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On June 24, 2025, Zohran Mamdani, a 33-year-old state assemblyman, won the primary to be the Democratic Party’s nominee for New York City mayor. Mamdani’s mother is Indian-born Mira Nair, a filmmaker nominated for an Academy Award and a BAFTA, and recipient of a Golden Lion. His father Mahmood Mamdani was also born in India. He occupies an endowed chair at Ivy League Columbia University. The Herbert Lehman Professor of Government Chair is named for the son of one of the Jewish Lehman Brothers. The New York Post reports that Columbia professors in Mamdani’s class are paid “an average of $308,000 a year.” Mahmood Mamdani has been accused of antisemitism. Mira Nair has attempted to get Gal Gadot, a Jewish actress, banned from the Oscars.
Zohran Mamdani is a Twelver Shia, an apocalyptic sect implicated in Iran’s push for nuclear weapons. He has professed “love” for jihadi terrorists. He supports the anti-Israel BDS movement. When asked about the phrase “Globalize the intifada,” he said that that phrase expresses support for “equality,” “human rights,” and “equal rights.” Bret Stephens corrects Mamdani; “globalize the intifada” means murdering Jews. When Mamdani campaigns in mosques, he is met with cries of “Takbir” and “Allahu akbar.” He tells his mosque audiences that Israelis murdered an innocent little Muslim girl named Fatima. Why bring up Fatima Abdullah in the New York City mayoral campaign? Mamdani mentions Fatima to reinforce his portrait of Muslims-as-victims of American Islamophobia and evil Israel. Mamdani self-identifies as Muslims’ avenger. “We have a million Muslims in this city. This is is our chance … an opportunity to vote for one of us,” he says to mosque audiences. Mamdani does not encourage mosque audiences to vote for the best mayor for New York City. He encourages mosque audiences to vote for tribal power and revenge.
Mamdani also identifies as a socialist. He wants free buses, free childcare, government-controlled rent prices, and government-run grocery stores that sell food at government-set prices, prices that would undercut privately-run stores. He wants to “win socialism,” “raise class consciousness,” and he also wants to raise property taxes on “whiter neighborhoods.” He “firmly believes in” “seizing the means of production.” He wants to devote tens of millions of dollars to transgender drugs and surgeries.
Mamdani’s self-identification as a socialist and a Muslim recalls previous alliances. The Russian Empire’s considerable Muslim population produced many who united with the Bolsheviks in overthrowing the czar. Lenin invited Muslim “holy war” against capitalism. Mirsaid Sultan-Galiev, a Bolshevik Muslim, promised that “The East” – that is, the regions of the Russian empire with large Muslim populations – “is a revolutionary cauldron capable of putting a revolutionary torch to all of Western Europe.” Once Bolsheviks gained power, Stalin ordered Sultan-Galiev’s execution. Stalin was responsible for many Muslim deaths, including in a famine in largely Muslim Kazakhstan that killed 40% of the population, that is, an estimated 1.5 million people.
Leftists helped Islamists overthrow Iran’s shah, and when Islamists gained power, they persecuted leftists. “How could we not have known that it would be like this?” asks leftist Chahla Chafiq, who participated in the revolution that ousted the shah and installed the mullahs in Iran. “I was so close to so many people that were massacred in the prisons.”
Many, including Democrats, desperately hope that Mamdani loses the general election in November. “Some Democrats Are Determined to Stop Him,” the New York Times reports. In fact, the liberal Times, according to the Guardian, is “trying to wreck Zohran Mamdani’s mayoral bid.” For example, the Times reported the unattractive detail that Mamdani self-identified as “Black/African American” in his application to Columbia. Black applicants receive special consideration when applying to elite universities. Mamdani is of Indian descent, not African descent. His application may suggest to some readers a willingness to mislead others in order to obtain privileges he does not deserve.
Here’s why I don’t like Mamdani: $68,793. That’s the current annual tuition at the Bank Street School for Children, the grammar school little Zohran attended. I don’t despise Mamdani because he is rich. I despise Mamdani because, in addition to the above facts, he is a poseur who playacts at being “Third World” – his words – at being an oppressed victim of domineering white folk, at being the voice of the wretched of the earth. And his parents, Nair, in her films, and Mahmood in his scholarship, are two more rich poseurs who have profitted by playing the same racist, victim game.
