Did you think I forgot all my interest in Russian and Soviet studies? Martin Amis’ 2002 work Koba the Dread: Laughter and the Twenty Million is another post-USSR look at Stalin’s brutal rule in Russia. “It loves blood, the Russian earth.”
I received a wonderful birthday gift from my brother Chris. Three books about Stalin, war with Germany and ultimately about sadness.
It is very difficult (again) to acknowledge the use of famine as a method of control. Both executed by Lenin and Stalin was so inhuman, yet effective for Soviet control of the non-Russian regions of the USSR. Was it not horrific enough that Stalin bled Ukraine, the fertile lands that kept his Bolsheviks temporarily alive?
Again, like Solzhenitsyn‘s The Gulag Archipelago: 1918-1956, Amis reveals the true horror of Stalin’s rule. How many people were shot on Stalin’s orders?
Although this work has been surpassed by more recent publications (with newly granted access to historical papers previously off limits to westerners) the true terror is no less important.
Did you ever realize simply counting the population was such a dangerous job?
Stalin looks at the census and thinks his country is big….but the census bureau’s numbers do not meet his expectations, so he has each member of the committee shot. The next committee also failing to “read between the lines” gives Stalin another wrong number. He has each member shot.
It was timely to see Amis linking Stalin’s son Vasily to Uday Hussian (pg. 163) both were rapists and found an uneven humor of living in the bright light of their terrorizing fathers.
But in the end Davis stated something quite amazing: Stalin saved democracy for the world. Really? After all it was his army that fought 44 divisions of the Wehrmacht. How could American forces (while fighting Japan) defeat the German army without Stalin?
NYTimes book review
Tags: Stalin, gulag, terror, Ukraine, famine, World War II