."

Finally, Amis cannot help but laugh at Stalin's reaction to the German invasion of Russia, on learning of "the true dimensions of his own miscalculation, paralysis, willed myopia, and lack of nerve." "Lenin left us a great inheritance," said Stalin, "and we, his heirs, have fucked it all up."

Did you laugh? If not, perhaps your heart is not sufficiently filled with despair. Reading accounts of Stalin by the yard will fix that, and then you can laugh along with Amis. He's distilled a good deal of the horror he has encountered in the works of Robert Conquest, Alexander Solzhenitsyn, and the many other historians of, and witnesses to, utter dread.

Amis offers the haunting scene of Arctic prison campus where everyone has frozen to death--prisoners, guards, dogs, everyone. Many of them doubtless perished in a moment known to inmates as "the whispering of the stars," a last breath frozen in midair, the icy cloud breaking audibly on the frozen ground. There is the evocation of the Ukraine withering with intentional starvation. There are even scenes where the Russians, stupefied by the inanity...