In 1936, as part of a "family values" campaign by Soviet propagandists to combat the falling birth rate, Joseph Stalin, aka Koba, went on a visit to his mother in the Caucasus, writes Declan Kiberd At one point, he asked her about the beatings she had given him in his childhood years. She said simply: "That is why you turned out so well."
A couple of years earlier, a 14-year-old peasant boy named Pavel Morozov had denounced his father as a kulak. The man was shot at once. Days later, a shocked community took its revenge by murdering the son. Stalin at once announced a cult of Pavel Morozov as a martyr-hero, but privately he said to aides: "What a little swine, denouncing his own father."
Martin Amis opens Koba the Dread with a swipe at his own illustrious father. Kingsley Amis joined the Communist Party in 1941 after Hitler attacked the USSR and he remained a member until the invasion of Hungary in 1956. "The world was offered a choice between two realities," writes a baffled Amis fils, "and the young Kingsley, in common with the overwhelming majority of intellectuals everywhere, chose the wrong reality".
But were "the overwhelming majority" as easily duped as Kingsley? The truth about the forced labour camps and show trials was well-known by the late 1930s: and George Orwell's Homage to Catalonia demonstrated in 1938 with cool, laconic authority just how Stalin had betrayed brigades who had fought in good faith for the Spanish republic. Stalin's men saw to it that POUM volunteers were given out-of-date and rusty guns which could do little harm to the fascists.
Yet, for all the mounting evidence of terror-by-famine and mass murder, some of the West's keenest intellects continued to believe. Bernard Shaw returned from a trip to Moscow assuring his readers that Russians were well fed at a time when millions were starving to death. The list of dupes from O'Casey to Sartre can seem like a who's who of modern literature - but the facts show that the "overwhelming majority" followed Orwell rather than Shaw.
At the centre of Martin Amis's book is the story of Soviet terrorism from 1917 to 1989. His contention is that the brutality was so awful as to be unimaginable and that it was therefore easier for Western intellectuals (always somewhere else when the bullets were fired, as Orwell joked) to believe in the fictions ridiculously propounded by the regime. That seems an astute explanation: for, as Primo Levi said of Auschwitz, if the whole thing had gone on much longer, a new language would have had to be invented simply to deal with the new forms of awfulness in human behaviour.
But there are other explanations, too, for the blindness of persistent fellow travellers. After the heroic defence of Stalingrad by the Russians and the brave fight put up by the Communist Resistance against the Nazis on the Continent, it became easy for some to forget Orwell's indictment. Marxism had a genuine appeal for those who despised the selfishness which seemed to drive consumer capitalism, or who wished to support insurrectionary movements in the Third World.
In England, however, there was always some doubt about just how serious Oxbridge thinkers' infatuation with Marxism might become. Writing in the late 1930s, before he decamped to the US, the poet W.H. Auden wearily conceded that his generation had used the ideas of Marx and Freud simply to expose the hyprocisy of their parents. His comrades were gleeful diagnosticians, he implied, tearing the mask of respectability from society's face, but never really serious about building a soviet state of their own.
In that sense, Martin Amis is truly his father's son, exposing the self-deception of the previous generation as surely as Kingsley Amis and Philip Larkin exposed the gaps in their own parents' thinking. The younger Amis goes farther, however, berating his own 1968 generation for its delusions. By 1968 it had become fashionable among leftist groups to suggest that Communism (like Christianity before it) had not so much failed as never been properly tried. Leon Trotsky, gifted with an intellect far superior to Stalin's, was the lost leader. And Lenin was his true comrade.
Martin Amis will have none of this. He quotes Lenin on intellectuals: "They are not the brains of the nation, but its shit." He quotes Trotsky: "We must put an end once and for all to the papist-Quaker gabble about the sanctity of human life." For him, it's but a step from these to Stalin.
In writing out his indictment, Martin Amis rehashes arguments made by cold warriors from Robert Conquest to Aleksander Solzhenitsyn. He doesn't add much and this has led scathing reviewers to ask why he bothered at all. But there may be an explanation. Although the Soviet empire fell in 1989, many of its former supporters still enjoy influential positions in the mass media. Some have long since abandoned socialism and settled for cosy careers as bleeding-heart columnists, but the underlying methodology in which they were trained - what Trotsky called "the Stalin school of falsification" - is still their favoured technique. You target a convenient heretic who fails to toe the PC line, offer a caricature of his beliefs and then whip up a little hysteria - the old Stalinist methods live on, the only difference being that they are now employed to peddle the ideological mush of the weekend supplements. Martin Amis has refused to join this herd of independent minds and has paid a price. Even a book as brilliant as London Fields was passed over, on a trumped-up charge of sexism, by the prize-awarding committees.
In Amis's analysis, Marxism at its best was a rationalist project which appealed to the middle class, whereas Nazism was a tabloid, yobbish inversion of the whole enlightenment project. Yet he is also shrewd (and original) enough to recognise that the Nazis never managed to destroy the memory of civil society as thoroughly as did the Communists: after all, Germany rebuilt itself within a few years of the war's end, whereas post-Soviet societies are still shattered. And so he moves to his crescendo: "Everybody knows of Auschwitz and Belsen. Nobody knows of Vorkuta and Solovetsky. This isn't right."
Insofar as Soviet Communism succeeded, it was less as a political system than as a substitute religion. Those followers of Lenin who broke open the caskets of saints to prove that their bodies were not miraculously preserved were soon discussing methods of embalming the corpse of Vladimir Ilyich in the Kremlin. Their formal denial of religion was, Amis avers, a denial of the very human desire to believe in a principle of goodness.
But a desire for social justice is just as deep a part of our human nature; and Amis is far too subtle a thinker to proclaim the triumph of the unfettered market. After all, the companion-book to this in his back-catalogue is The Moronic Inferno (1988), a ferocious put-down of the ways in which the vulgar commercialism of the US devalues human dignity, and at the same time a celebration of the ways in which a great novelist such as Saul Bellow can protect some of that dignity by making sense of what happens in the inferno.
In this latest book, for Bellow read Solzhenitsyn. And for the mockers of piratical US capital, read the jokers who used to tell the Cheka visitors at four in the morning: "You've got the wrong apartment; the Communists live upstairs." The connecting tissue between both books is, of course Vladimir Nabokov, the exiled Russian who tried to warn Edmund Wilson that Lenin and Trotsky made Stalin possible.
Some of Amis's command of his sources seems shaky - at one point, he denounces Isaac Deutscher's multi-volume biography of Trotsky as "notoriously mythopeiac", yet later disarmingly admits he has never read it. However, his core thesis stands. Because the communist system was not overcome in a final apocalyptic battle, but simply ebbed quietly away, there have been few sustained post-mortems on it by Western thinkers. Most remain baffled by its collapse, and by the question of what form of social democracy might take its place.
Amis, for all his clumsy attempts to link his own family history to the story, at least raises the right question. But one gets the feeling that, in doing so, he will never fully disentangle it from the ancillary question of being a famous novelist's famous-novelist son. In the end, it is as a screen-version of the Great Father that Joe Stalin is wheeled on and off through this confusing but honest narrative - a further confirmation, if proof were needed, that your mum and dad really can do what Philip Larkin said they do, and that, in the wise words of an ancient Greek, Oedipus wrecks.
Declan Kiberd is professor of Anglo-Irish literature and drama at UCD and author of Irish Classics
Koba the Dread. By Martin Amis. Jonathan Cape, 306 pp. £16.99 sterling