A great read - I picked it up late one evening and really found it hard to put it down long enough to get some sleep. Here, Amis bookends personal stories from his own life and the people around him onto a potted biography of Stalin and the worst excesses of Communism in Russia between WW1 and the mid-1950s. Meticulously researched and relatively academic, it is nonetheless extremely readable - as you would expect from an Amis. ( )

Amis wrote famously memorable fictions about the Holocaust (‘Time’s Arrow’, ‘The Zone of Interest’) and the threat of nuclear annihilation (‘Einstein’s Monsters’, ‘London Fields’) but it’s telling I think that when he came to Stalin only non-fiction would do. This is possibly the most underrated book Amis produced. Many critics at the time seemed uncertain what it was, and a sort of reticence pervades many of the reviews, augmented perhaps by the fact that Amis was not an academic or professional historian.
But reading it again I have to say I think it’s as telling and thought provoking as some of the novels. Amis had, as he says at the start of the book, ‘read several yards of books about the Soviet experiment’. If I say he read them so we don’t have to that would be unfair to many of the authors of those books I’m sure (and I have gone on to read at least one acclaimed account by a historian, to be reviewed later) but it does start to capture the achievement to some extent. Amis has read, understood, thought deeply and synthesised his reading and come up with a relatively short book of insights on aspects of the ‘experiment’, the second part of which is devoted to Stalin. There are facts and narrative woven in very skilfully so that the effect at the end is having had a very informative conversation with a clever friend who has somehow squeezed Russia roughly 1917 - 1953 into a couple of hours.
There’s more though. First, I cannot emphasise enough how well written this book is. The rightly celebrated Amis prose style is marshalled to brilliant effect here (and yes, he does find some moments of farce amongst the utterly chilling related facts). Second, for those who admired ‘Experience’ and ‘Inside Story’ there is some fascinating writing on Kingsley Amis (who was a card carrying member of the British Communist Party for a while) and how his attitude changed, Martin’s own attitude to his father’s politics (which is inevitably also very illuminating as to this most famous of father/son relationships) and the part that the pioneering historian Robert Conquest - a good friend of Kingsley’s who became an equally good friend of Martin by the sound of it- played in their relationship, but also of course in what Conquest did to awaken more generally those supporters of the USSR in the UK and US as to what was really happening. Amis recounts how Conquest’s book ‘The Great Terror’ was republished post-glasnost as ‘The Great Terror: A Reassessment’. Amis goes on: ‘When asked to suggest a new title for the revised work, Conquest told his publisher, “How about I Told You So, You [deleted] Fools?” ‘ There’s more - the Christopher Hitchens/Amis friendship inevitably features not least in the brilliant long letter which opens the third part of the book and Amis again hauntingly returns to the early death of his sister Sally and the effect it had on him.
If this all sounds a slightly odd concoction all I can say is read it and it won’t seem odd at all and you will be glad you did. Highly recommended. ( )

If you need a list of reasons to hate Stalin and pity the people of the Soviet Union, this books provides a maximalist version of that list. All scrupulously cited and delivered with rare erudition (for a history book anyway). ( )

Amis is an excellent writer in fiction, history and politics.Stalin makes
Hitler smaller than an ant. Never see Russia the same after this.
Helps explain the Russian mindset. ( )

It is difficult to say that I enjoyed Koba the Dread: Laughter and the Twenty Million by Martin Amis. There is too much brutality to enjoy the book. But it was most informative. I have never read nonfiction from Amis before though I am familiar with his novels. This books describes the brutality of the Communists, especially under Stalin though Lenin doesn't get off scot free. The holocaust pales compared to the brutal random killings of so many under the Communist leaders. It is frightening. They killed millions and millions but usually tortuned them for a long time before they died or were killed. However I can recommend the book. ( )