Paul Berman, New York Times Book Review
Koba the Dread is not a great book about Stalin, and it is less than a useful meditation on totalitarianism and the western intellectuals. Amis observes that large tragedies require a “high style” – a tone of grandeur. He himself does not command a high style. Yet his book carries a punch, artfully delivered.
Christopher Hitchens, Atlantic Monthly
In related anecdotes that are too obviously designed to place himself in a good light, Amis . . . 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 judgement I would once have thought unutterable. Amis’s want of wit here, even about a feeble joke, compromises his seriousness.
Charles Taylor, www.salon.com
What Amis is trying to do . . . is to clear the mental decks, to synthesise what various sources have to tell us about . . . a major episode of 20th-century history and to disdain any attempt to apologise for it or explain it away. That he does not consider himself especially political may be why his tone is so even (though firm), why he’s without either the guilt or the fury that ex-believers feel in having allowed themselves to be deceived.
Andrew Stuttaford, National Review
To explain that laughter [about Stalin], he [Amis] turns, unconvincingly, to the elements of black farce that were never absent from communist rule (but which were, he neglects, crucially, to say, equally present under the Nazis), and then, more believably, “to the laughter of universal fondness for that old, old idea about the perfect society, [which] is also the laughter of forgetting. It forgets the demonic energy unconsciously embedded in that hope. It forgets the Twenty Million.” And in that one word “unconsciously”, Martin Amis gets it all wrong. Murder, turmoil and repression were always explicit in that “old, old idea”, and they play no small part in its appeal. Glance, just for a second, at Lenin’s writings and you will be amazed by the morbid love of violence that permeates his prose.
Sergei Kovalyov, a Russian MP who spent seven years in jail under Brezhnev for anti-Soviet agitation. Quoted in the Observer
How can you talk about laughter in connection with the millions of victims, streams of blood and endless lying? As far as I understand, the author is trying to make a cultural analysis, and it seems to me that such an approach to Stalinism is hardly acceptable. . . . How could we laugh if people were sentenced to death or many years in prison?
Nikita Petrov, a historian at Memorial, an organisation dedicated to the remembrance of Stalin’s victims. Quoted in the Observer
I have some doubts about the role of laughter in understanding Soviet history because in that there is an element of haughtiness of the author, who is a citizen of a country that has not experienced [the things Russia did].
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