Mamdani released a video of himself eating with his hand. In the video, he identifies as “Third World.” I lived in the Indian Subcontinent for years. I ate with my hand and so did my neighbors. In his video, Mamdani hunches over his food. He slaps the rice onto his face. That’s not etiquette. One is to use just the tips of the fingers, and use the thumb as a utensil, pushing a small amount of food into the mouth. One does not, as Mamdani does, stick one’s tongue out as if it were a net to catch grains of rice scattering willy-nilly from a flattened palm. Harmeet Dhillon and Harris Sultan, both from the subcontinent, have publicly criticized Mamdani for his stunt. Dhillon accuses Mamdani of being a “LARPing Philistine,” that is, a “live action role playing” uncouth person. Harris’ Mamdani rant is epic.
Of course Mamdani’s supporters insist that any resistance to this new Golden Boy’s big, fat charisma is “racist.” Vox calls it “astonishing racism.” Playing the race card here is even more absurd than it often is. The editorial board at the conservative New York Post encouraged the white independent candidate, Andrew Cuomo, to drop out. The Post encouraged all voters, including Republicans, to vote for Eric Adams, the current mayor, and a black Democrat. Former New York state Governor David Paterson has also called on all candidates, other than Eric Adams, to drop out, to make it easier for Adams to beat Mamdani. Governor Paterson is black. Clearly, contrary to Vox and other hysterical leftist accusations, the resistance to Mamdani is not racist.
Garry Kasparov is a former World Chess Champion and a pro-democracy activist who has gone head-to-head with Vladimir Putin. Russia became too dangerous for him. He has lived in exile in New York City since 2013. When Kasparov criticizes Putin or Trump, his social media accounts brim with readers’ praise. On July 2, 2025, Kasparov published an op ed in the Post entitled, “In the USSR, I saw how Mamdani’s socialism can destroy a country.” One of Kasparov’s critics responded, “Garry, with all the due respect, please just play chess.” One must not criticize Zohran Mamdani. The most perverse criticism of Kasparov: because he was “traumatized” by the USSR, Kasparov is not qualified to critique socialist Mamdani. In other words, survivors of “socialist republics,” who are best qualified to assess the very policies Mamdani recommends, are, by this argument, disqualified from speaking.
One last irony. Those championing Mamdani as a working class hero despise the real working class hero in the race. Curtis Sliwa is the Republican candidate. Sliwa’s Polish father was in the merchant marine. His Italian mother was a bookkeeper. Sliwa himself was the night manager of a Bronx McDonald’s. The folks swooning over Mamdani speak about Sliwa as if he were a farm animal. He is beneath their contempt.
***
Mamdani’s ascendancy highlights a perennial question. If Mamdani self-identified as a fascist, or a Nazi, he’d be anathema. But he calls himself a socialist, and criticism of him is taboo.
My relatives and friends in Eastern Europe suffered under German Nazis and Russian Soviets. As a kid traveling to Poland and Czechoslovakia in the 1970s, I met dissidents who had been, in one case, badly tortured, and, in other cases, merely imprisoned or “unpersoned” by representatives of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. I also met Poles with tattoos on their arms from Auschwitz. In Poland just about everyone you met had been harmed by Nazis and/or Soviets.
I went on to write a dissertation that addressed the Nazi occupation of Poland. I read many books. This was never easy. I developed various ways to deal with descriptions of torture. I ended up knowing a lot more about Nazi atrocities than Soviet ones.
I have vivid mental pictures of Nazis like Göring, Heydrich, and Eichmann. I can’t picture Beria, Kaganovich, Yezhov, or Blokhin. Have you heard of Lazar Kaganovich? By some estimates, he is co-responsible for the deaths of up to six million people, most of them Ukrainians he ordered be starved to death. The remainder died in the Great Purge. He committed not just biological, but also cultural genocide. Under his wife’s influence, he destroyed sublime Russian Christian architecture and historical monuments. The Bolsheviks took a scorched earth approach to Russia’s soul. In one year, 1937, 85,000 Orthodox priests were executed. “From 1917-41, the number of Russian Orthodox Churches fell from 30,000 to 500.” Kaganovich died, at age 97, of natural causes. He never faced justice for his crimes. Mao – a conservative estimate of his death toll is 45 million – died at age 82 of natural causes. Pol Pot – estimates of his death toll range between 1.2 and 2.8 million people – that is 25% of the entire population of his country – he died in his sleep of a heart attack at age 72.
