Koba The Dread

<p><i>Koba the Dread</i> is the successor to Amis's celebrated memoir <i>Experience</i>. 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. <br><br>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 <i>The Great Terror</i> was second only to Solzhenitsyn's <i>The Gulag Archipelago</i> in undermining the USSR. Amis's remarkable memoir explores these connections. <br><br>Stalin said that the death of one person was tragic the death of a million a mere 'statistic'. <i>Koba the Dread</i> during whose course the author absorbs a particular a familial death is a rebuttal of Stalin's aphorism.</p>