The Latest(ish)
Back in the time of the revolution he was described as a gray blur, and it is as a gray blur that Stalin survives today, a nullity, a gap in our memory, an absence. In the lands of his old empire, they remember more, far, far more. The absence there is absent fathers, absent mothers, absent grandparents, absent uncles, absent aunts, absences in the millions, all victims of the monster who remains, remarkably, still present in Red Square (there’s a small bust at his burial site by the Kremlin’s walls and usually someone takes the trouble to leave a flower [...]
Hollow Laughter
July 16, 2002
Koba the Dread: Laughter and the Twenty Million by Martin Amis; published originally in National Review Online
Imagine, for a moment, that some crime had taken place, an act of wrongdoing so outrageous that it gripped the attention of the nation. And suppose that the perpetrator of this crime had been the member of an ethnic minority, do you think, even for a second, that the New York Times would have set up a meeting with some genial racist to find out his reaction? Would the reporter from the New York Times have sat there, quietly nodding as he took his notes, preparing to write an article that (with, of course, the appropriate amount of ironic distance) [...]
Party On
July 16, 2002