October: The Story of the Russian Revolution

by China Miéville

  Between 1924 and 1928 the atmosphere in Russia grows more and more toxic, infighting in the party more bitter, the shifting of allegiances and cliques more urgent and dangerous. Allies become opponents become allies again. The Heavenly Twins make their peace with the regime. Trotsky does not: he is squeezed out of the CC and the party; his supporters are harassed and abused, beaten up, driven to suicide. In 1928, his Left Opposition is smashed and scattered.

  Threats against the regime multiply, and Stalin consolidates his rule. As crisis grips the world economy, he inaugurates the ‘great change’. ‘The tempo must not be reduced!’ he announces in 1931. This is his first Five-Year Plan. ‘We are fifty or 100 years behind the advanced countries. We must make good this distance in ten years. Either we do it or they crush us.’

  Thus is justified brutal industrialisation and collectivisation, a ruthless centralised control and command economy and political culture. Party activists are hounded in great numbers, forced to betray others, to confess to preposterous crimes with stentorian declarations. They are executed by this counterrevolution against their tradition, in that tradition’s name. Previous loyalty to Stalin is no defence: the long roll call of Bolsheviks put to death in the 1930s and after includes not only Trotsky and Bukharin, but Zinoviev, Kamenev, and countless others.

  With this despotic degradation comes a revival of statism, anti-semitism and nationalism, and bleakly reactionary norms in culture, sexuality and family life. Stalinism: a police state of paranoia, cruelty, murder and kitsch.

  After a protracted sumerki, a long spell of ‘liberty’s dim light’, what might have been a sunrise becomes a sunset. This is not a new day. It is what the Left Oppositionist Victor Serge calls ‘midnight in the century’.

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  There have been a hundred years of crude, ahistorical, ignorant, bad-faith and opportunist attacks on October. Without echoing such sneers, we must nonetheless interrogate the revolution.

  The old regime was vile and violent, while Russian liberalism was weak, and quick to make common cause with reaction. All the same, did October lead inexorably to Stalin? It is an old question, but one still very much alive. Is the gulag the telos of 1917?

  That objective strains faced the new regime is clear. There are subjective factors, too, questions we must pose about decisions made.

  The left Mensheviks, committed anti-war internationalists, have a case to answer, with their walkout in October 1917. Coming straight after the congress voted for coalition, this decision shocked and upset even some of those who went along with it. ‘I was thunderstruck,’ said Sukhanov, of an action he never ceased to regret. ‘No one contested the legality of the congress … [This action] meant a formal break with the masses and with the revolution.’

  Nothing is given. But had the internationalists of other groups remained within the Second Congress, Lenin and Trotsky’s intransigence and scepticism about coalition might have been undercut, given how many other Bolsheviks, at all levels of the party, were advocates of cooperation. A less monolithic and embattled government just might have been the outcome.

  This is not to deny the constraints and impact of isolation – nor to exonerate the Bolsheviks for their own mistakes, or worse.

  In his short piece ‘Our Revolution’, written in January 1923 in response to Sukhanov’s memoir, Lenin rather startlingly allows as ‘incontrovertible’ that Russia had not been ‘ready’ for revolution. He wonders pugnaciously, however, whether a people ‘influenced by the hopelessness of its situation’ could be blamed for ‘fling[ing] itself into a struggle that would offer it at least some chance of securing conditions for the further development of civilisation that were somewhat unusual’.

  It is not absurd to argue that the ground-down of Russia had no real choice but to act, on the chance that in so doing they might alter the very parameters of the situation. That things might thereby improve. The party’s shift after Lenin’s death, from that plaintive, embattled sense that there had been little alternative but to strive in imperfect conditions, to the later bad hope of Socialism in One Country, is a baleful result of recasting necessity as virtue.

  We see a similar curdling tendency in the depiction, at various times by various Bolsheviks, of the dreadful necessities of ‘War Communism’ as desiderata, communist principles, or of censorship, even after the Civil War, as an expression of anything other than weakness. We see it in the presentation of one-person management as part and parcel of socialist transformation. And in the traducing and misrepresentation of opponents; in what, for example, Serge calls the ‘atrocious lie’ according to which the 1921 uprising of Kronstadt sailors against the regime was a White attack, a slander justified (though not by him) as ‘necessary for the benefit of the people’. Nor, considering the aftermath of that revolt, should we gloss over what Mike Haynes – a historian sympathetic to the Bolsheviks – chillingly calls their ‘inability to resist executions’.

