Koba the Dread Read online

  In 1968 the world seemed to go further left than it had ever gone before and would ever go again. But this left was the New Left: it represented, or turned out to represent, revolution as play. The ‘redeemer’ class was no longer to be found in the mines and factories; it was to be found in the university libraries and lecture halls. There were demonstrations, riots, torchings, street battles in England, Germany, Italy, Japan and the USA. And remember the Paris of 1968: barricades, street theatre, youth-worship (‘The young make love; the old make obscene gestures’), the resurgence of Marcuse (the wintry dialectician), and Sartre standing on street corners handing out Maoist pamphlets … The death throes of the New Left took the form of vanguard terrorism (the Red Brigades, the Baader-Meinhof gang, the Weathermen). And its afterlife is anarchistic, opposing itself to the latest mutation of capital: after imperialism, after fascism, it now faces globalization. We may note here that militant Islam cannot be made to fit into this ‘model’ – or into any other.

  But red wasn’t dead, in 1968. During my time at Oxford they used to come to your room: the believers, the steely ones – the proselytizing Communists. One might adapt the old joke. Q: What’s the difference between a Communist car and a Communist proselytizer? A: You can close the door on a Communist proselytizer. To glance quickly at a crucial dissonance: it has always been possible to joke about the Soviet Union, just as it has never been possible to joke about Nazi Germany. (Hitler attracts mockery, but his actions repel it). This is not merely a question of decorum. In the German case, laughter automatically absents itself. Pace Adorno, it was not poetry that became impossible after Auschwitz. What became impossible was laughter. In the Soviet case, on the other hand, laughter intransigently refuses to absent itself. Immersion in the facts of the Bolshevik catastrophe may make this increasingly hard to accept, but such an immersion will never cleanse that catastrophe of laughter …

  I have to say that for a while I rather creepily, but very loyally, toed my father’s line on Vietnam. Soon I changed my mind and we argued about it, often bitterly, for thirty years.3 As I now see it, America had no business involving itself in a series of distant convulsions where the ideas, variously interpreted, of a long-dead German economist were bringing biblical calamity to China, North Korea, Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia. The prosecution of the war by America, I came to think, was clearly intolerable, impossible, not only because of what it was doing to Vietnam, but also because of what it was doing to America. There was a ghostly epiphany, a ghostly confirmation, when, in the late 1980s, the number of home casualties in the war was officially exceeded by the number of suicides among its veterans. That is strong evidence of an ideological brutalization of the motherland. The veterans returned, as we know, not to flowers and embraces, but to isolation.

  The Szamuelys. All four Szamuelys – Tibor, Nina, Helen and George – were staying at the fascist mansion on the day I drove from there to Oxford, in 1972, to be orally judged for my degree. When it was over I crowed the news home by telephone, and returned to a scene of celebration. At about one o’clock that night I made a cordially unrequited pass at Helen Szamuely and then blacked out on the chaise longue in the drawing room. I awoke at about five, and stood up wonderingly, and headed for the door. When I opened it, all the fascist burglar alarms went off and I roused everyone in the house, my father, stepmother, step-uncle, and all four Szamuelys.

  3 Conquest was strongly anti-Vietcong, but his support for the American conduct of the war was never emphatic, and has evolved in the direction of further deemphasis. (Here we may recall that, despite his donnish accent and manner, Conquest is an American. Well, American father, English mother; born in the UK; dual nationality; now a resident of California.) Kingsley was never less than 100 per cent earnest on Vietnam, right up until his death in 1995.

  The Politicization of Sleep

  Having analysed a particularly violent tackle by a particularly violent player, the ex-footballer Jimmy Greaves remarked: ‘Put it this way. He’s a lovely boy when he’s asleep.’ With the Bolsheviks, there was no such respite. In 1910 a political opponent said of Lenin that you couldn’t deal with a man who ‘for twenty-four hours of the day is taken up with the revolution, who has no other thoughts but thoughts of the revolution, and who, even in his sleep, dreams of nothing but revolution’. The actual Revolution, of course, had no effect on this habit. As the young secretary Khrushchev said to a cheering audience of Party members, ‘A Bolshevik is someone who feels himself to be a Bolshevik even when he’s sleeping!’ That’s how a Bolshevik felt about sleep,

  The death of each day’s life, sore labour’s bath,

  Balm of hurt minds, great nature’s second course,

  Chief nourisher in life’s feast.

