My father and Stalin

Stalin had a terrible fear of death, or rather of his own death. Yet he ran a system in the Soviet Union that was responsible during his lifetime for killing, directly with a bullet or indirectly through starvation or cold, millions of Soviet citizens. It is this fearful, scheming, clever, brutal man that Martin Amis seeks to unmask, perhaps even to understand.

In this scintillating study, Amis wrestles over and over with the absurdity of it all. How did people idolise the man who was impoverishing and murdering them? Why did thousands of foreign Communists sweep atrocities under the carpet yet laud the falsified production statistics? Why, Amis wants to know, did the little boy not leap out of the crowd and declare that the Red Tsar has no clothes?

Amis can only laugh bleakly, and blackly, at what was Stalin's crowning achievement: to survive all his wrongdoings and mistakes and become the supreme socialist being, who was so popular that people were crushed to death queuing to see his body lie in state (perhaps they were queuing to check he was really dead?).

He has a strong motive for doing so. Not that Stalin's system of repression ever touched the Amis household, as it did the households of countless Soviet novelists swept to their deaths in the purges of the Thirties. It is Amis's father, Kingsley, whose shadow lurks behind this diatribe against the ludicrousness of dictatorship.

For years he was a fellow traveller, turning a blind eye to Soviet murder until jolted to his senses by Khrushchev's unmasking of Stalin, and the invasion of Hungary, both in 1956. Amis junior found other Communists among his workmates at the New Statesman in the Seventies, dewy-eyed about Vietnam and Mao.

Their models were Lenin and Trotsky, not Stalin, but these reputations have been blighted also by revelations of pre-Stalinist brutality, encouraged by their rhetoric of extermination and annihilation. Amis is only a little less cross about Lenin, and with much justification.

This book is really a great historical shriek at all those mistaken souls who saw Communism as progress, virtue and (rough) justice. He peels back the reality of Stalin's Russia in a confusion of layers, but unmistakably the object beneath is so politically-grotesque that no one should have mistaken its true identity.

Yet thousands did so. And Amis has no better answer at the end of the book as to why. He pauses, briefly, to ask himself the question that has become permissible, if historically unanswerable, since the fall of Communism: which was worse, Stalin's terror or the Holocaust? It is interesting that he feels, incoherently, inexplicably drawn to the conclusion that Nazi horrors were worse.

Yet in this grudging confession lie the seeds of the willingness of Kingsley et al to embrace Stalin. Nazism was closer to home and defiantly odious; progressive intellectuals needed something to fight fascism with (and to berate their own appeasers). Soviet Communism was a kind of metaphor, mobilised not for its own sake, but to beat the fascists.

Amis writes with driven prose, in a muddled script spiced with wonderful historical apercus and powerful, almost Nietzschean aphorisms. He has relied heavily on an older historical literature, much of it clearly preglasnost. There is little historical argument here, but there is a strident and compulsive argument with history.