  Those who count themselves on the side of the revolution must engage with these failures and crimes. To do otherwise is to fall into apologia, special pleading, hagiography – and to run the risk of repeating such mistakes.

  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.

  October, for an instant, brings a new kind of power. Fleetingly, there is a shift towards workers’ control of production and the rights of peasants to the land. Equal rights for men and women in work and in marriage, the right to divorce, maternity support. The decriminalisation of homosexuality, 100 years ago. Moves towards national self-determination. Free and universal education, the expansion of literacy. And with literacy comes a cultural explosion, a thirst to learn, the mushrooming of universities and lecture series and adult schools. A change in the soul, as Lunacharsky might put it, as much as in the factory. And though those moments are snuffed out, reversed, become bleak jokes and memories all too soon, it might have been otherwise.

  It might have been different, for these were only the first, most faltering steps.

  The revolutionaries want a new country in a new world, one they cannot see but believe they can build. And they believe that in so doing, the builders will also build themselves anew.

  In 1924, even as the vice closes around the experiment, Trotsky writes that in the world he wants, in the communism of which he dreams – a pre-emptive rebuke to the ghastly regime of bones to come – ‘the forms of life will become dynamically dramatic. The average human type will rise to the heights of an Aristotle, a Goethe, or a Marx. And above this ridge new peaks will rise’.

  The specifics of Russia, 1917, are distinct and crucial. It would be absurd, a ridiculous myopia, to hold up October as a simple lens through which to view the struggles of today. But it has been a long century, a long dusk of spite and cruelty, the excrescence and essence of its time. Twilight, even remembered twilight, is better than no light at all. It would be equally absurd to say that there is nothing we can learn from the revolution. To deny that the sumerki of October can be ours, and that it need not always be followed by night.

  John Reed interrupts his own narrative of Prokopovich’s speech to the Duma deputies, prevented by exasperated sailors from martyring themselves. ‘It is beneath our dignity to be shot down here in the street by switchmen,’ he records him saying. Then: ‘What he meant by “switchmen”, I never discovered.’ Louise Bryant, who was also present, likewise noted the odd word. ‘Just exactly what he meant by that was too much for my simple American brain.’

  There is a probable answer in an unlikely place.

  In 1917, Chaim Grade was a young child in Vilna, Lithuania. Much later, when he had become one of the world’s leading Yiddish writers, in the glossary to the English translation of his memoir Der mames shabosim – My Mother’s Sabbath Days – he records the following:

  Forest Shack: Term for the switchmen’s booths along the
railway tracks in the vicinity of Vilna. Before the Revolution of 1917, the area around the Forest Shacks was the clandestine meeting place for the local revolutionaries …

  A nickname from a meeting place. It seems likely that the word Prokopovich deployed as epithet was a disdainful term for ‘revolutionaries’.

  Prokopovich had been a Marxist. His move to liberalism paralleled that of many other heretics infected with so-called ‘Economism’, as well as that of the ‘Legal Marxists’. There was a kind of bleak rigour to their stageist dogmas, in which the epochs must succeed one another perforce, like stations along a line.

  Little wonder he would scorn the Bolsheviks as switchmen. What could be more inimical to any trace of teleology than those who take account of the sidings of history? Or who even take to them?

  The revolution of 1917 is a revolution of trains. History proceeding in screams of cold metal. The tsar’s wheeled palace, shunted into sidings forever; Lenin’s sealed stateless carriage; Guchkov and Shulgin’s meandering abdication express; the trains criss-crossing Russia heavy with desperate deserters; the engine stoked by ‘Konstantin Ivanov’, Lenin in his wig, eagerly shovelling coal. And more and more will come: Trotsky’s armoured train, the Red Army’s propaganda trains, the troop carriers of the Civil War. Looming trains, trains hurtling through trees, out of the dark.

