Koba the Dread

by Martin Amis

  It can be tersely stated: under Lenin, the ‘value of human life collapsed’, as Alain Brossat put it. And that was the end of the matter, for the next thirty-five years.

  Vasily Grossman:

  ‘Everything inhuman is senseless and worthless’… Amid the total triumph of inhumanity, it has become self-evident that everything effected by violence is senseless and worthless, and that it has no future and will disappear without trace.

  6 The insurrectionary armies of the Peasant War (1918–22). Lenin, with justice, thought the Greens a greater threat to the regime’s survival than the Whites.

  7 Between 1 January 1917, and 1 January 1923, the price of goods increased by a factor of 100 million.

  8 This made sense doctrinally, too. The Bolsheviks were internationalists; the Soviet Union was no more than the headquarters of Communism while it waited for planetary revolution. As he advanced on Warsaw in July 1920, Marshal Tukhachevsky repeated the official line: ‘Over the corpse of White Poland lies the path to world conflagration.’ (After the Red Army – largely thanks, it seems, to Stalin – was defeated, the Bolsheviks began to suspect that the fraternal revolutions weren’t going to materialize.) As for the Russians themselves, Lenin was frankly racist in his settled dislike for them. They were fools and bunglers, and ‘too soft’ to run an efficient police state. He made no secret of his preference for the Germans.

  9 Though very tardily: the future US president Herbert Hoover had been agitating for a food campaign in the USSR since 1919. Lenin also continued to export grain throughout this period (and continued, of course, to commit vast sums to the fomentation of revolutions elsewhere).

  10 ‘There is no hint in any of the vast array of archival material to suggest that [Lenin] was troubled by his conscience about any of the long list of destructive measures he took’ (Volkogonov, Lenin: A New Biography). ‘Nothing in the notes, remarks and resolutions of [Stalin’s] last years suggests anything but unfailing confidence that his life’s work was eternal’ (Volkogonov, The Rise and Fall of the Soviet Empire).

  11 Which the Provisional Government under Kerensky had reinstated as a punishment for front-line desertion. The Bolsheviks had earlier campaigned with the slogan, ‘Down with capital punishment, reinstated by Kerensky.’

  12 Orlando Figes, A People’s Tragedy: The Russian Revolution 1891–1924.

  Who-Whom?

  Who, here, is describing whom?

  In the course of those five February days when the revolutionary fight was being waged in the cold streets of the capital, there flitted before us several times like a shadow the figure of a liberal of noble family, the son of a former tsarist minister, ******* – almost symbolic in his self-satisfied correctness and dry egotism … He now became General Administrator of the Provisional Government … In his Berlin exile where he was finally killed by the stray bullet of a White Guard, he left memoirs of the Provisional Government which are not without interest. Let us place that to his credit.

  The whom is Vladimir Nabokov (the father) and the who is Leon Trotsky: History of the Russian Revolution (1932, and written in exile). How translucently bloodthirsty is the phrase ‘he was finally killed …’ Because Trotsky counted Nabokov among those he wanted killed, and someone ‘finally’ killed him. Trotsky was not accustomed to waiting so long. He joins Lenin as guilty of the basic charge, although he typically stated the case with more revolutionary ‘elan’: ‘We must put an end once and for all to the papist-Quaker babble about the sanctity of human life.’ A considerable severance. Trotsky was not without literary talent, literary expressiveness. But Edmund Wilson, in To the Finland Station (1940), is ridiculous when he talks about Trotsky’s stuff as being ‘part of our permanent literature’. Trotsky’s History is a valuable historical document, but it is worthless as history, as historiography, as writing; truth, like all other human values, is indefinitely postponable. After a while the reader is physically oppressed by the dishonesty of his prose. In any case, Trotsky’s final pages, for all their massive, inordinate – indeed, world-historical – complacency, are also quietly ironic when you consider the fate of their author. The History runs to three volumes, so these quotes are effectively from pages 1,258–59:

  Enemies are gleeful that fifteen years after the revolution the Soviet country is still but little like a kingdom of universal well-being … Capitalism required a hundred years to elevate science and technique to the heights and plunge humanity into the hell of war and crisis. To socialism its enemies allow only fifteen years to create and furnish a terrestrial paradise …

  The language of the civilized nations has clearly marked off two epochs in the development of Russia. Where the aristocratic culture introduced into world parlance such barbarisms as tsar, progrom, knout, October has internationalized such words as Bolshevik, soviet and piatiletka. This alone justifies the proletarian revolution, if you imagine that it needs justification.

