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EILEEN BATTERSBYponders Stalin and Martin Amis

HE HAD A NUMBER of nicknames including Uncle Joe and Koba the Dread, but Josef Vissarionovich Dzhugashvilli (1878-1953) is most widely known as Stalin, meaning steel, which he adopted around 1913. In creating the modern Soviet state, he is known to have caused the death of 15-20 million Russians. Born to a modest Georgian family he was educated in a Russian Orthodox seminary from which he was expelled; the official version claims he was involved with subversive literature. Other explanations suggest he either failed to sit his final exams or could not pay his fees. He joined the Bolsheviks under Lenin and co-founded Pravda, the party’s newspaper in 1912. Shortly afterwards he was exiled to Siberia, remaining there until after the Russian revolution. Lenin died in 1924. Stalin’s rise began when becoming chairman of the Politburo. He quickly eradicated Trotsky’s challenge for leadership. By 1927 Stalin was poised to implement a succession of brutal Five Year Plans, industrialising and collectivising agriculture. Millions of peasants died from starvation, others were executed. Meanwhile, the intelligentsia were systemically purged from the 1930s onwards in a bid to smash all opposition.

Despite his domestic terror, the Russian people, assisted by their vicious climate, defeated Hitler and Stalin participated in the Big Three Teheran (1943) and Yalta and Potsdam (both 1945) peace conferences. The horrific account of the Gulag chronicled by Aleksander Solzhenitsyn among others, confirms that Stalin was a monster who considered cruelty and fear as justifiable. Denounced by successors such as Khrushchev and others who attacked the cult of personality, Stalin has left a legacy so ambivalent that in recent polls some Russians suggested that they would still vote for him.

Heavily scarred by smallpox Stalin was only 5ft4ins or 1.60m and had a withered arm. Regardless of the monumental terror he exacted over his own people, his evil remains overshadowed by Hitler’s genocide.

The gifted British satirist Martin Amis published Koba the Dread in 2006, a sincere, if historically naïve, view of Stalin’s crimes. Critics, including his friend Christopher Hitchens, raged. Though not a good book it is motivated by the surprising but always convincing sense of decency which undercuts everything Amis writes. As far back as 1987 with Einstein’s Monsters he was wary of nuclear armament. The Booker shortlisted Time’s Arrow, a daringly virtuosic narrative (1991) in which a Nazi concentration camp doctor’s memories unfold backwards, confirmed that Amis was entitled to summon history in his fiction. House of Meetings (2006) looked to the Gulag and its aftermath. His candid memoir Experience (2000) was most impressive. Money (1984), London Fields (1985) and The Information (1995) testify to his wit and his linguistic originality. For all the precocious flair of The Rachel Papers (1973), Dead Babies (1975) and Success (1978), by 1981 Amis had written the darkly masterful, poignant thriller, Other People: A Mystery. Recently, Lionel Asbo: State of England disappointed. Yet former enfant terrible Amis, who turns 63 today, is a risk-taking truth-teller possessed of comic timing, humanity and a conscience.