october [china miéville]

China Miéville’s book is an account of the events that lead to the Russian revolution of 1917. The writer offers a detailed month by month picture of the year, leading to the Bolshevik seizure of power in October. What’s fascinating about this is that one tends to interpret “the Russian revolution” as a homogenous event, one that appears to have a clear endgame, and therefore, one assumes, should possess a reasonably clear starting point and middle. The facts of the matter as presented by Miéville are very different. Lenin’s Bolshevik party emerged triumphant from a scrum of competing factions and political possibilities. In fact, the author makes it clear that it wasn’t even ‘Lenin’s Bolshevik party’ until very late in the day. Seemingly inevitable dialectical outcomes, are, the author’s scholarship appears to suggest, anything but. History might be written by the victors, but that in itself implies that the process of creating history is one that has multiple sub-authors, whose versions failed to predominate as a result of a myriad of causes and conditions.

All of which makes October a sometimes dense, even bewildering read, as Miéville takes the reader through the political shenanigans, introducing figures onto the political stage whose significance rapidly wanes thereafter. There are moments when the book seems to cry out for a more humanistic account (something offered by Marina Tsvetaeva’s memoirs, for example). Perhaps ironically, the ordinary Russian citizen, red or white, feels relegated to the background in Miéville’s take, and the human cost and scale of events flickers, mainly supplied through first-hand accounts from foreign journalists. The author is very good on the politicians’ intentions, errors and false dawns, less so on what these meant to the people who were living through these tumultuous events.

Nevertheless, this feels like a comprehensive version of a year of living politically dangerously, a year which had, as the book’s epilogue makes clear, consequences which were far from positive, neither for the classical notion of communism, nor for the Soviet Union itself. Perhaps unsurprisingly, given the chaos out of which the revolution was born. In that sense, it has felt instructive to read the book at the same time as witnessing a similar period of hyper-political activity in the UK where some kind of a revolution is playing itself out. One hopes (and everyone assumes) that the consequences will be less severe than they were for citizens of the state called Russia, later the USSR. However, it is telling to see from this account how extremism fills a vacuum; how the appeal of political ideologues escalates in times of crisis. Perhaps the most important aspect of Miéville’s book is the way in which he re-vindicates the existence of a more moderate, conciliatory path, one which Lenin and the Bolsheviks and, he seems to argue at the end, even the moderates themselves, turned away from. A kinder vision of the revolution existed, Miéville seems to suggest, one which was snuffed out before it had a chance to govern. Which may be wishful thinking, but might also be a lesson that the contemporary British, not just the Russians of a hundred years ago, might do well to heed.