Name: Mitch Stewart's review of October by China Miéville
Item: October
Rating: 4
Author: Mitch Stewart

China Miéville

"Fantasy and science fiction writer China Miéville has long been inspired by the ideals of the Russian Revolution and here, on the centenary of the revolution, he provides his own ... take on its history. In February 1917 ... Russia was still an autocratic monarchy: nine months later, it became the first socialist state in world history ... This is the story of the extraordinary months between those upheavals, in February and October, of the forces and individuals who made 1917 so epochal a year"--

The Story of the Russian Revolution

October

Mitch Stewart

China Mieville

Acclaimed fantasy author China Mieville plunges us into the year the world was turned upside down The renowned fantasy and science fiction writer China Mieville has long been inspired by the ideals of the Russian Revolution and here, on the centenary of the revolution, he provides his own distinctive take on its history. In February 1917, in the midst of bloody war, Russia was still an autocratic monarchy: nine months later, it became the first socialist state in world history. How did this unimaginable transformation take place? How was a ravaged and backward country, swept up in a desperately unpopular war, rocked by not one but two revolutions? This is the story of the extraordinary months between those upheavals, in February and October, of the forces and individuals who made 1917 so epochal a year, of their intrigues, negotiations, conflicts and catastrophes. From familiar names like Lenin and Trotsky to their opponents Kornilov and Kerensky; from the byzantine squabbles of urban activists to the remotest villages of a sprawling empire; from the revolutionary railroad Sublime to the ciphers and static of coup by telegram; from grand sweep to forgotten detail. Historians have debated the revolution for a hundred years, its portents and possibilities: the mass of literature can be daunting. But here is a book for those new to the events, told not only in their historical import but in all their passion and drama and strangeness. Because as well as a political event of profound and ongoing consequence, Mieville reveals the Russian Revolution as a breathtaking story."

André Nóbrega

October - the month - isn't usually among my favorites of each year. The progressive lack of natural light is quite unhelpful and I never expect much from it.
October - the book - was a surprise. Not that I didn't expect it to be good, I did, but it became one of my favorite reads ever. The audiobook is exceptionally narrated.
October - the story - was fascinating, both in and of itself and as one compares it with the myth and its frequent retelling and exploitation. The Russian revolution(s) of 1917 are the most human of stories, setting up needs and despairs against expectations and fears from the peasant through the merchant and the aristocrat up to the tsar. Not only that, but it shows how those historical events one so often learns about as simple, teleological, straightforward, are nothing of the sort.
October is a lesson for humankind. One can find many mistakes, many dreadful intended and unintended consequences, many indecisions, coincidences, incoherence. But one can find light. October is not necessarily followed by fall and winter. It may have been, this time around, but there is much hope in this myth, in this story, that one could have gone - or can one day go - from darkness to light. One one looks, some of the seeds of good things planted in 1917 are still around.

Brigid Hogan

Bryan Alexander

October is a very good political history of the Russian Revolution. While it focuses on political maneuvering, it is also as engagingly well written as you would expect from a novelist,

Most of the book follows events chronologically, working through weeks, days, and even hours during a very chaotic 1917. We get to see the former Russian empire's lands become increasingly chaotic and the populations more politicized.

Central to October is the unusual political arrangement that followed the tsar's abdication. The provisional government and the soviets were both in charge of Russia and its crumbling empire in a system called "dual power" (Двоевластие). It comes across as very complicated and clunky, unsurprisingly collapsing under Lenin's coup.

Miéville's style is fine enough to distract, or at least distract me. He offers gags like Nicholas II having "nothing... stir[ring] behind those placid, tsarry eyes" (372) and elegant phrases such as "a debased cosmopolitanism of the conscripted, fingering bayonets in these premonitory graves" (2526). I don't think I've ever read a historian use "testeria" to describe a political response (2144). This bit damns the provisional government neatly:With all the seriousness in the world, like burnt-out matches telling grim stories of the conflagration they will soon start, the ashes of Russia's Provisional Government debated which of them to make dictator." (4527) And he has an eye for sharp little stories, like this:Governor-General Viren was hauled out of his villa in nothing but a white shirt.
He drew himself up and bellowed a familiar order: "Attention!" This time the men just laughed.
They marched him to Anchor Square, shivering in his underclothes in the sea winds. They told him to face the great monument to Admiral Makarov, engraved with his motto: "Remember war." 
 Viren refused. When the Kronstadt soldiers bayonetted him he made them meet his eyes. (1021)Even Miéville's conclusion reads like something from lyrical science fiction. He begins with the fun assertion that "the revolution of 1917 is a revolution of trains" (4985), which reminds this attentive Miéville reader of his locomotive-obsessed novel 
  The Iron Council
 (2004). Then he reaches for Marx's language and a passage from fantasist Bruno Schulz, before finishing:Onto such tracks the revolutionaries divert their train, with its contraband cargo, unregisterable, supernumerary, powering for a horizon, an edge as far away as ever and yet careering closer.
Or so it looks from the liberated train, in liberty's dim light.

The book has some limitations and issues. For one, Miéville has his biases, although he wears them openly. Clearly he admires Lenin and Trotsky, although doesn't hesitate to criticize them as they struggle through 1917. Naturally he criticizes leftists in general (2418), as leftists habitually do to each other. But we don't get insights into the right-wing figures as deeply depicted as those to whom the author is more sympathetic. In an important passage Miéville tries to exfiltrate the good, even utopian ideas from the October revolution, carefully balancing them against the disasters and horrors to come. This is a powerful, problematic for some discussion, and it bears rereading (4953ff).

The larger problem is that WWI is largely absent from the account. We learn more about how Germany set up Lenin's famous railroad trip (his car "would be an extraterritorial entity, a rolling-stock leghal nullity", 1600) than we do about its armies shattering Russia's. There are some very well done impressions of the war - Dugouts and low log cabibs; rough, jury-rigged chapels; and a staccato tinnitus of mortars. Trench-drenched soldiers the color of the ripped-up earth taking what hours of respite they could, drinking tea from tin mugs. Alternate rhythms of boredom and terror, fire rising to meet German planes... (2433) - yet the actual strategies, results, contingencies of the war are barely in October. We get glimpses of German advances on Riga and a hint about the army's collapse a year hence (3883), but they appear ghostly, unmoored from the kind of structure October assembles for Russia. It may be that war is more difficult terrain for Miéville to tread than revolution; in the finale he sketches the next few years after 1917, but somehow fails to mention the crucial war with Poland. I know the English language literature on the eastern front has been relatively scanty until very recently, but I would have liked to hear more from the author on this, well, front.

One issue I'm not sure about, for personal reasons. I studied Russian history under the Soviet studies rubric in university, and have kept up over the years, albeit mostly in English. My family lived through the revolution, the civil war, and the early years of Stalin, before fleeing to America. 1917 is a familiar story for me, in other words, so I don't know to what extent October would be a good introduction. It feels rich to me, accessible yet deep, but perhaps it's too much for a reader new to that revolution.

Mitch Stewart &
October by China Miéville

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