Have you heard of Vasily Blokhin? He is said to be “the most prolific official executioner in recorded world history.” He personally killed tens of thousands. When killing 7,000 Poles, Comrade Blokhin dressed for work in a leather apron and shoulder-length leather gloves. He shot his victims with a German-made Walther pistol – more reliable than socialist models.
I know the Nazi numbers: years, death tolls. I can name and locate the camps: Auschwitz, Dachau, Treblinka, etc. I don’t have that information for the USSR. What years? How many? What were the names of the camps and prisons?
I might know these things. A loved one in Slovakia, whom I met and adored, was gang-raped by Red Army soldiers. A kind friend’s mother was imprisoned in Kolyma. The mother’s crime was being Polish – really – her ethnicity was her crime. How many died in Kolyma? Nobody knows. No movie or class taught me the name “Kolyma.” The only reason I know the name of this Soviet hellhole is that my friend’s mother was imprisoned there. All four of a friend’s grandparents were in the Gulag. Their crime was being German. I don’t know anything more about their experience. Why don’t I? Have you ever heard of Sukhanovka, Pagari 1, Tuol Sleng? Why not?
A movie fan can’t turn around without bumping into a film involving Nazis. Films about Soviet atrocities are less common. I’ve seen only one film about the Holodomor, 2019’s Mr. Jones. Mr. Jones was a fine but low-budget film that reached a limited audience. Mr. Jones was not nominated for any major awards. Swastikas are taboo; red stars are okay. Here’s an experiment. Go to Google and type in “Stalin t-shirt.” You are offered an array of options, from reputable sellers. Stalin is often depicted as young and handsome or merely witty: “Black humor is like food. Not everyone gets it.” Mao and Che t-shirts are even more popular. Now type in “Hitler t-shirt.” You will get very different results. One difference – the search turns up many admonitions explaining why Hitler-branded merch is bad.
I just performed a Facebook search of Stalin gifs. I was offered too many gifs to count them all. Stalin appears attractive and makes witty comments. There are also lots of Mao gifs. One says, “Te Amo Mao Zedong.” I then asked for Hitler gifs. Facebook offered none. Why? Certainly not because Stalin or Mao is more innocent than Hitler.
In 2011, Timothy Snyder devoted a lengthy essay to asking “Who was worse, Hitler or Stalin?” Ian Johnson followed up with, “Who Killed More? Hitler, Stalin, or Mao?” The question is ongoing, given new research, and all numbers in this piece are contested estimates, but a good answer is “all three were profoundly evil and killed millions of innocents.” So why the t-shirt differential, why the difference in gifs? My questions are not rhetorical. I do not know the answer.
When I studied the Nazis for my dissertation, I really wanted to know why they did the horrible things they did. I came to understand, as best as I could. Previous history provided influences that the Nazis could twist. Herder’s romantic nationalism, Neo-Paganism, the Grimms’ insistence on the morality of national folklore, even the violent and sadistic kind, Nietzsche and Wagner, Darwin – none of these thinkers were Nazis, but they produced tools Nazis could use. And then Germans felt themselves to be victims – of World War I, Versailles, the Depression, the Russian Revolution and the rise of Communism, and rapid modernization.
What explains the horrors of the workers’ paradise, horrors committed by men and women convinced they were making the world a better place for their own victims? The Nazis felt themselves to be Übermenschen; their victims were Untermenschen. The Bolsheviks insisted that they were the very people they persecuted. We are the workers, they insisted. Nazis wore sleek Hugo Boss uniforms and shiny leather boots when crushing the skulls of peasants dressed in rags. Bolsheviks dressed in drab clothing and even peasant blouses. Here’s Lenin playing the peasant in a VN Basov painting.– cf. Mamdani eating with his hand. There are many photos of Stalin posing in various Muslim peasant costumes. The men who wore these costumes mass murdered peasants and Muslims. How to make sense of this?