  Sleep was just another opportunity to feel like a Bolshevik.

  But that is what they want, the believers, the steely ones, that is what they live for: the politicization of sleep. They want politics to be going on everywhere all the time, politics permanent and circumambient. They want the ubiquitization of politics; they want the politicization of sleep.

  Soon we will look at what Stalin did to the Meyerholds: the extreme example of the politicization of sleep.

  * * *

  This is from a letter addressed to Maxim Gorky concerning the status of intellectuals under the new regime:

  The intellectual strength of workers and peasants grows in the struggle to overturn the bourgeoisie and their acolytes, those second-rate intellectuals and lackeys of capitalism, who think they are the brains of the nation. They are not the brains of the nation. They’re its shit.

  That isn’t Stalin. (That is Lenin.) Stalin hated intellectuals too, but he cared about what we call creative writing and had an uneasy feel for it. His famous and much-mocked remark, ‘writers are the engineers of human souls’, is not just a grandiose fatuity: it is a description of what he wanted writers to be under his rule. He didn’t understand that talented writers cannot go against their talent and survive, that they cannot be engineers. Talentless writers can, or they can try; it was a very good thing to be a talentless writer in the USSR, and a very bad thing to be a talented one.

  Stalin personally monitored a succession of novelists, poets and dramatists. In this sphere he wavered as in no other. He gave Zamyatin his freedom: emigration. He menaced but partly tolerated Bulgakov (and went to his play Days of the Turbins fifteen times, as the theatre records show). He tortured and killed Babel. He destroyed Mandelstam. He presided over the grief and misery of Anna Akhmatova (and of Nadezhda Mandelstam). He subjected Gorky to a much stranger destiny, slowly deforming his talent and integrity; next to execution, deformity was the likeliest outcome for the post-October Russian writer, expressed most eloquently in suicide. He endured Pasternak; he silenced him, and took a lover and a child from him; still, he spared him (‘Do not touch this cloud-dweller’). But this is what he did to the Meyerholds.

  The world-famous Vsevolod Meyerhold had displeased Stalin, at the height of the Great Terror, with his production of a play about the Civil War. Meyerhold was savaged by Pravda (that was a ritual, something like a promissory note of disaster) and his theatre was shut down. After a while he was given some employment and protection by Stanislavsky. Stanislavsky died in August 1938. Just under a year later Meyerhold was given an official opportunity to recant at a conference organized by the Committee on Art Affairs. He did not recant. He said, among other things:

  I, for one, find the work of our theatres pitiful and terrifying … Go to the Moscow theatres and look at the colourless, boring productions which are all alike and differ only in their degree of worthlessness … In your effort to eradicate formalism, you have destroyed art!

  A few days later he was arrested. The file on Meyerhold contains his letter from prison to Molotov:

  The investigators began to use force on me, a sick, sixty-five-year-old man. I was made to lie face down and then beaten on the soles of my feet and my spine with a rubber strap … For the next few
days, when those parts of my legs were covered with extensive internal haemorrhaging, they again beat the red-blue-and-yellow bruises with the strap and the pain was so intense that it felt as if boiling water was being poured on these sensitive areas. I howled and wept from the pain … [which] caused my eyes to weep unending streams of tears. Lying face down on the floor, I discovered that I could wriggle, twist and squeal like a dog when its master whips it … When I lay down on the cot and fell asleep, after eighteen hours of interrogation, in order to go back in an hour’s time for more, I was woken up by my own groaning and because I was jerking about like a patient in the last stages of typhoid fever.

  You know that your sleep has been politicized – when that is what wakes you. The interrogator, he added, urinated in his mouth. Meyerhold wrote this letter on 13 January 1940, having confessed to whatever it was they wanted him to confess to (spying for the British and the Japanese, among other charges). Stalin needed confessions; he followed the progress of certain interrogations (lasting months or even years), and couldn’t sleep until confessions were secured. So his sleep, of course, was also politicized.

