Koba The Dread - laughter and the twenty million

Koba the Dread is the successor to Amis''s celebrated memoir, Experience. It addresses itself to the central lacuna of twentieth-century thought: the indulgence of communism by Western intellectuals. In between the personal beginning and the personal ending, Amis gives us perhaps the best one hundred pages ever written about Stalin: Koba the Dread, Iosif the Terrible.

The author''s father, Kingsley Amis, was ''a Comintern dogsbody'' (as he would come to put it) from 1941 to 1956. His second-closest, and later in life his closest friend, was Robert Conquest, whose book The Great Terror was second only to Solzhenitsyn''s The Gulag Archipelago in undermining the USSR. Amis''s remarkable memoir explores these connections.

Stalin said that the death of one person was tragic, the death of a million a mere ''statistic''. Koba the Dread, during whose course the author absorbs a particular, a familial death, is a rebuttal of Stalin''s aphorism.