Perhaps Bolsheviks justified their crimes by thinking, “We are the true voice of the working class and the peasants. Not they, we. We know what is best for them. They should be grateful – for the free buses.” There’s so much playacting taking place here. Garry Kasparov, who lived in the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, is not the expert on socialism; some Park-Slope-hipster Mamdani-fanboy is the expert on socialism. Curtis Sliwa is not the working class hero; the graduate of a grammar school whose annual tuition is thousands of dollars more than the median New Yorkers’ annual income, is the working class hero. Stalin murdered and ethnically cleansed millions of Muslims, but doesn’t he look so authentic in this Muslim folk costume?
***
On January 28, 2025, Soho Press published Bronshtein in the Bronx by Robert Littell. The book is a fictionalized account of Trotsky’s two-month-long stay in New York City in 1917. I wanted to read it as part of the process of filling in the gaps in my knowledge of the other folks, besides the Nazis, who persecuted my loved ones. I was underwhelmed by the novel, and that dissatisfaction prodded me finally to read a book I’d purchased in 2019 but never worked up the courage to read: Koba the Dread: Laughter and the Twenty Million. Martin Amis’ 2002 book is a devastating gauntlet thrown down at the feet of his friend Christopher Hitchens. Hitchens’ political views became complicated as he aged, but he identified as a Marxist for most of his life, and he had good things to say about Lenin and Trotsky even after he began to depart from self-defining as a Trotskyite.
I’ll talk about both books, below.
Robert Littell, author of Bronshtein in the Bronx, is a 90-year-old Navy veteran, former foreign correspondent, and bestselling spy novelist. In an interview with National Public Radio’s Scott Simon, Littell spoke of his inspiration for writing Bronshtein. “My father,” he said, “was appalled at what he called the ends-justify-means brutality of Trotsky … The conscience is, to me, a key character in the novel, because I wondered where the idealism that must have functioned in Trotsky when he was young, what happened to it? Why did he become so brutal? Why did he become a killer?”
Publishers Weekly reviewed Bronshtein in the Bronx positively. The novel “is full of winking anachronisms that poke fun at Trotsky and his fellow idealists … Littell’s fans will love this playful swerve.” Would any respected author write, and would any mainstream critic review positively, a book that depicted a chapter from a Nazi’s life as “charming,” “playful,” and “irreverent”? Would any Nazi be characterized as an “idealist”?
Clive James was a journalist, leftist, and atheist. In his 2007 book Cultural Amnesia, James warns against the tendency to romanticize Trotsky. Trotsky was, he says, “a mass murderer, not the true champion of the working class.” James mentions the Kronstadt rebellion of 1921. Sailors and others rebelled against Bolshevik totalitarianism. They made reasonable demands, for, for example, civil rights. Thousands were killed, at Trotsky’s command. James argues that Trotsky was no less ruthless than Stalin. “When it became clear that the vast crime called the collectivization of agriculture would involve a massacre of the peasantry, Trotsky’s only criticism was that Stalin’s campaign was not sufficiently ‘militarized.’ He meant that the peasants weren’t being massacred fast enough.” Trotsky wrote that, “We must put an end, once and for all, to the papist-Quaker babble about the sanctity of human life.”
The plot of Bronshtein in the Bronx: Trotsky, the first person narrator, is in exile. He comes to New York City with his wife and sons. He works for a Russian-language paper. He is pursued by J. Edgar Hoover. He rubs shoulders with fellow revolutionaries, including Nikolai Bukharin, Alexandra Kollontai, Eugene Debs, Morris Hillquit, Abraham Cahan, and Louis Fraina. He meets a young journalist. She is that deathless character believed in only by the authors and fans of fiction by and about men – she’s a hot, young nymphomaniac who finds the novel’s main character irresistible, and, besides sex, the only thing she wants to do is provide him with a chance for exposition. The hope is that the exposition, that might otherwise be boring or amateurish, is voiced by a hot, naked babe, so it suddenly becomes fascinating. And of course she has a cutesy name, and, as is often the case, a male name: Fred Fedora. Throughout the novel, Trotsky has an internal dialogue with his conscience. Trotsky’s conscience abandons him when Trotsky, before returning to Russia, announces that the ends justifies the means.
