by Guy Stricklin
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.
China Miéville’s October is an electrifying centenary tour through Russia’s axial 1917. Acting as expert guide, he whisks readers through the labyrinthine history of that land, past Tzars and Rasputin, to focus on the intimate details of factory-level debates, cabinet meetings, bureaus, letters, trains, revolutions, and the Revolution. Most of us have a sense of where this particular drama ends or at least what came later, but Miéville throws the reader into scene after scene of this spectacular story.
The man begged shelter from the downpour. Lenin had little choice but to stand aside and let him in. As they sat together listening to the drumbeat of water, Lenin asked his visitor what brought him to this out-of-the-way spot.
A manhunt, the Cossack said. He was after someone by the name of Lenin. To bring him back dead or alive.
This powerful dramatic voice galvanizes a story frequently (though necessarily) saturated with committee vote tallies. Take for instance the following passage in which Miéville strikes a skillful balance between fact, gravity, and levity.
At last, after prolonged and impassioned back and forth, they voted. By ten to two – Zinoviev and Kamenev, of course – the resolution passed. It was hazy in its details, but a Rubicon had been crossed. Insurrection was now the ‘order of the day’.
The tension eased. Iurii Flakserman brought cheese, sausage and bread, and the famished revolutionaries fell to. Good-naturedly they teased the Heavenly Twins: hesitating to overthrow the bourgeoisie was so very Kamenev.
Miéville’s October felt like the classes I loved in college. Classes where facts were not just data but invitations to think, and where teachers brought faraway subjects closer and pushed you to care deeply. When Miéville recounts the circumstances of a wonderful and infamous phrase from 1917, it’s not in anticipation of the punch-line to be delivered.
A big worker pushed his way through and came up close and shook his fist in Chernov’s face. ‘Take power, you son of a bitch,’ he bellowed, in one of the most famous phrases of 1917, ‘when it’s given to you!’
He wants the reader (you and me, right now) to wrestle with this event’s crucial questions.
Read October because China Miéville is a good writer and this is a great story. Read October because we are now 100 years from the events described. Read October because, as Miéville believes:
It is not for nostalgia’s sake that the strange story of the first socialist revolution in history deserves celebration. The standard of October declares that things changed once, and they might do so again.
P.S. The publisher, Verso, has a slew of new books centered on the Russian Revolution including an exciting gem coming in September, Lenin 2017. This book brings together a collection of Lenin’s later writings and an essay from the reigning “Clown Prince of the Revolution,” Slavoj Zizek.
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