For anyone familiar with the work of China Miéville or the Russian Revolution, there is a question immediately posed by his new book October: The Story of the Russian Revolution (Verso, 2017): Why should Miéville, author of some of the most complex and vivid contemporary “weird fiction,” be a good candidate to write about the first successful communist revolution in history? The centenary of the Bolshevik seizure of power has of course brought out countless commentaries and dissections of the still-controversial event. Some are useful. Others are disgraceful hatchet jobs. Does there need to be another volume written on what took place in Russia one hundred years ago? What does this curator of the strange and uncanny have to tell us about it?
As it turns out, a great deal. And this is connected to the necessity of revisiting and retelling the story of the seizure of power that took place during the October Revolution. Miéville knows how to use off-kilter lights to illuminate those parts of existence elided by polite conversation. His best work reminds us of the power that exists in alterity: systems cast people into the past, yet these same people often contain an image of our future. Whereas a more traditional historian might describe a sequence of events, Miéville tarries with the moment and the event, mining its different dimensions and its possible outcomes as manifested in a place or a crowd.
The potential of the crowd is a prescient discussion, as ever-present as it is contentious. The refrain that America’s most disaffected and disgruntled are the ones who gave us President Donald Trump is a constant one. Miéville presents us with a markedly different kind of deplorable, however, and a sharply opposed vision of the future. He is a Marxist, and an unabashed one. As such, October is resolutely partisan in its sympathy for the Bolsheviks, Vladimir Lenin, Leon Trotsky, the ragged soldiers, sailors, and workers who stormed the Winter Palace on October 26, 1917.
Miéville’s method is in both his wheelhouse and the title. As he writes in the introduction:
It is…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.
In other words, it is the creative intellect rather than the analytical that leads us here. This is not to say that Miéville plays fast and loose with the facts, or that there isn’t a rigorously researched reality being sketched for us. The book’s partisanship and willingness to take a side necessitate that the author regard the facts for what they are. Russian workers and peasants lived through both abject deprivation and violent flux. World War I was a depraved bloodbath that threw millions into a meat grinder. The Romanovs were pampered inepts completely detached from the real world and the liberal politicians who attempted to build a society after the tsar’s abdication. They were trying to stop a process they didn’t fully understand. No matter how they feel about the Revolution, all but the most dishonest historian would accept these as hard truths. But how does the truth evolve? How does one reality become another? Explaining this is where Miéville’s gifts as a storyteller are so important. Not in the sense of creating fiction, but rather in knowing that the dramatic also holds within it the stuff of social conflict and change.
Miéville starts his narrative in a unique way: by retelling the myth of how St. Petersburg (later Petrograd), the primary setting for October, was founded. In 1703, Peter the Great himself supposedly thrust his bayonet into the earth and yawped for there to be a city built on Zayachy Island. “This never happened,” the author writes. “Peter was not there.” There are distinct echoes here of Marshall Berman’s literary treatment of cities (St. Petersburg included) in his seminal All That Is Solid Melts Into Air. In such narratives, the city is a contradictory place: at once built from singular triumphalist myth and a multifaceted combination of different landscapes and timelines jockeying with each other. In October, however, St. Petersburg is more than setting; it is its own character, with different versions of itself emerging and taking over depending on which historic force seizes its streets and the form in which it does so.
The breadth and diversity of these forces—some of which emerged during or after the toppling of the tsar in February, others radically transformed and rearranged—are often dizzying. And Miéville, it appears, wants us to feel this dizziness, even if we are never overwhelmed by it. This is no Manichean tale of two sides grappling for a clean victory. Russia’s ruling cliques change face a handful of times throughout the book: the tsar abdicates and leaves a vacuum to be filled by parliamentary bodies pulled between reaction, liberalism, and social democracy of one kind or another. Hard-line military men step in and attempt to wrench control of the nation back into authoritarian hands, impatient with the dithering of compromisers.
