The wonders of communism

Fascinating review of a fascinating book, "Koba the Dread," by Martin Amis:

[Martin] Amis' tone doesn't match the earned belligerence you find in Conquest's revised post-glasnost version of "The Great Terror." His prose gives off a sense of appalled wonder. Underneath the steady accumulation of facts and horror stories, Amis is asking how anyone in his or her right mind can still consider Marxism as a means to a more just world; how people (like his pal [Christopher] Hitchens) can joke about their communist past without invoking the horror that someone who joked about his fascist past would; how the apologists for Stalin, despite having plenty of evidence as to the truth of Soviet Russia before glasnost, can be thought of any differently from Holocaust deniers.

The descriptions would make for unbelievable fiction, only it all happened. So much for the glory of Communism....