  Revolutions, Marx said, are the locomotives of history. ‘Put the locomotive into top gear’, Lenin exhorted himself in a private note, scant weeks after October, ‘and keep it on the rails.’

  But how could you keep it there if there really was only one true way, one line, and it is blocked?

  ‘I have gone where you did not want me to go.’

  In 1937, Bruno Schulz opens his story ‘The Age of Genius’ with a dizzying rumination on ‘events that have no place of their own in time’, the possibility that ‘all the seats within time might have been sold’.

  Conductor, where are you?

  Don’t let’s get excited …

  Have you ever heard of parallel streams of time within a two-track time? Yes, there are such branch lines of time, somewhat illegal and suspect, but when, like us, one is burdened with contraband of supernumerary events that cannot be registered, one cannot be too fussy. Let us try to find at some point of history such a branch line, a blind track onto which to shunt these illegal events. There is nothing to fear.

  By the Forest Shacks are the points, the switches onto hidden tracks through wilder history.

  The question for history is not only who should be driving the engine, but where. The Prokopoviches have something to fear, and they police these suspect, illegal branch lines, all the while insisting they do not exist.

  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.

  Glossary of Personal Names

  Alexeev, Mikhail (1857–1918) General. Tsar’s chief of staff until February 1917; commander-in-chief until May 1917. Died while fighting the Bolsheviks in the Civil War.

  Antonov, Vladimir Alexandrovich (1883–1938) Bolshevik activist. Marxist since 1903, Bolshevik since 1914. Executed under Stalin.

  Balabanoff, Angelica (1878–1965) Russian–Italian Marxist activist.

  Bochkareva, Maria (1889–1920) Soldier. Founder of the Women’s Battalion of Death. Executed by the Cheka, the Soviet state security organisation set up in December 1917.

  Bonch-Bruevich, Vladimir (1873–1955) Bolshevik activist. An ‘Old Bolshevik’ and researcher on religious sects; Lenin’s personal secretary.

  Breshko-Breshkovskaya, Catherine (1844–1934) SR activist. Close to Kerensky, on the right of the SR party. Fled Russia after October.

  Bubnov, Andrei (1883–1938) Bolshevik activist. Active in Moscow, and in the Military Revolutionary Committee. Executed under Stalin.

  Chernov, Viktor (1873–1952) SR politician. Leader of the SR party, minister in Kerensky’s government. Briefly chair of the Constituent Assembly in 1918, before fleeing Russia.

  Chkheidze, Nikolai Semenovich (1864–1926) Menshevik politician. First chair of the Petrograd Soviet. After October moved to Georgia, then Europe.

  Dan, Fyodor (1871–1947) Menshevik activist. Doctor and founding leader of the Mensheviks, on the presidium of the Soviet in 1917. Arrested and exiled in 1921.

  Dyusimeter. L. P. (1883–?) Colonel. Head of the Republican Centre’s Military Section; right-wing anti-Bolshevik conspirator in August 1917. In exile in Shanghai from 1920, where he died.

  Fedorovna, Alexandra (1872–1918) Tsarina. Wife of the last tsar, Nicholas II. Arrested and sent with her family ultimately to Ekaterinburg; executed by the Bolsheviks on 16 July 1918.

  Filonenko, Maximilian (1885–1960) Right SR, army commissar. Collaborator with Kerensky. After 1917, led an underground anti-Bolshevik group that assassinated Cheka chief Moisei Uritsky in 1918, provoking the Red Terror. Fled Russia in 1920.

  Finisov, P. N. (?–?) Right-wing conspirator. Vice-president of the Republican Centre; conspirator against the Bolsheviks in August 1917.

  Gapon, Georgy (1870–1906) Priest. Leader of the workers’ march on Bloody Sunday in January 1905. A police contact, he was assassinated by SR activists.

  Gorky, Maxim (1868–1936) Writer. Socialist activist, editor of Novaya zhizn, associate of leading leftists; grew increasingly disaffected with the Bolsheviks after 1917.

  Gots, Avram (1882–1937) SR leader. Leading member of the Petrograd Soviet. In 1922, was arrested and tried with other Right SR leaders. Rearrested and shot in Kazakhstan.

  Grand Duke Michael (1878–1918) The youngest brother of the last tsar Nicholas II. Declined the throne when Nicholas abdicated. Murdered by Bolshevik activists in 1918.

