Comrade Koba

September 1, 2020
"I can't decide whether he was hard-hearted or brokenhearted," says precocious, 12-year-old Leon Rozental about an old man he knows as Koba, a self-described advisor to Stalin in the postwar USSR. Living off the grid with other children of dead or imprisoned Russian Jews, Leon and his friends, including the equally precocious Isabeau, are hiding in boarded-up rooms within Moscow's House on the Embankment, where Leon lived with his parents before his nuclear-physicist father died and his physician mother was imprisoned for treason. Wandering the building's sub-basement, Leon stumbles upon rooms occupied by "Comrade Koba," whose real identity quickly becomes apparent to the reader. Over numerous meetings, Koba attempts to instruct Leon in the development of the Soviet state, celebrating Stalin and discounting Lenin as a "preening coffee-house brainbox." Leon's friends, especially Isabeau, question Koba's bona fides, but they can't deny the food that Leon brings with him from the sub-basement. In this short but compelling novel, Littell uses the interplay between a disarmingly discerning if naive boy and a tortured, self-justifying dictator to expose a tragic slice of muddled humanity behind the gray monolith of Stalinist Russia.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2020, American Library Association.)