  THE END

  Which leaves you wondering if piatiletka is Russian for ‘summary execution’, perhaps, or ‘slave camp’.13 ‘Fifteen years after the revolution’: 1932. Stalin, Trotsky’s enemy and eventual murderer, was immovably emplaced, and 6 million people were being systematically starved to death. The Ukraine, in Conquest’s phrase, was becoming ‘one vast Belsen’…

  Vladimir Nabokov (the son) met Edmund Wilson in 1940, just after the appearance of To the Finland Station; and they became good enough friends to produce an inspiring correspondence: The Nabokov-Wilson Letters 1940–1971. As the editor, Simon Karlinsky, says in his introduction, Wilson acted, to begin with, as Nabokov’s ‘unpaid literary agent’. This spontaneous donation of energy was received with desperate gratitude by Nabokov, who would remain grossly overworked and more or less ‘penniless’ until Lolita (1955). He had just fled with his Jewish wife, Véra, and their son, Dmitri, from France, which was then collapsing to the Germans. Next, going backwards in time, Hitlerian and Weimar Berlin, where Nabokov incorporated into a novel (The Gift, 1937–38) an erudite but also brilliantly impressionistic biography of Nikolai Chernyshevsky – whose revolutionary primer (Nabokov translates it as What to Do?) was Lenin’s looking-glass.14 Then, going further back in time, the flight from revolutionary Russia. Cowed, perhaps, by Nabokov’s strictures on art and ‘ideas’, we neglect the political pulse in him and in his fiction. He wrote two novels about totalitarian states (Bend Sinister and Invitation to a Beheading); these were imaginary, but the totalitarian states Nabokov had experienced were real: Lenin’s and Hitler’s. And, as Trotsky contentedly noted, Vladimir Nabokov (the father) was assassinated in Berlin in 1922, when Vladimir Nabokov (the son: in Speak, Memory he refers to the assailants as ‘two Russian Fascists’) was turning twenty-three; that night – ‘Father is no more’ – was the crux of his life. So, yes, there would be a political pulse. And this is partly why Nabokov, in all his fiction, writes with incomparable penetration about delusion and coercion, about cruelty and lies. Even Lolita, especially Lolita, is a study in tyranny.

  Wilson and Nabokov fell out. Their first enduring disagreement had to do with the Russian Revolution. Their second had to do with Russian prosody, and it was this, quaintly but intelligibly, that foreclosed their friendship, together with Wilson’s cold words about Lolita. As I regretfully see it, Bunny (Bunny was the nickname Volodya was soon using) began to pick fights with his friend at just about the point where Nabokov’s reputation was eclipsing his own. The friendship plummeted in 1966, when Wilson went into print with a hostile (and ignorant) review of Nabokov’s translation of Eugene Onegin – and gave its last flicker, palely and politely, five years later.

  In To the Finland Station Wilson had written about Lenin romantically: Lenin the warrior-poet, the quiet man of destiny, with something of the instinctive grace of the noble savage – Lenin, the savage savant. When the book was reissued in 1971 Wilson added a new introduction:

  I have also been charged with having given a much too amiable picture of Lenin, and I believe that this criticis
m has been made not without some justification … one can see the point of Lenin’s being short with the temporizing and arguing Russians but one cannot be surprised that he gave offense and did not show himself so benevolent as I perhaps tend to make him.

  Lenin, we note, is still being assessed merely as a social or collegiate being. As for Trotsky, ‘I have not found anything which obliges me to make any rectifications,’ writes Wilson, having read Isaac Deutscher’s (notoriously mythopoeic) biography. So this stands, among much else: ‘[I]t is as a hero of the faith in Reason that Trotsky must figure for us.’

