Koba the Dread: Laughter and the Twenty Million

A blistering blend of history and political reckoning, Koba the Dread is Martin Amis's searing indictment of Stalinist terror and the Western intellectuals who turned a blind eye.

A deft and deeply felt combination of history, memoir, and political criticism, Koba the Dread is Martin Amis's razor-sharp investigation into the legacy of Joseph Stalin. Drawing from conversations with his father, Kingsley, a onetime Comintern acolyte, and family friend Robert Conquest, the distinguished Sovietologist who helped strip away the USSR's facade, Amis blends irony and sorrow with characteristic precision.

In the face of Stalin's infamous aphorism—that the death of one is a tragedy, while the death of millions is a mere statistic—Amis offers a scathing rebuttal. Koba the Dread is not just an exploration of Soviet terror; it is an intensely personal counterpoint to the moral apathy that allowed such horrors to flourish.