  A few days after Meyerhold’s arrest his young wife, the actress Zinaida Raikh, was found dead in their apartment. She had seventeen knife wounds. The neighbours had heard her screams; they thought she was rehearsing. It is reported that her eyes, presumably closed in sleep when the doorbell rang, had been cut out.

  Meyerhold was shot on 2 February 1940.

  I had just begun this book when I came across the following, in an account of the Soviet-exported Hungarian ‘revolution’ of 1919:

  With some twenty of ‘Lenin’s Boys’ [the terror wing of the Revolutionary Council], Tibor Szamuely … executed several locals accused of collaborating with the Romanians … One Jewish schoolboy who tried to plead for his father’s life was killed for calling Szamuely a ‘wild beast’ … Szamuely had requisitioned a train and was travelling around the country hanging any peasant opposed to collectivization …

  My first thought was to fax Bob Conquest with the question: ‘Was Tibor Szamuely related to Tibor Szamuely?’ Then I recalled the piece about Tibor, our Tibor, written by my father in his Memoirs. I settled down to it, thinking that I knew Tibor’s story pretty well, and thinking, moreover, that it was a happy story, a story of struggle, heroic cunning, luck, escape, subversive triumph. And I finished the piece with a pain in my throat. This is not a Meyerhold story; but it is another story about the politicization of sleep.

  Tibor Szamuely was Tibor Szamuely’s uncle, and a famous associate of Lenin’s. Tibor, our Tibor, ‘had a framed photograph, prominently displayed, of the two monsters side by side facing a crowd from a platform’, my father writes. It was, then, as a scion of an émigré Hungarian political family that Tibor was born in Moscow in 1925. When he was eleven his father disappeared into the mouth of 1936. Tibor fought in the Red Army while still in his teens. In the early 1950s Tibor happened to say, in the hearing of somebody he thought he could trust, that he was sick of the sight of that ‘fat pig’ Georgi Malenkov (Prime Minister of the USSR, 1953–55). Representatives of ‘the Organs’ came for him in the middle of the night. He got eight years, to be served in the northern camp of Vorkuta – a name that means as much to a Russian, perhaps, as the name Dachau means to a Jew. Or means more. I choose Dachau advisedly and maybe pusillanimously. Many people died in it but Dachau did not have time to become a death camp (its gas chambers were built too late). Vorkuta was not a death camp. The gulag had no death camps of the Nazi type, no Belzec, no Sobibor (though it had execution camps). But all the camps were death camps, by the nature of things. Those not immediately killed at Auschwitz, which was a slave camp and a death camp, tended to last three months. Two years seems to have been the average for the slave camps of the gulag archipelago.

  ‘Write to your mother’ were Tibor’s last words to his wife as he was led away at three o’clock in the morning. It used to be his boast that he was the only prisoner ever freed by Stalin – by Stalin personally. Nina Szamuely’s mother had apparently had close relations with Hungary’s Stalinist dictator Matyas Rakosi. Stalin was duly called or cabled by the Stalinist; orders were dispatched to Vorkuta. The KGB man sent to liberate Tibor apologized to him, on the railway platform by kissing his shoes. The convicted slanderer of the state was now in favour. And Tibor, by a series of wonderful feints and flukes, escaped to the England he had visited as a boy. He escaped with his wife, his two children, and also (a great coup) his vast and irreplaceable library. So this was a happy story, I thought: a happy story.

  It didn’t take Tibor long to establish himself: historian, academic, journalist, USSR-watcher. When his naturalization papers came through, the fascists held a celebratory lunch. Of his new citizenship he later said to my father, ‘You know, this means I have no more worries. Nothing matters to me now. Not even dying. I’ll be able to say to myself, well, at least it’s in England.’ And it was in England: two years later, at the age of forty-seven. And Nina died two years after that: the same day, the same cancer. I remember her with greater clarity and feeling than I remember him. I used to smile at it: her air of worry, her constant activity of worry. And I remember her funeral, too, and ‘one of the most harrowing sights imaginable,’ as my father writes, ‘that of the two young orphaned children, Helen and George, there at the top of the church steps to greet the mourners, standing completely alone …’

  Tibor was an unusually late riser, and Kingsley once complained to Nina about it. She said that her husband sometimes needed to see the first signs of dawn before he could begin to contemplate sleep. Even in England. He needs, said Nina, ‘to be absolutely certain that they won’t be coming for him that night’.