  Wilson was not lastingly gulled by Stalin, but he could never give up on the essential purity of October. So he played his part in the great intellectual abasement. To explain this abasement certain historical conditions are often adduced. They are: the generational wound of World War I (a war successfully branded as ‘imperialist’ and therefore capitalist), the Great Depression of 1929–34, the rise of fascism and then Nazism (and their combined involvement in the Spanish Civil War), and, later, the moral force of the Russian losses in World War II. But the fact remains that despite ‘more and more voluminous and unignorable evidence’ to the contrary (as my father put it, writing of the mid-1950s), the USSR continued to be regarded as fundamentally progressive and benign; and the misconception endured until the mid-1970s. What was it? From our vantage it looks like a contagion of selective incuriosity, a mindgame begun in self-hypnosis and maintained by mass hysteria. And although the aberration was of serious political utility to Moscow, we still tend to regard it as a bizarre and embarrassing sideshow to the main events. We must hope to find a more structural connection.

  In 1935 Wilson journeyed to the USSR and wrote about it in Travels in Two Democracies (1956), which, as Professor Karlinsky puts it,

  is an affecting mixture of his own naive expectations and the harsh realities he does his best to explain away… Unlike such Western travelers as G. B. Shaw, who visited the USSR at the height of the post-collectivization famine and declared after his return that Soviet citizens were the best-fed people in Europe, Wilson perceived enough of Soviet realities to make him see that this was not the free and idealistic utopia, run by workers and peasants, which he had hoped to find.

  Now: let us consider this utopia, the fully achieved utopia that Wilson hoped to find. Ten seconds of sober thought will decisively inform you that such a place is not heaven but a species of hell; that such a place is alien to us; that such a place is non-human. The ‘Potemkin villages’ occasionally rigged up to deceive foreign VIPs, with the appearances of plenitude trucked in from the cities, and labourers and cowgirls impersonated by the secret police, and imported trees wedged into slots on the road-side: such a setting is an appropriate figure for utopia, any utopia, because it is farce, because it is travesty.

  Wilson shepherded his illusions into his grave (1972). I want to quote some extracts from Nabokov’s great letter of 23 February 1948: 1948. In its opening sentences you can hear Nabokov rolling his sleeves up, and you can feel the prose moving a notch towards his high style:

  Dear Bunny,

  You naively compare my (and the ‘old Liberals”) attitude towards the Soviet regime (sensu lato [broadly]) to that of a ‘ruined and humiliated’ American Southerner towards the ‘wicked’ North. You must know me and ‘Russian Liberals’ very little if you fail to realize the amusement and contempt with which I regard Russian émigrés whose ‘hatred’ of the Bolsheviks is based on a sense of financial loss or class degringolade. It is preposterous (though quite in line with Soviet writings on the subject) to postulate any material interest at the bottom of a Russian Liberal’s (or Democrat’s or Socialist’s) rejection of the Soviet regime.

  Despite his palpable warmth of feeling, Nabokov is here showing restraint. For Wilson has clearly delivered a gross injury to his friend and to their friendship. Nabokov is bearing in mind that Wilson, not understanding the Bolshevik reality, does not understand the insult, either.

  Ominously gathering force, the letter continues. Nabokov reminds, or informs, Wilson that the opposition to Bolshevism was and is pluralistic. There follows a comparatively playful elucidation (‘[i]ncidental but very important’) on the exact constituency of the Russian ‘intelligentsia’ (they were, definingly, professionals: ‘In fact a typical Russian intelligent would look askance at an avant-garde poet’); Nabokov lists their strengths and virtues (we feel VN Senior as a powerful exemplum here), and firmly proceeds:

  But of course people who read Trotsky for information anent Russian culture cannot be expected to know all this. I have also a hunch that the general idea that avant-garde literature and art were having a wonderful time under Lenin and Trotsky is mainly due to Eisenstadt [Eisenstein] films – ‘montage’ – things like that – and great big drops of sweat rolling down rough cheeks. The fact that pre-Revolution Futurists joined the party has also contributed to the kind of (quite false) avantgarde atmosphere which the American intellectual associates with the Bolshevik Revolution.

  Nabokov starts a new paragraph. This letter impresses me further every time I read it. I like the even cadences, now, as the writer reasserts the decorum of friendship: ‘I do not want to be personal, but here is how I explain your attitude …’ There follows a perceptive and generous and near-universal analysis (one I will hope to add something to) of the kind of conditions that would facilitate such a severe cognitive dissonance. In 1917 Wilson was twenty-two; the Russian ‘experiment’ – remote and largely obscure – spoke to his natural ardour.

