It is an awkward commemoration. In October 1917, amidst the brutality of World War I, Soviet forces led by Vladimir Ilyich Lenin overthrew the provisional government that ruled from Petrograd - the then-capital of Russia, later named Leningrad and which has since returned to its original name: Saint Petersburg. Widespread starvation had bred discontent among impoverished peasants and proletarians (labourers) alike, the majority of whom lived under a semi-feudal system.
NARRATIVE HISTORY
Yet far from ushering in the egalitarian and just utopia promised by socialist ideologues, the Russian Revolution brought some seventy devastating years of central planning, famine, political repression, Gulags and ultimately the deaths of millions of people.
The fall of the Berlin Wall signalled the end of an era, but the Russian Revolution still lingers in the collective memory and its les- sons are worth revisiting. Among the many books written on the subject, China Miéville’s recently published October (Verso) stands out, chronicling the social upheaval and political manoeuvrings of this dramatic episode in history in a dazzling narrative style that highlights its human elements. Yet Miéville, a British author born in Norwich in 1972 and based in London, makes an unusual writer of a history book, for he is not a scholar but an acclaimed, award-winning novelist in the science fiction genre.
LOYALTY AND TREACHERY
Miéville had no need to devise an imaginary plot for this astonishing piece of 20th century history. It was a period, he writes, that was “all intrigue and violence and loyalty and treachery and courage.” As told in October, the establishment of the Bolshevik regime was the culmination of a laborious, erratic process that lasted nine months and that involved many parties with conflicting interests, each fractured internally with factions within factions.
In the months leading up to October 1917, widespread popular unrest and strikes aggravated by Russia’s involvement in World War I saw the monarch Tsar Nicholas II abdicate and a provisional government form in his place. A miscellaneous group of liberal, right wing and socialist politicians, it lacked real power and was continually undermined by the Soviets, councils comprised of workers, peasants and soldiers that had strong popular support and with whom it was forced to negotiate. However, the majority of the Soviets did not believe that the country was ready to be a socialist state! According to Marx- ist dogma, an egalitarian society could only be attained as the final stage of a long process, in which a bourgeois capitalist society was an indispensable phase; yet the Russian bourgeoisie was weak and lacked potential – revolutionary activity from them was unlikely.
Lenin, who was exiled in Switzerland when the Revolution broke out, arrived in Petrograd in April 1917 after a lengthy train journey. Though late on the scene, Lenin made quite an entrance; his fierce rhetoric convinced the Soviets to push past the bourgeois phase straight into the “dictatorship of the proletariat and the peasantry.” The rest, as they say, is history. And as told in the prose of China Miéville, it also makes a fascinating story.
A History Made of Stories
A science-fiction writer by trade, China Miéville did not attempt to write an authoritative and unbiased account of the developments that led to the Bolsheviks taking power, and to the eventual creation of the Communist block. Instead, the author offers a compelling narrative of this crucial event in 20th century history.
China Miéville (standard British accent): Although I’ve never made any secrets about my politics, it was important that this is a book that’s telling the revolution as a story. And therefore, while there are of course - you know? - the political discussion and a political texture is there, it is a narrative history, and to that extent I was approaching it as much as anything as not just a story but an extraordinary, strange story. And it’s full of all the stuff of ripping yarns, you know, derring-do and camouflage, and betrayal and love and cowardice and honour and so on and so forth.
STRANGER THAN FICTION
For Miéville, the events of the Russian Revolution were so remarkable that not even the most talented fiction writer could have made them up.
China Miéville: There were points where I was kind of gleefully aware that if I had indeed come up with this as a piece of fiction, my editor would quite properly have sort of said ‘That’s a bit much’. This extraordinary concatenation of conspiracy, cock-up, you know, secret agendas, miscommunication, a kind of countercoup and coup by misunderstanding as well as intent. You literally could not make it up. One of the decisions I made quite early on was that I was going to try as far as possible not to focus on an individual person or one or two individual people, because then inevitably you turn it into much more of that person’s story than it was.
AN UNAVOIDABLE REVOLUTION
In Miéville’s book larger-than-life characters, such as Vladimir Lenin, but also many minor ones, play important roles.
China Miéville: The debates have been endless – essentially without Lenin could it have happened, sort of thing? And I think that, I do think that there’s no... I don’t think you can plausibly argue that he did not, his decisions did not have an enormous impact. What was also interesting to me was the decisions that could have had a big impact, the decisions that were made one way and that it would have taken a very small tweak of history to have quite a big effect in a different way. And some of the figures that don’t necessarily loom large in a lot of the histories but who with the tiniest kink of history could have loomed much larger. One of the things that’s terrifying is: so many points at which things could have got much much worse and gone in a very different direction. But was an upheaval that changed the system fundamentally inevitable, you know, [was it] going to happen? Yes I don’t think there’s much doubt about that.
LESSONS OF 1917
According to Miéville, Russia under Tsarist rule was simply unsustainable, and although it led to a ruthless dictatorship, the Russian Revolution proved that dramatic change is possible.
China Miéville: I think that there’s simply no question that the system was unsustainable at the beginning of 1917 in Russia. The question was what happened next. The question was what was going to happen to this system. What was going to replace it and how? That’s the key question. So was the revolution inevitable in the outlines of what happened? Absolutely not. In a way, the most important thing about the Russian Revolution, still now, is both ludicrously simple and breathtakingly exciting, which is that, you know, in an epoch in which we have been told for decades that there is no alternative, you literally have a moment, a glimmer, at which things were radically other. There was an apse, you know, there was an attempt to usher in something fundamentally different. Things were different once [and] things could be different again.