From an official list of declassified Soviet jokes prepared by the CIA (no kidding)

"A train bearing Lenin, Stalin, Khrushchev, Brezhnev, and Gorbachev stops suddenly when the tracks run out. Each leader applies his own, unique solution. Lenin gathers workers and peasants from miles around and exhorts them to build more track. Stalin shoots the train crew when the train still doesn't move. Krushchev rehabilitates the dead crew and orders the tracks behind the train ripped up and relaid in front. Brezhnev pulls down the curtains and rocks back and forth, pretending the train is moving. And Gorbachev calls a rally in front of the locomotive, where he leads a chant: 'No tracks! No tracks! No tracks!"

That's the notable feature of Communism. Despite a universal list of atrocities and failures, we can still joke about it. For figures on the left, a brush with Communism isn't the same kiss of death as a similar touch of Nazism (ironic North Korean propaganda hangs behind my monitor). Amis moves through his own biography and family history with Communism to write a personal history of coming to grips with Atrocity, in the person of Stalin, and the twenty million (at least) victims of the gulags, summary executions, purges, and deliberate famines.

Amis is a novelist, not a historian, but what he synthesizes out of the work of others, histories, survivors, and victims, is a picture of one of the great abattoirs of history, Stalin's personal weakness and paranoia, and the terrible way in which his victims came to love him. I wasn't quite sure what to make of this book, as it wandered through Martin's childhood and, his father the ex-Communist, and conversations with Christopher Hitchens, but once he finds his topic, Koba is hypnotic and compelling. We understand Stalin better by seeing his reflection in Martin Amis.