»Koba the Dread» is the successor to Martin Amis's celebrated memoir, Experience. It is largely political (while remaining personal). It addresses itself to the central lacuna of twentieth-century thought: the indulgence of communism by intellectuals of the West. In between the personal beginning and the personal ending, Amis gives us perhaps the best one hundred pages ever written about Stalin: Koba the Dread, Iosif the Terrible. Stalin said that the death of one person was tragic, the death of a million a mere 'statistic'. «Koba the Dread», during whose course the author absorbs a particular, a familial death, is a rebuttal of Stalin's aphorism.