I read every word of this novel without enthusiasm. It did not fill in gaps in my knowledge. The invented scenes of Marxists in America sitting around talking about the role the invention of the light bulb might play in the revolution did not intrigue me. I hated the use of a nymphomaniac female in an attempt to make the novel more interesting. I didn’t think that the novel’s slightly whimsical tone suited the material. I was especially disturbed by this tone in relation to scenes with Trotsky’s sons, who are children during this time period. Stalin murdered almost all of Trotsky’s family. Realizing that these boys would have short, miserable lives and cruel deaths rendered distasteful and sad the scenes where they are meant to be comic relief.
Because I felt disappointed by Bronshtein, and because I wanted to make good on my vow to read something about the Soviets, I finally picked up Koba the Dread: Laughter and the Twenty Million by Martin Amis.
Martin Amis (1949 – 2023) was an English author. His father was Kingsley Amis, also an English writer. Kingsley joined the Communist Party in 1941, when he was at Oxford. He said that Party membership “seemed almost compulsory in Oxford.” Kingsley left the Party in 1956 and moved rightward politically. Martin Amis was close with fellow English writer Christopher Hitchens (1949 – 2011), who, as mentioned above, often described himself as a Marxist and a Trotskyite, even while his views changed as he aged.
Koba the Dread: Laughter and the Twenty Million, is written as if it were the transcript of one side of a conversation between Martin Amis, his father, and Christopher Hitchens. The tone is very much what this reader imagines is the tone of English masters-of-the-universe throwing down intellectual gauntlets at each other while surrounded by lush furnishings, their needs met by trusty, silent, servants. Given this rhetorical approach, there is often not much filling in of background information. Amis assumes that his interlocutors know to whom he refers when he mentions a given personage by last name only. I made extensive use of Wikipedia while reading this book.
Reading Koba wrecked me in a way that most previous books I’d read about Nazism did not. The scholarly books on Nazism that I’d read were methodical and clinical, without rhetorical flair. When reading the personal memoirs of concentration camp survivors, I could identify myself with the authors and keep their eventual survival as the light from the north star, however remote, that guided me through descriptions of hell.
In Koba, Martin Amis wants to shock his interlocutors – his father, Kingsley, and his friend, Christopher Hitchens – and he wants to shame and hurt them too. He wants to rattle their convictions so thoroughly that they repent. This was not successful; Kingsley was already dead, and Hitchens was immune to reason. Amis wants them to feel the pain of the still-living Russian woman whose body parts were cut off and consumed in a Russian famine zone; the final, pathetic moments of a Kolyma prisoner who cannot keep up with his quota, the suffocation of innocents packed tightly into dark, airless rooms, without food, water, or waste facilities, merely so that they can be tortured for days before being executed.
Amis wants to grab the world by the lapels and ask the same question I asked, above. Why don’t you care about these victims? Why do you hand Stalin and the USSR a free pass? These questions are behind Amis’ subtitle. Koba was Stalin’s nom de guerre. The book’s subtitle, Laughter and the Twenty Million, is an accusation hurled at all educated Westerners. Why can you laugh at Stalin gifs on Facebook, while Hitler gifs are not allowed? Why can you wear a Stalin t-shirt, or one of Mao or Che? Why do the victims of collectivism not matter to you? “I’m going to make them matter to you,” Amis insists. “My book will give you nightmares.”
Often, after revealing yet another Soviet grand guignol, Amis mentions some Westerner – an H.G. Wells or a George Bernard Shaw – who mouths some howlingly clueless propaganda about how well-fed everyone in the USSR is, and what a congenial guy Stalin is. Amis quotes Australian historian Manning Clark. Lenin, Clark says, was “Christ-like in his compassion.” Lenin was “as excited and lovable as a little child.”
Amis quotes his friend Hitchens. “Lenin was a great man.” Hitchens was a fan of Lenin’s suppression of Christianity. Lenin, Amis reminds us, was inspired by a book, What Is to Be Done?, that exhibited “contempt for ordinary people.” “Lenin’s Famine” of 1921-22 (not to be confused with subsequent Soviet famines) may have killed five million. Famine, Lenin thought, would have only positive results. It would destroy faith in the czar and also in God. Amis quotes Lenin:
“It is now and only now, when in the regions afflicted by the famine there is cannibalism and the roads are littered with hundreds if not thousands of corpses, that we can (and therefore must) pursue the acquisition of [church] valuables with the most ferocious and merciless energy, stopping at nothing in suppressing all resistance.”