  Guchkov, Alexander (1868–1936) Politician. Conservative Octobrist until February 1917. War minister in the Provisional Government until April. Supportor of Kornilov. Left Russia after the revolution.

  Kamenev, Lev (1883–1936) Bolshevik activist and politician. An ‘Old Bolshevik’; long-time collaborator with Lenin. Briefly in opposition to Stalin in the mid-1920s. Executed after a mass show trial under Stalin.

  Kamkov, Boris (1885–1938) Left SR activist. A long-time internationalist, Zimmerwaldist Left SR. Increasingly opposed to the Bolsheviks after 1918; repeatedly arrested. Executed under Stalin.

  Kerensky, Alexander (1881–1970) Trudovik/SR politician. Leading figure in the Provisional Government after February 1917; took several positions, becoming prime minister after July. Unsuccessfully attempted to retake Petrograd with loyalist troops after October 1917. Fled Russia and died in exile.

  Kishkin, Nikolai Mikhailovich (1864–1930) Kadet politician. Spent time as minister of welfare in the Provisional Government in 1917. Granted ‘special powers’ by rump government in October; arrested the same night. Later worked under the Soviet government’s Commissariat of Health.

  Kollontai, Alexandra (1872–1952) Bolshevik activist. Initially a Menshevik, joined the Bolsheviks in 1914. People’s commissar for social welfare after October 1917. Later formed the ‘Workers’ Opposition’ with Alexander Shlyapnikov.

  Kornilov, Lavr (1870–1918) General. Hard-line authoritarian; briefly commander-in-chief in July 1917, before the ‘Kornilov Affair’ in August. Escaped confinement in November; fought against the Bolsheviks in the Civil War. Killed in battle.

  Krupskaya, Nadezhda (1869–1939) Bolshevik activist. Long-time militant. Married to Lenin in 1898. Served as Soviet government’s deputy minister of Education from 1929 until her death.

  Latsis, Martin (1888–1938) Bolshevik activist and politician. An ‘Old Bolshevik’ active during 1905 and after, including throughout 1917; member of the Military Revolutionary Committee, then of the Cheka. Executed under Stalin.

  Lenin, Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov (1870–1924) Bolshevik activist and politician. Prolific wri
ter and theorist. Inaugurator of the 1903 split between the Mensheviks and the Bolsheviks. Leader of the Bolsheviks during and after 1917, and of the Russian government after October. Died after a series of strokes.

  Lunacharsky, Anatoly (1875–1933) Bolshevik activist and politician. Prolific writer, unorthodox Marxist theorist. Briefly a member of the Mezhraiontsy in 1917, then the Bolsheviks. First people’s commissar for education in the Soviet government after October; lost influence under Stalin. Died of natural causes.

  Lvov, Prince Georgy (1861–1925) Liberal politician. From a noble family, joined the Kadet party in 1905. First prime minister of Russia after February 1917, resigning in favour of Kerensky in July. Fled Russia after October.

  Lvov, Vladimir Nikolaevich (1865–1940) Liberal politician. Ex-Duma member for the Progressive Party, in coalition with Kadets. Lay procurator for the Synod of the Orthodox Church between March and July 1917. Directly involved in the Kornilov Affair in August, then arrested. Supporter of the Whites 1918–20. Escaped Russia after October.

  Martov, Julius (1873–1923) Menshevik activist. Popular leader of the Menshevik faction of the RSDWP after 1903. On the far left of the Mensheviks, opposed to the right Mensheviks in charge of the party after February 1917. Would not ally with the Bolsheviks, but supported them against the Whites in the Civil War. Left Russia for Germany in 1920. Died of natural causes.

  Milyukov, Pavel (1859–1943) Kadet politician. Prominent historian and leading member of the Kadet party. Minister of foreign affairs in Provisional Government after February 1917; a staunch patriot committed to victory in the war; resigned after provoking a crisis in April. Left Rusia in 1918.

  Nicholas II (1868–1918) Last tsar of Russia. Abdicated in March 1917, and lived under house arrest thereafter with his family. Executed along with them by the Bolsheviks on 16 July 1918.