Koba the Dread Quotes

“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.”
― Martin Amis, Koba the Dread: Laughter and the Twenty Million

“Ideology brings about a disastrous fusion: that of violence and righteousness — a savagery without stain.”
― Martin Amis, Koba the Dread: Laughter and the Twenty Million

“Robert Conquest once suggested that 'a curious little volume might be made of the poems of Stalin, Castro, Mao and Ho Chi Minh, with illustrations by A. Hitler.”
― Martin Amis, Koba the Dread: Laughter and the Twenty Million

“Stalin's mental journey, by 1943, proceeded in the opposite direction to that of Hitler. One moved toward reality; the other moved away from it. They crossed paths at Stalingrad. And as the war turned on the hinge of that battle (and on the new psychological opposition), Stalin might have concerned himself with a "counterfactual": if, instead of decapitating his army, he had intelligently prepared it for war, Russia might have defeated Germany in a matter of weeks. Such a course of action, while no doubt entailing grave consequences of its own, would have saved about 40 million lives, including the vast majority of the victims of the Holocaust.”
― Martin Amis, Koba the Dread: Laughter and the Twenty Million

“Nazism did not destroy civil society. Bolshevism did destroy civil society. This is one of the reasons for the “miracle” of German recovery, and for the continuation of Russian vulnerability and failure. Stalin did not destroy civil society. Lenin destroyed civil society.”
― Martin Amis, Koba the Dread: Laughter and the Twenty Million

“Q: What’s the difference between a Communist car and a Communist proselytizer? A: You can close the door on a Communist proselytizer.”
― Martin Amis, Koba the Dread: Laughter and the Twenty Million

“The militant Utopian, the perfectibilizer, from the outset, is in a malevolent rage at the obvious fact of human imperfectibility.”
― Martin Amis, Koba the Dread: Laughter and the Twenty Million

“He tortured, not to force you to reveal a fact, but to force you to collude in a fiction.”
― Martin Amis, Koba the Dread: Laughter and the Twenty Million

“As I now see it, America had no business involving itself in a series of distant convulsions where the ideas, variously interpreted, of a long-dead German economist were bringing biblical calamity to China, North Korea, Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia.”
― Martin Amis, Koba the Dread: Laughter and the Twenty Million

“The fact was that facts were losing their value. Stalin had broken the opposition. He was also far advanced toward his much stranger objective of breaking the truth. Or it may have been the other way about: actuality, under Stalin, was such that dread and disgust forbade you to accept it— or even to contemplate it.”
― martin amis, Koba the Dread: Laughter and the Twenty Million

“Denunciation in Russia has a long history, going back at least as far as the sixteenth century and the testingly protracted reign of Ivan the Terrible (1533– 84). “Spy or die” was, more or less, the oath you swore. This practice, increasingly institutionalized under the old regime, was a tsarist barbarity that Lenin might have been expected to question.”
― Martin Amis, Koba the Dread: Laughter and the Twenty Million

“Nearly every night there were screenings in the private projection rooms in the Kremlin or the various dachas. Khrushchev says that Stalin was particularly keen on Westerns: 'He used to curse them and give them proper ideological evaluation, but then immediately order new ones.”
― Martin Amis, Koba the Dread: Laughter and the Twenty Million

“The refusal of laughter to absent itself, in the Soviet case, has already been noted (and will be returned to). It seems that the Twenty Million will never command the sepulchral decorum of the Holocaust. This is not, or not only, a symptom of the general 'asymmetry of indulgence' (the phrase is Ferdinand Mount's). It would not be so unless something in the nature of Bolshevism permitted it to be so.”
― Martin Amis, Koba the Dread: Laughter and the Twenty Million

“One recalls John Updike's argument: the only evidence for the existence of God is the collective human yearning that it should be so.”
― Martin Amis, Koba the Dread: Laughter and the Twenty Million

“There are several accounts, written or deposed, by the guards, executioners and inhumers of the Romanovs. One of the inhumers said that he could 'die in peace because he had squeezed the Empress's -----.'*

*Pipes's note reads: 'Deposition by P. V. Kukhtenko in Solokov Dossier I, dated September 8, 1918; omission in the original.”
― Martin Amis, Koba the Dread: Laughter and the Twenty Million

“At the age of twenty, his artistic dreams frustrated, Hitler was a tramp: park benches, soup queues. Given just a little more talent, perhaps, he would have killed himself, not in the bunker, but in a cosy little studio in Klagenfurt.”
― Martin Amis, Koba the Dread: Laughter and the Twenty Million

“There are many accounts of prison floors strewn with genitals, breasts, tongues, eyes and ears. 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.”
― Martin Amis, Koba the Dread: Laughter and the Twenty Million

“One recalls John Updike’s argument: the only evidence for the existence of God is the collective human yearning that it should be so.”
― Martin Amis, Koba The Dread: Laughter and the Twenty Million

“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.”
― Martin Amis, Koba the Dread: Laughter and the Twenty Million

“After many ponderous experiments the first crematorium was opened in December 1920 in Petrograd. It could manage barely 120 bodies a month, and, in February 1921, cremated itself when the wooden roof caught fire.”
― Martin Amis, Koba the Dread: Laughter and the Twenty Million

“Hamlet doesn't fully see that his metaphysical miseries constitute a subliminal symptom of grief; and this was exactly my case. I thought I was sick, I thought I was dying (maybe that is what bereavement actually asks of you). Literature gives us these warnings about the main events, but we don't recognize the warnings until the events have come and gone. Isabel, my senior in the loss of a sibling, told me that you just have to take it, like weather—yes, like sleet in your face.”
― Martin Amis, Koba the Dread: Laughter and the Twenty Million