Under Lenin, Amis writes, “the value of human life collapsed.” Lenin t-shirts are also popular.
During Lenin’s famine, Americans, including, significantly, future president Herbert Hoover, saved, according to Amis, ten million lives. For those they could not save, you really should see the grim photos here. And here is a photo of hungry Russians kneeling in gratitude before an American aide worker.
Martin Amis asks Hitchens, “What about the famine?”
Hitchens replies, “There wasn’t a famine.”
Amis continues. “He knew it wasn’t true. But the truth, like much else, was postponable; there were things that, for now, were more important.” Amis says that he liked Hitchens’ journalism, but that “there seemed to be something wrong with it … the sense that the truth could be postponed.”
Amis quotes Polish former Communist Leszek Kolakowski. “Truth, they knew, was a party matter, and therefore lies became true even if they contradicted the plain facts of experience. The condition of their living in two separate worlds at once was one of the most remarkable achievements of the Soviet system.”
Amis quotes New Yorker editor David Remnick. During glasnost, under Gorbachev, when Russians were allowed to tell the truth, they put on a museum show called “The Exhibition of Poor Quality Goods.” The items in the display were all purchased at local, state-run grocery stores – the kind Mamdani wants to open. One of the items was a bottle of mineral water containing a dead mouse. “The leading cause of house fires in the Soviet Union was television sets that exploded spontaneously.”
Remnick visits formerly productive farmland, now a wasteland. An old Russian tells Remnick, “We were all supposed to be one big family after collectivization. But everyone was pitted against everyone else. Everyone suspicious of everyone else. Now look at us. A big, stinking ruin. Now everyone lives for himself. What a laugh, what a big, goddamn laugh.”
One of the Bolsheviks handling the corpses of the murdered czar’s family testified that he could die happy because he had had a chance to fondle the czarina’s private parts.
The Bolsheviks murdered so many that stray dogs battened on the corpses, epidemics spread, and the smell was pervasive. “To die in Russia is easy; to be buried is very difficult,” one diarist recorded.
Soviet slave ships, according to one witness, presented horrors “which neither Goya nor Gustav Dore could ever have imagined. In a murky hold, thousands of women, floor to ceiling, were crammed as if in a poultry farm, five women, some naked, per tiny cage. It was very hot; they could not wash; most had skin lesions.
Secret policeman Naftaly Frenkel “advised Stalin to run the Gulag on the steady deprivation of food.” “We have to squeeze everything out of a prisoner in the first three months. After that, we don’t need him any more.”
Amis struggles repeatedly with the question that I summarized, above, as why does Facebook offer multiple Stalin and Mao gifs, all attractive and humorous, and no Hitler gifs? In his attempts to make sense of comparisons, Amis offers, inter alia, this. “Nazism did not destroy civil society. Bolshevism did destroy civil society. This is one of the reasons for the ‘miracle’ of German recovery.”
Another difference, which Amis does not mention. The territory variously called “The Russian Empire,” and the “USSR” and the “Russian Federation” has, and has had since Stalin’s days, a remarkably low replacement rate. People don’t just die younger there than they do in other “developed” countries in Europe and Asia. They don’t just die younger from partially self-inflicted ailments like alcohol abuse and poor self care leading to early heart attacks and strokes. They refuse to have children. Russia today is one of the most sparsely populated countries in the world, with one of the world’s oldest populations, and with one of the world’s lowest birthrates. This is true today, and it was true decades ago, under the USSR. Snyder is right; Hitler killed more. Bolshevism’s poison kept killing long after Stalin left the scene. Amis does report that when census takers reported to him the lack of growth in the population, Stalin had the census-takers shot.
Amis makes abundantly clear that Bolsheviks held peasants in complete contempt, and tortured and murdered peasants with alacrity. Bolsheviks did not just murder the biological bodies of peasants. They murdered peasant culture, which was intertwined with Christianity. Amis quotes historian Richard Pipes. “No action of Lenin’s government brought greater suffering to the population at large, the so-called masses, than the profanation of its religious beliefs, the closing of the houses of worship, and the mistreatment of the clergy.”
In addition to destroying churches and shrines, and murdering priests and nuns, they went after folk culture. Kobzars were itinerant folk bards who disseminated Ukrainian folk culture. Almost all were shot, at least partly because many were blind, and blind men could not do work in the Gulag. Remember – the revolution was ostensibly all about uplifting the peasants. Remember all those photos of Stalin and Lenin and Maxim Gorky in peasant attire. Remember those posters of happy peasants expressing their gratitude to Lenin for liberating them.
Stalin gets credit for beating Hitler. Amis demurs. “If, instead of decapitating his army, he had intelligently prepared it for war, Russia might have defeated Germany in a matter of weeks.” That could have saved about 40 million lives, including most Holocaust victims. Amis points out that Stalin’s bloodlust didn’t just send average folk to the executioner or the Gulag. Stalin eliminated many of his top military leaders, people who might have hastened the defeat of Hitler. He quotes Roy Medvedev. “Never had the officer corps of any army suffered such losses in any war such as the Soviet Army suffered in this time of peace.” Amis says, “Soviet unpreparedness for the Nazi invasion is legendary … In the first weeks of the war, the Soviet Union lost 30 percent of its ammunition and 50 percent of its food and fuel. In the first three months, the air force lost 96.4 percent of its planes.” By the end of 1942, 65 percent of the Red Army had been taken prisoner by the Nazis, and most would die horribly. Stalin, Amis writes, trusted Hitler. “At a time when the camps were being combed for competent military men, Stalin took the time to shoot 300 officers who were already in prison.”
One caveat about Koba. Amis says a few things in the book that aren’t true. For example, he claims that scorpions sting themselves to death. They don’t. He repeats a couple of Gulag stories, one, about the SS Dzhurma, and another, about one little boy who conversed with Maxim Gorky at the White Sea Canal who was later shot by Bolsheviks, that are more legendary than supported by facts. Also, given ongoing research and the problems of finding accurate figures, his numbers, like the numbers in this essay, are open to debate and revision. These issues do not compromise the value of the book.
A few final thoughts. I had tried to watch the 2017 farce, Death of Stalin, when it first came out, but I could not. It is a comedy but it is also honest and it includes many scenes of torture and murder and they were too much for me. After Koba the Dread, I was ready. I highly recommend the film. It is a farce, and not historically accurate in every detail, but there’s enough truth there to be a pointed satire.
People tell me that “socialism” is nicer than “communism” and since Zohran Mamdani calls himself a “socialist” he is nice. The people who raped and tortured in my mother’s natal village also called themselves “socialists.” No, that doesn’t mean that Bernie Sanders or Alexandra Ocasio Cortez are comparable to the criminals of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. It does mean that the difference between the two words is no guarantee that the ideology behind the words is less likely to lead to violence.
One of the people I loved most in the world was my uncle in Slovakia. He was a card-carrying member of the Communist Party. I asked him why. He said, “Before the Communists, under the grofs, [Austro-Hungarian nobility], peasants could not go to the doctor. If peasant got sick, the grofs made him work till he died. When the Communists came in, we could go to the doctor. We were suddenly able to go to the spas like Karlovy Vary that only the grofs could go to before.”
My peasant ancestors were serfs, comparable to slaves, for hundreds of years. After liberation in the mid nineteenth century, they were still poor, often barefoot, denied education, living in “black cottages,” black from cooking smoke. The desperation of the poor, and extreme differentials between the rich and the poor feed extremism.
Before reading Koba the Dread, if some magic had transported me to a room with two babies in it, baby Hitler and baby Stalin, I would have put the pillow over the head of baby Hitler. After reading this book, I would now place it over baby Stalin. This is no commentary on the above-debated question of who was worse, or whether the Holocaust was was worse than the Gulag. Extremism breeds extremism. I reject extremism, whether of the right or the left. The Bolsheviks terrorized the world and fueled Hitler’s rise. Maybe, just maybe, if there had been no Stalin, Hitler would have lacked the fuel of social panic he needed to rise above being what he was most suited to being – a worthless bum.
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Danusha V. Goska is the author of God through Binoculars: A Hitchhiker at a Monastery.