  We cannot understand it, and there is no reason why we should. It takes a significant effort of imagination to guess at the ‘fear that millions of people find insurmountable’, in the words of Vasily Grossman, ‘this fear written up in crimson letters over the leaden sky of Moscow – this terrible fear of the state’.

  More Background

  ‘Hugh MacDiarmid: what a bastard,’ said my father in about 1972, referring to the man widely believed to be the greatest Scottish poet of the twentieth century. ‘He became a Communist in 1956 – after Hungary.’

  ‘And what’s his stuff like?’ I asked.

  ‘Oh, you know. Nothing but Marxist clichés interspersed with archaic “Scotch” expletives.’

  ‘For instance?’

  He thought for a moment. My memory exactly vouches for lines two and four, though it can’t do the same for lines one and three, where, for that matter, any old rubbish would have done. He said something like:

  Every political system is a superstructure over a determining

  socioeconomic base.

  Whah-hey!

  The principle of distribution according to need precludes the

  conversion of products into goods and their conversion

  into value.

  Och aye!

  The objective conditions for the transfer to socialism can

  only—

  ‘Enough,’ I said – though now I wish I had let him go on a bit. It was easy to joke about Communism. That was one of the things the Russians, too, had always done about Communism. On the other hand you could serve years for joking about Communism, under Communism (as Tibor knew). Joke. Q: Why are the USSR and America the same? A: Because in the USSR you can joke about America and in America you can joke about America.

  During the mid-1970s I worked for the famous and historic and now perhaps obsolescent Labour weekly, the New Statesman (or the NEW STATESMAN, in its own house style).4 My contemporaries there were Julian Barnes (novelist and critic), Christopher Hitchens (journalist, essayist, political man of letters), and James Fenton (journalist, critic, essayist and, above all, poet). Politically we broke down as follows. Julian was broadly Labour – though Christopher Hitchens would tirelessly ridicule him for having once voted Liberal. I was quietist and unaligned
. Fenton and Hitchens, on the other hand, were proselytizing Trotskyists who (for instance) spent their Saturdays selling copies of the Socialist Worker on impoverished London high streets.

  ‘What do I call you if I write this piece?’ I said to Christopher, on the phone to him in Washington, D.C. ‘Trotskyites or Trotskyists?’

  ‘Oh, Trotskyists. Only a Stalinist would have called us Trotskyites.’

  I laughed. I laughed indulgently. We talked on.

  At the New Statesman in the mid-1970s we used to argue about Communism. I was unaligned, but I was, in a sense, a congenital anti-Communist, inoculated not at birth but at the age of six or seven, in 1956, when the Amises settled into honest atheism with the Labour Party. And, anyway, the argument was surely all over now, with the publication, in 1973 and 1975, of the first two volumes of The Gulag Archipelago. Upstairs, in the literary department, we had published a review of Volume Two, by V. S. Pritchett, beautifully and (to me) unforgettably entitled ‘When We Dead Awaken’. Pritchett’s piece ended: ‘[Solzhenitsyn] is not a political; he is without rhetoric or doublethink; he is an awakener.’ When We Dead Awaken: yes, I thought. That is the next thing now … And it hasn’t happened. In the general consciousness the Russian dead sleep on.

  Hitchens and I used to argue about Communism in the corridors, sporadically, semi-seriously. The fascist novelist John Braine (proletarian, northern, monotonously drunken, and ridiculously influential, socioculturally but not politically, for at least a generation) used to say to left-wingers: ‘Why do you love despotism? Why do you yearn for tyranny?’ And this was more or less the question I put to the Hitch: