China Miéville, October, Verso, 2017; hbk £18.99.
|
RATING: 92
|
Buy this book?
|
Yes
|
This book tells the story of the Bolshevik revolution from February 1917 until 5 a.m. on 26 October in the same year (Miéville uses the old Julian calendar in force at the time) - through, that is, to the successful storming of the St Petersburg Winter Palace and the adoption of Lenin's address 'To All Workers, Soldiers and Peasants', at which point: 'Exhausted, drunk on history, nerves still as taut as wires, the delegates to the Second Congress of Soviets stumbled out of Smolny. They stepped out of the finishing school into a new moment of history, a new kind of first day, that of a workers' government, morning in a new city, the capital of a workers' state' (304). What's Worth Reading should have a book of the year. It does now, and this is it. So if you read no other book on the Russian Revolution in its centenary year, read this. Indeed, if you read no other book this year, read this. Miéville's narrative is sure-footed, unobtrusively controlled, and beautifully balanced. It captures both the sheer improbability of the revolutionary triumph, and its deeper inevitability, given the twists and turns, mishaps, misunderstandings and 'slapstick errors' on the one hand, and the surging movement of social forces - workers and peasants and soldiers and sailors to the fore - on the other, against the grim backdrop of hunger, war-weariness, and the slow disintegration of the old order. Lenin naturally looms large, slipping in and out of St Petersburg once he returns from exile, often completely at odds with his fellow Bolsheviks, tricked out in a series of ever more inventive disguises (the first had him in an 'unlikely hat', the last swathed in bandages), switching tactics with dizzying speed, and coming down in the end in favour of insurrection, for fear the moment would be lost. Three months earlier, he had been holed up with Zinoviev on the shore of Lake Razliv in July, disguised as a Finnish peasant, 'a martyr to the mosquitoes and the rain', scribbling out a draft of State and Revolution (190). The 'seizure of state power', when it came, was both world-historically momentous, and curiously banal, hingeing crucially on the belated success of the commissar of the Military Revolutionary Committee, Blagonravov, after falling into a mud-pit, in hanging a red lantern as a signal on the flagpole of the Peter and Paul fortress.
Miéville's account is scrupulously based on contemporary sources (where there is no record, he says that we don't know), and while his sound grasp of revolutionary and Marxist theory and debate stands him in good stead, this is the reverse of a dogmatic tract. For all their ambition, the leading protagonists could have had no idea of the particular history they were contributing to making, and Miéville does not force his account to suggest that they do. As readers of his other work will know, he is a superb and superbly imaginative writer. Here his imagination is disciplined to the task of bringing extraordinary events alive. Telling details and arresting phrases abound, brief vignettes illuminate the range of delirious liberation, puzzlement and despair as all that seemed solid melted into air. The ten-year old Zinaida Schakovsky, a pupil at the Empress Catherine Institute for Young Ladies of the Nobility, weeps in bewilderment as an older pupil, substituting the prayer for the Tsar and his family at morning assembly with one for the Provisional Government, herself stumbles over the words and bursts into tears (77-8); 'A miracle has happened,' declares Alexander Blok after the fall of the Tsar. 'Nothing is forbidden ... almost anything might happen' (92); as the last hopes of reaction fade, the 'hard-right' head of the Third Corps, General Krimov, his authority over the Don Cossacks melted away, declares that, with the last card for saving the motherland beaten, 'life is not worth living', retires to private room, and shoots himself through the heart (233). Similar moments abound.
I cannot say that this is how it must have been. But it is a measure of Miéville's empathy and sureness of touch that I can imagine that this is how it could have been. It is an extraordinary imagining of an extraordinary time, exhilaratingly told, that does justice to its subject.
After the main narrative is concluded, a brief epigraph reflects on how the Russian revolution unfolded thereafter. It is a wonder that it survived, and no surprise that it turned the way it did. Miéville's reflection is measured, humane and moving, engaging with the 'failures and crimes', while rejecting 'a hundred years of crude, ahistorical, ignorant, bad-faith and opportunistic attacks'.
Miéville's account is scrupulously based on contemporary sources (where there is no record, he says that we don't know), and while his sound grasp of revolutionary and Marxist theory and debate stands him in good stead, this is the reverse of a dogmatic tract. For all their ambition, the leading protagonists could have had no idea of the particular history they were contributing to making, and Miéville does not force his account to suggest that they do. As readers of his other work will know, he is a superb and superbly imaginative writer. Here his imagination is disciplined to the task of bringing extraordinary events alive. Telling details and arresting phrases abound, brief vignettes illuminate the range of delirious liberation, puzzlement and despair as all that seemed solid melted into air. The ten-year old Zinaida Schakovsky, a pupil at the Empress Catherine Institute for Young Ladies of the Nobility, weeps in bewilderment as an older pupil, substituting the prayer for the Tsar and his family at morning assembly with one for the Provisional Government, herself stumbles over the words and bursts into tears (77-8); 'A miracle has happened,' declares Alexander Blok after the fall of the Tsar. 'Nothing is forbidden ... almost anything might happen' (92); as the last hopes of reaction fade, the 'hard-right' head of the Third Corps, General Krimov, his authority over the Don Cossacks melted away, declares that, with the last card for saving the motherland beaten, 'life is not worth living', retires to private room, and shoots himself through the heart (233). Similar moments abound.
I cannot say that this is how it must have been. But it is a measure of Miéville's empathy and sureness of touch that I can imagine that this is how it could have been. It is an extraordinary imagining of an extraordinary time, exhilaratingly told, that does justice to its subject.
After the main narrative is concluded, a brief epigraph reflects on how the Russian revolution unfolded thereafter. It is a wonder that it survived, and no surprise that it turned the way it did. Miéville's reflection is measured, humane and moving, engaging with the 'failures and crimes', while rejecting 'a hundred years of crude, ahistorical, ignorant, bad-faith and opportunistic attacks'.