•
Rating: Necessary premise:
[ Martin Amis rightly asks in this essay: Why were Stalin's crimes judged more leniently than Hitler's? Why could one joke about the Gulag and Siberia, when no one would laugh about Auschwitz?
Yes, why?
And it is precisely for this simple reason I downloaded his book to my Kindle and have just (well, the day before yesterday) finished reading it. ]
“Koba the Dread” was how Sir Winston Leonard Spencer Churchill described him upon meeting, while here we affectionately dubbed him “Baffone” (Ha da venì Baffone...), but there was nothing benign about him, as history demonstrates (I'm not sure if school books recount the atrocities he commissioned and carried out by the Cheka, now KGB or rather FSB, a Soviet political police force established in December 1917 by Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov, better known as Lenin, and Feliks Edmundovich Dzerzhinsky, to combat those considered enemies of the Russian regime (namely the Russians themselves, Chechens, Georgians, Ukrainians, etc.) using violent methods that included torture and starvation leading to the killing of men, women, the elderly, and children of any class and age, in an unimaginable escalation of gratuitous atrocities akin to the worst Dantean infernos or medieval inquisitions, and this Koba was none other than Stalin (“Steel”, as he liked to be called), namely Iosif Vissarionovich Dzhugashvili, a Georgian who hated Georgians first and foremost and then the rest of humanity, including his birth family and the one he later formed, his philosophy, we read, can be described in a few words “Man is a problem, eliminate the man, you eliminate the problem!” all to achieve a collectivization in favor of the industry to create a global economic power (100% failed goal... indeed...), permeated by a communism that was never communism but a strict dictatorial regime where the primary concern was his mania for greatness that had never existed before, he wanted to be believed the best in everything and was only so in the negative with his innate meanness, supported by fear, compulsory confessions quotas (false) extracted with systematic torture by judges who were themselves scared and threatened, by denunciation (children denouncing parents, siblings denouncing siblings, etc. in a slanderous manner and not, some denounced without any real reason than the paranoia of being denounced first...) and by the exclusion of truth at all possible imaginable levels, he even lied to himself!
Martin Amis, son of Kingsley Amis, in turn a prolific writer, poet, and British literary critic (as well as a staunch communist until '56, the year the USSR invaded Hungary), after careful studies of philosophers, historical essays, letters, and manuscripts, etc., on the Czars, and various communist/Bolshevik dictators, narrates to us in a sort of “bignami” what happened in that Russia in the very early 1900s up until the end of the century at the behest of criminal quaraqquaquà like Lenin, Lev Davidovich Bronshtein known to most as Trotsky, Lavrentiy Pavlovich Beria, Nikita Sergeyevich Khrushchev, Leonid Ilyich Brezhnev, also passing through other presidents such as Yuri Vladimirovich Andropov, Konstantin Ustinovich Chernenko, Mikhail Sergeyevich Gorbachev, reaching up to the former KGB official Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin and of course that little man Stalin, who had nothing to envy about that little mustache of Hitler, so much so that if a heart attack hadn't taken him away in '53, he would have exterminated the rest of the Russian Jews as he planned to by deporting them to remote Gulags away from everything and everyone to better exterminate them, as happened during his mandate to at least twenty million (20,000,000) people.
Well, despite many known things, for me it was worse than a bombardment on the stomach and mind, to venture into these pages of “Koba the Dread: Laughter and the Twenty Million”, where Martin Amis describes also with the aid of firsthand testimonies from Aleksandr Isayevich Solzhenitsyn and his essential essay “The Gulag Archipelago” written in three volumes from '58 to '68 and published in Italy only in '73 where he documents his sad stay in hell in this valley of tears called Earth.
p.s. I repeat, I don't know if these things are minimally described in school history books nor if they will be taught in the future, but they certainly should be, in honor of that truth of which “Koba the Dread” was insanely afraid.
Loading comments slowly