On the other side is a restless subaltern that also straddles the divide between futurity and anachronism: a vast peasant majority often forced into squalid circumstances, and a proletarian minority working in some of the largest and most technologically advanced factories in the world. These were further composed of several variants of radical and socialist parties—Bolshevik, Menshevik (Left and Right as time progresses), Mezhraiontsy, Socialist Revolutionary (again parsed into Left and Right wings), and so on—whose ways forward conflicted as often as they dovetailed. When these classes instituted their own method of democratic decision making in the form of soviets, the parties became stages for competing visions and philosophies as conditions grow more and more dire.
What Miéville necessarily must experiment with here is a concept that has fascinated and stumped a great many writers and artists: that of the collective protagonist. It was, in fact, a method of storytelling whose contradictions were drawn into further relief by the Russian Revolution itself, spurring filmmakers like Sergei Eisenstein to innovate the method of montage to conceive of “the people” as the narrative’s driving force. Like Eisenstein, Miéville is uninterested in telling the revolution as a tale of “great men” who magically amass throngs of people behind them in the shape of their historic vision. To him, this is not fundamentally where the story exists.
If this is evident anywhere, then it is in the sequences that feature the in/famous personification of Bolshevism: Lenin. It is impossible to talk about the Russian Revolution without him, and both proponents and detractors have granted him a central place in its events. While October does not deny for a second that he was crucial to shaping the path to working-class power, it also has no truck with images of either genius or master manipulator. Miéville is frank, several times throughout the book, about when Lenin was wrong, when he miscalculated, misjudged, or failed to win an argument with the membership of the Bolsheviks. He is also, along with the Bolsheviks, outpaced by events through dint of misjudgment or outright absence several times.
Such debates and arguments are a constant feature throughout the book, particularly within the Soviets (councils) of workers, soldiers, sailors, and peasants. Miéville’s care in connecting the arguments with the consequence of what was happening in the real world, however, saves them from becoming merely interminable chatter. Here is the scene that played out in April when Lenin arrived in Petrograd after months in exile, greeting a Soviet whose elected representatives were urging caution, arguing against the seizure of power and for the continuation of war:
When Lenin at last replied, it was not to the Soviet chair, nor to anyone from its delegation. He spoke instead to everyone else present, to the crowd – his ‘dear comrades, soldiers, sailors and workers’. The imperialist war, he roared, was the start of European civil war. The longed-for international revolution was imminent…. Ever the internationalist, he concluded with a stirring call to build from this first step: ‘Long live the worldwide socialist revolution!’ His Soviet hosts were stunned. They could only watch numbly as the crowds demanded a further speech.
It is the crowds that drive this scene, not Lenin. In this way Miéville reveals how, even within the historico-literary aegis of the collective, certain individuals and their ideas can become conduits for future events, both acted upon by them and in turn acting upon them. This is, after all, the story of a revolution struggling to make itself permanent. Illustrating such a dynamic requires mining the chaos for strands of order, of the common threads that tangle and cut from each other as factories strike, landlords’ homes are ransacked, and battalions revolt against their commanding officers.
Boosters of the revolution might shy from mentioning the violent and senseless crime that streamed into Petrograd life in the weeks leading up to the October Revolution. Miéville doesn’t. This is not, as one would expect were the author a detractor, a play at painting the revolution wholly as an act of depravity. Rather it is to drive home the fact that there was no going back to the old order. It could not hold, and the morbid symptoms (as Gramsci famously called them) were bound to appear. Much like the revolutionaries themselves, the author must find the hints of utopia in an increasingly dystopian sequence.
Seeing these differing realities, these different visions for the future balancing and pulling on each other, hits home the depth of the rupture taking place within Russian society and the possibility for that shift to go in any direction. “The standard of October declares that things changed once,” writes Miéville, “and they might do so again.” This image of history is necessarily one in which crowds become chimeras, transforming the trajectory of time between each singular moment’s pain and promise. It is a markedly different kind of historical event, a different kind of crowd, than the one that lifts the demagogy of right-wing populism on its shoulders. In the midst of overwhelming chaos, there is also the potential for something new to be conceived and invented.
January 2018