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This paperback edition published by Verso 2018
First published by Verso 2017
© China Miéville 2017, 2018
Illustrations supplied by Press Association Images, with the exception of
the pictures of Maria Spiridonova, Baku, and the Aurora, which came from Alamy, and the picture of the Red Guard, supplied by the author.
All rights reserved
The moral rights of the author have been asserted
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Verso
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US: 20 Jay Street, Suite 1010, Brooklyn, NY 11201
Verso is the imprint of New Left Books
ISBN-13: 978-1-78478-278-8
ISBN-13: 978-1-78478-279-5 (US EBK)
ISBN-13: 978-1-78478-280-1 (UK EBK)
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
The Hardback Edition Has Been Cataloged by the Library of Congress as Follows:
Names: Miéville, China, author.
Title: October : the story of the Russian Revolution / China Mieville.
Description: London ; Brooklyn, NY : Verso, 2017.
Identifiers: LCCN 2016051217 | ISBN 9781784782771 (hardback)
Subjects: LCSH: Soviet Union – History – Revolution, 1917–1921. | BISAC:
HISTORY / Europe / Russia & the Former Soviet Union. | HISTORY /
Revolutionary.
Classification: LCC DK265 .M475 2017 | DDC 947.084/1 – dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016051217
Typeset in Fournier by MJ & N Gavan, Truro, Cornwall
Printed in the UK by CPI Mackays
To Gurru
‘………………………………
………………………………’
Nikolai Chernyshevsky,
What Is to Be Done?
Contents
Introduction
1.The Prehistory of 1917
2.February: Joyful Tears
3.March: ‘In So Far As’
4.April: The Prodigal
5.May: Collaboration
6.June: A Context of Collapse
7.July: Hot Days
8.August: Exile and Conspiracy
9.September: Compromise and Its Discontents
10.Red October
Epilogue: After October
Glossary of Personal Names
Further Reading
Acknowledgements
Index
Midway through the First World War, as Europe shuddered and bled, an American publisher released Alexander Kornilov’s acclaimed Modern Russian History. Kornilov, a liberal Russian intellectual and politician, concluded his narrative in 1890, but for this 1917 English-language edition, his translator, Alexander Kaun, brought the story up to date. Kaun’s final paragraph opens with minatory words: ‘One need not be a prophet to foretell that the present order of things will have to disappear.’
That order disappeared, spectacularly, as those words appeared. In the course of that violent and incomparable year, Russia was rocked and wracked by not one but two insurrections, two confused, liberatory upheavals, two reconfigurings. The first, in February, dispensed breakneck with a half-millennium of autocratic rule. The second, in October, was vastly more far-reaching, contested, ultimately tragic and ultimately inspiring.
The months from February to October were a continuous jostling process, a torquing of history. What happened and the meaning of what happened remain overwhelmingly controversial. February and, above all, October have long been prisms through which the politics of freedom are viewed.
It has become a ritual of historical writing to disavow any chimerical ‘objectivity’, a disinterest to which no writer can or should want to cleave. I duly perform that caveat here: though not, I hope, dogmatic or uncritical, I am partisan. In the story that follows, I have my villains and my heroes. But, while I do not pretend to be neutral, I have striven to be fair, and I hope readers of various political hues will find value in this telling.
There are already many works on the Russian Revolution, and a good number of them are excellent. Though carefully researched – no event or spoken word described here is not recorded in the histories – this book does not attempt to be exhaustive, scholarly or specialist. It is, rather, a short introduction for those curious about an astonishing story, eager to be caught up in the revolution’s rhythms. Because here it is precisely as a story that I have tried to tell it. The year 1917 was an epic, a concatenation of adventures, hopes, betrayals, unlikely coincidences, war and intrigue; of bravery and cowardice and foolishness, farce, derring-do, tragedy; of epochal ambitions and change, of glaring lights, steel, shadows; of tracks and trains.
There is something in the Russia-ness of Russia that often seems to intoxicate. Again and again, discussions of the country’s history, particularly those of non-Russians but sometimes those of Russians themselves, veer into romanticised essentialism, evocations of some supposed irreducible, ineffable Russian Spirit, with a black box at its heart. Not only uniquely sad but uniquely inscrutable, evasive of explanation: mnogostradalnaya, much-suffering Russia; Little Mother Russia. The Russia where, as Virginia Woolf puts it in her most dreamlike book, Orlando, ‘the sunsets are longer, the dawns less sudden and sentences are often left unfinished from doubt as how to best end them’.
This cannot stand. That there are Russian specifics to the story is hardly in doubt; that they explain the revolution, let alone explain it away, is. The story must honour those specificities without losing sight of the general: the world-historic causes and ramifications of the upheaval.
The poet Osip Mandelstam, in a poem that goes by various names, a celebrated first-anniversary commemoration of the start of 1917, speaks of ‘liberty’s dim light’. The word he uses, sumerki, usually portends twilight, but it may also refer to the darkness before dawn. Does he honour, his translator Boris