  Your concept of pre-Soviet Russia came to you through a pro-Soviet prism. When later on (i.e., at a time coinciding with Stalin’s ascension) improved information, a more mature judgment and the pressure of inescapable facts dampened your enthusiasm and dried your sympathy, you somehow did not bother to check your preconceived notions in regard to old Russia while, on the other hand, the glamor of Lenin’s reign retained for you the emotional iridescence which your optimism, idealism and youth had provided … The thunderclap of administrative purges [1937–38] woke you up (something that the moans of Solovki or at the Lubianka had not been able to do) since they affected men on whose shoulders St Lenin’s hand had lain.

  Solovki: cradle of the gulag (and established under Lenin). The Lubyanka was the Cheka’s headquarters in Moscow; its dates are 1918–91.

  ‘I am now going to state a few things,’ writes Nabokov, winding up, ‘which I think are true and I don’t think you can refute.’ The letter ends with two encapsulations. Pre-1917:

  Under the Tsars (despite the inept and barbarous character of their rule) a freedom-loving Russian had incomparably more possibility and means of expressing himself than at any time during Lenin’s and Stalin’s regime. He was protected by law. There were fearless and independent judges in Russia. The Russian sud [legal system] after the Alexander reforms was a magnificent institution, not only on paper. Periodicals of various tendencies and political parties of all possible kinds, legally or illegally, flourished and all parties were represented in the Duma. Public opinion was always liberal and progressive.

  Post-1917:

  Under the Soviets, from the very start, the only protection a dissenter could hope for was dependent on governmental whims, not laws. No parties except the one in power could exist. Your Alymovs [Sergei Alymov was a showcase hack poet] are specters bobbing in the wake of a foreign tourist. Bureaucracy, a direct descendant of party discipline, took over immediately. Public opinion disintegrated. The intelligentsia ceased to exist. Any changes that took place between November [1917] and now have been changes in the decor which more or less screens an unchanging black abyss of oppression and terror.

  ‘Intellectual’ is a word commonly applied to the Bolshevik leaders (and it is often said that Stalin was ‘the only non-intellectual’ among them). They qualified, one supposes, as intellectuals of the radical fringe, in that they were half-educated in history and political economy, and in nothing else. As Nabokov has just explained, h
owever, a Russian intellectual is a professional; and it was a rare Old Bolshevik who ever presented himself for gainful employment (though Lenin, earlier, lost a couple of cases as a lawyer). We have seen, too, that the revolutionary vanguard developed an abnormal aversion to the intellectuals, who were, as Lenin said, ‘shit’. And in 1922 Lenin threw himself into the business of what Solzhenitsyn, establishing a metaphor for the gulag, calls ‘sewage disposal’. Some were executed or internally exiled, and scores of thousands were deported. American commentators ‘saw us’, writes Nabokov, ‘merely as villainous generals, oil magnates, and gaunt ladies with lorgnettes’, but the émigrés were very broadly the intelligentsia. They were the civil society.

  In another sense, of course, the revolutionaries were professionals: avowedly and disastrously, they were ‘professional revolutionaries’, just as Chernyshevsky had enjoined them to be, ‘fulltime revolutionaries’, with their leather jackets, revolvers, hideouts, trysts, schisms, conspiracies, passwords, false beards, false names.15 Watched, trailed, shadowed, menaced, detained, searched, infiltrated, provoked, arrested, imprisoned, interrogated, tried, sentenced: when, in the course of a single evening, these undergrounders found themselves at the commanding heights, how could it be otherwise than who-whom? (in Lenin’s famous question)? Who will vanquish whom? Who will destroy whom?

  Nabokov’s ‘Life of Chernyshevsky’, which comprises about a hundred pages of The Gift, is serious (and comic) and scholarly, and based on deep reading. And poor Nikolai Gavrilovich, of course, emerges as a Gogolian grotesque (obsessed by perpetual-motion machines and encyclopedias), a shambling cuckold, and a literary anti-talent (who, with his ‘agonisingly circumstantial’ style, was ‘a person ridiculously alien to artistic creation’). The following lines take on wide application, if we regard Chernyshevsky as the tutelary spirit, the jinx or genius of Bolshevism and its transformative dream: