October

The Story of the Russian Revolution

China Miéville

• Publisher: Verso
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN:
  9781784782771
• eBook ISBN:
  9781784782801
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Russian History
• Index: History

In February of 1917 Russia was a backward, autocratic monarchy, mired in an unpopular war; by October, after not one but two revolutions, it had become the world's first workers' state, straining to be at the vanguard of global revolution. How did this unimaginable transformation take place?

In a panoramic sweep, stretching from St Petersburg and Moscow to the remotest villages of a sprawling empire, Mi?ville uncovers the catastrophes, intrigues and inspirations of 1917, in all their passion, drama and strangeness. Intervening in long-standing historical debates, but told with the reader new to the topic especially in mind, here is a breathtaking story of humanity at its greatest and most desperate; of a turning point for civilisation that still resonates loudly today.

China Mi?ville tells the extraordinary story of this pivotal moment in history.

1

The Prehistory of 1917

A man stands on a windswept island, staring up at the sky. He is powerfully built and enormously tall, and his fine clothes whip about him in the May squalls. He ignores the chop of the Neva river that surrounds him, the scrub and greenery of a sprawling littoral marshland. His rifle dangling from his hand, he gazes up in awe. Overhead, a great eagle soars.

Transfixed, Peter the Great, all-powerful ruler of Russia, watches the bird for a long time. It watches him back.

At last the man turns abruptly and plunges his bayonet into the wet earth. He forces the blade through the dirt and roots, hacking out first one, then two long strips of turf. He peels them from the ground and drags them, filthying himself, to just below where the eagle hovers. There he lays the strips down cruciform. ‘Let there be a city here!’ he bellows. Thus in 1703, on Zayachy Island in the Gulf of Finland, in land wrestled from the Swedish Empire in the Great Northern War, the tsar ordains the creation of a great city named for his own patron saint – St Petersburg.

This never happened. Peter was not there.

The story is a tenacious myth of what Dostoevsky called ‘the most abstract and premeditated city in the whole world’. But although Peter is not present on that founding day, St Petersburg goes on to be built according to his dream, against odds and sense, in a mosquito-ridden Baltic estuary floodplain, assaulted by fierce winds and punishing winters.

First the tsar directs the building of the Peter and Paul Fortress, a sprawling, star-shaped complex to fill that little island, ready for a Swedish counterattack that never comes. And then around its walls Peter orders a great port raised, in accord with the latest designs. This will be his ‘window to Europe’.

He is a visionary, of a brutal kind. He is a moderniser, contemptuous of Russia’s churchy ‘Slavic backwardness’. The ancient city of Moscow is picturesque, unplanned, a tangle of quasi-Byzantine streets: Peter directs that his new city be plotted by rational design, in straight lines and elegant curves of epic scale, its vistas wide, canals criss-crossing its avenues, its many palaces grand and palladian, its restrained baroque a determined break from traditions and onion domes. On this new ground, Peter intends to construct a new Russia.

He hires foreign architects, dictates that European fashions be worn, insists on building in stone. He populates his city by fiat, ordering merchants and nobles to relocate to the nascent metropolis. In the early years, wolves prowl the unfinished streets at night.

It is forced labour that lays those streets down, that drains the wetlands and raises columns in the quag. Tens of thousands of conscript serfs and convicts, forced under guard to struggle across the vastness of Peter’s lands. They come and dig foundations in the muck, and die in vast numbers. One hundred thousand corpses lie beneath the city. St Petersburg will be known as ‘the city built on bones’.

In 1712, in a decisive move against a Muscovite past he scorns, Tsar Peter makes St Petersburg Russia’s capital. For the next two centuries and more, it is here that politics will move most quickly. Moscow and Riga and Ekaterinburg and all the countless other towns and cities and all the sprawling regions of the empire are vital, their stories cannot be neglected, but St Petersburg will be the crucible of the revolutions. The story of 1917 – born out of a long prehistory – is above all the story of its streets.

Russia, a confluence of European and easterly Slavic traditions, is long gestated among debris. According to a key protagonist of 1917, Leon Trotsky, it is thrown up by ‘the western barbarians settled in the ruins of Roman culture’. For centuries a succession of kings – tsars – trade and war with nomads of the Eastern steppes, with the Tatars, with Byzantium. In the sixteenth century, Tsar Ivan IV, whom history calls the Terrible, slaughters his way into territories east and north until he becomes ‘Tsar of All Russias’, head of a colossal and multifarious empire. He consolidates the Muscovite state under ferocious autocracy. That ferocity notwithstanding, rebellions erupt, as they always do. Some, like the Pugachev uprising of Cossack peasants in the eighteenth century, are challenges from below, bloody insurgencies bloodily subdued.

After Ivan come motley others, a dynastic jostling, until nobles and clergy of the Orthodox Church elect Michael I tsar in 1613, founding the Romanov dynasty that will continue to 1917. That century the status of the muzhik, the Russian peasant, becomes entrenched in a rigid system of feudal serfdom. Serfs are tied to particular lands, whose owners wield extensive power over ‘their’ peasants. Serfs can be transferred to other estates, their personal property – and their family – retained by the original landowner.

The institution is bleak and tenacious. Serfdom endures in Russia well into the 1800s, lifetimes after Europe dispenses with it. Stories of grotesque abuse of peasants by landlords abound. ‘Modernisers’ see serfdom as a scandalous brake on progress: their ‘Slavophile’ opponents decry it as a Western invention. On the fact that it must go, both groups agree.

At last, in 1861, Alexander II, the ‘Tsar Liberator’, emancipates the serfs from their obligations to the landlord, their status as property. For all that reformers have long agonised over the serfs’ atrocious lot, it is not their softening hearts that drive this. It is anxiety at waves of peasant riots and rebellions, and it is the exigencies of development.

The country’s agriculture and its industry are stunted. The Crimean War of 1853–55 against England and France has exposed the old order: Russia stands humiliated. It seems clear that modernisation – liberalisation – is a necessity. And so are born Alexander’s ‘Great Reforms’, an overhaul of the army and schools and justice system, the relaxation of censorship, the granting of powers to local assemblies. Above all, the abolition of serfdom.

The emancipation is carefully limited. The serfs-turned-peasants do not receive all the land they formerly worked, and that which they do is saddled with grotesque ‘redemption’ debts. The average plot is too small for subsistence – famines recur – and it shrinks in size as the population grows. Peasants remain legally constrained, tied now to the village community – the commune, the mir – but poverty drives them to seasonal labour in construction, mining, industry and commerce legal and illegal. Thus they become imbricated with the country’s small but growing working class.

It is not only tsars who dream of kingdoms. Like all exhausted peoples, Russian peasants imagine utopias of rest. Belovode of the White Waters; Oponia at the edge of the world; the underground Land of Chud; the Golden Islands; Darya; Ignat; Nutland; the submerged city of Kitezh, immortal below the waters of Lake Svetloyar. Sometimes bemused explorers strike out physically for one or other of these magic territories, but peasants mostly try to reach them in other ways: in the late nineteenth century comes a wave of countryside revolt.

Informed by dissidents, writers like Alexander Herzen, Michael Bakunin, the trenchant Nikolai Chernyshevsky, this is the tradition of the narodniki, activists for the narod, the people. The narodniks in groups such as Zemlya i Volya, Land and Liberty, are mostly members of a new layer of self-identified, quasi-messianic purveyors of culture, of the Enlightenment – an intelligentsia that includes a growing proportion of commoners.

‘The man of the future in Russia’, says Alexander Herzen at the start of the 1850s, ‘is the peasant.’ Development being slow, with no meaningful liberal movement in sight, the narodniks look beyond the cities to rural revolution. In the Russian peasant commune, the mir, they see a glimmer, a foundation for an agrarian socialism. Dreaming their own better places, thousands of young radicals ‘go to the people’, to learn from, work with, raise the consciousnesses of a suspicious peasantry.

A chastening and bitter joke: they are arrested en masse, often at the request of those very peasants.

The conclusion that one activist, Andrei Zhelyabov, draws? ‘History is too slow.’ Some among the narodniks turn to more violent methods, so as to hasten it.

In 1878, Vera Zasulich, a radical young student of minor noble background, draws a revolver from her pocket and seriously wounds Fyodor Trepov, governor of St Petersburg, a man loathed by intellectuals and activists for ordering the flogging of a discourteous prisoner. In a sensational rebuke to the regime, Zasulich’s jury acquits her. She flees to Switzerland.

The next year, from a split in Zemlya i Volya, a new group, Narodnaya Volya – People’s Will – is born. It is more militant. Its cells believe in the necessity of revolutionary violence, and they are ready to act on their conviction. In 1881, after several failed attempts, they take their most coveted prize.

The first Sunday in March, Tsar Alexander II travels to St Petersburg’s grand riding academy. From the crowd the young Narodnaya Volya activist Nikolai Rysakov hurls a handkerchief-wrapped bomb at the bulletproof carriage. An explosion scorches the air. Amid the screams of wounded onlookers, the vehicle shudders to a halt. Alexander staggers out into the chaos. As he sways, Rysakov’s comrade Ignacy Hryniewiecki comes forward. He throws a second bomb. ‘It’s too early to thank God!’ he shouts.

There is another almighty blast. ‘Through the snow, debris and blood’, one of the tsar’s entourage will recall, ‘you could see fragments of clothing, epaulets, sabres and bloody chunks of human flesh.’ The ‘Tsar Liberator’ is ripped apart.

For the radicals, this is a pyrrhic victory. The new tsar, Alexander III, more conservative and no less authoritarian than his father, unleashes ferocious repression. He decimates People’s Will with a wave of executions. He reorganises the political police, the fierce and notorious Okhrana. In this climate of reaction comes a slew of the murderous organised riots known as pogroms against the Jews, a cruelly oppressed minority in Russia. They face heavy legal restrictions; are allowed residence only in the region known as the Pale of Settlement, in Ukraine, Poland, Russia’s west and elsewhere (though exemptions mean there are Jewish populations beyond that stretch); and they have long been the traditional scapegoats at times of national crisis (and indeed whenever). Now, many who are eager to blame them for something blame them for the death of the tsar.

The embattled narodniks plan more attacks. In March 1887, St Petersburg police break up a plot against the new tsar’s life. They hang five student ringleaders, including the son of a school inspector in the Volga region, a bright, committed young man called Alexander Ulyanov.

In 1901, seven years after the brutal and bullying Alexander III dies – of natural causes – and his dutiful son Nicholas II takes the throne, several narodnik groups merge, under a non-Marxist agrarian socialist programme (though some of its members consider themselves Marxists) focusing on those particularities of Russia’s development, and its peasantry. They anoint themselves the Socialist Revolutionary Party, henceforth better known as the SRs. They still hold with violent resistance: for a while yet, the SRs’ military wing, its ‘Combat Organisation’, does not flinch from a campaign of what even its advocates call ‘terrorism’, the assassination of government figures.

Given such commitment, there is irony to come. One of the party’s leaders, the extraordinary Evno Azef, leader of the Combat Organisation itself for some years, will within a decade be unmasked as a faithful Okhrana agent, in a hammer blow to the organisation. And a few years later, in the pivotal moments of the revolutionary year of 1917 itself, two more, Catherine Breshko-Breshkovskaya and its main theoretician Viktor Chernov, will be high-profile and anxious partisans of order.

In the final years of the nineteenth century, the state pours resources into its infrastructure and industry, including an immense programme of railway building. Great crews drag iron rails across the country, hammering them down, stitching the limits of the empire together. The Trans-Siberian Railway. ‘Since the Great Wall of China the world has seen no one material undertaking of equal magnitude,’ breathes Sir Henry Norman, a British observer. For Nicholas, the building of this transit route between Europe and East Asia is a ‘sacred duty’.

Russia’s urban population soars. Foreign capital flows in. Huge industries arise around St Petersburg, Moscow, the Donbass region in Ukraine. As thousands of new workers struggle to eke out livings in cavernous plants under desperate conditions, subject to the contemptuous paternalism of their bosses, the labour movement takes unsteady steps forward. In 1882, the young Georgy Plekhanov, later to be Russia’s leading socialist theorist, joins the legendary Vera Zasulich herself, the failed assassin of Trepov, to found Osvobozhdenie Truda, Liberation of Labour – the first Russian Marxist group.

In its wake come more reading circles, cells of agitators, gatherings of the variously like-minded, aghast at a world of ruthless, exploitative capital and the subordination of need to profit. The future for which the Marxists yearn, communism, is as absurd to their detractors as any peasant’s Belovode. It is rarely distinctly outlined, but they know it beckons beyond private property and its violence, beyond exploitation and alienation, to a world where technology reduces labour, the better for humanity to flourish. ‘The true realm of freedom’, in Marx’s words: ‘the development of human powers as an end in itself’. This is what they want.

The Marxists are a gaggle of émigrés, reprobates, scholars and workers, in a close weave of family, friendship and intellectual connections, political endeavour and polemic. They tangle in a fractious snarl. Everyone knows everyone.

In 1895, a Union of Struggle for the Liberation of the Working Class is formed in Moscow, Kiev, Ekaterinoslav, Ivanovo-Vosnessensk and St Petersburg. In the capital, the founders of the Union are two fervent young activists: Yuli Tsederbaum and his friend Vladimir Ulyanov, brother of Alexander Ulyanov, the narodnik student executed eight years before. Noms de politique are the norm: Tsederbaum, the younger of the two, a scrawny figure peering through pince-nez over a thin beard, calls himself Martov. Vladimir Ulyanov, a striking, prematurely balding man with distinctive narrow eyes, is known as Lenin.

Martov is twenty-two, a Russian Jew born in Constantinople. He is, in the words of one leftist sparring partner, ‘a rather charming type of bohemian … by predilection a haunter of cafés, indifferent to comfort, perpetually arguing and a bit of an eccentric’. Weak and bronchial, mercurial, talkative but a hopeless orator, not much better as an organiser, affecting, in these early days, a worker’s get-up, Martov is every inch the absent-minded intellectual. But he is a celebrated mind. And while certainly not above the sorts of sectarian machination typical of political hothouses, he is renowned, even among his adversaries, for integrity and sincerity. He is widely respected. Even loved.

As for Lenin, all who meet him are mesmerised. As often as not, it seems, they feel driven to write about him: libraries’ worth of such books exist. He is a man easily mythologised, idolised, demonised. To his enemies he is a cold, mass-murdering monster; to his worshippers, a godlike genius; to his comrades and friends, a shy, quick-laughing lover of children and cats. Capable of occasional verbal ogees and lumbering metaphors, he is a plain rather than a sparkling wordsmith. Yet he compels, even transfixes, in print and speech, by his sheer intensity and focus. Throughout his life, opponents and friends will excoriate him for the brutality of his takedowns, his flint and ruthlessness. All agree that his is a prodigious force of will. To an extent unusual even among that ilk who live and die for politics, Lenin’s blood and marrow are nothing else.

What particularly distinguishes him is his sense of the political moment, of fracture and traction. To his comrade Lunacharsky, he ‘raise[s] opportunism to the level of genius, by which I mean the kind of opportunism which can seize on the precise moment and which always knows how to exploit it for the unvarying objective of the revolution’.

Not that Lenin never makes mistakes. He has, however, an acutely developed sense of when and where to push, how, and how hard.

In 1898, a year after Lenin is banished to Siberia for his activities, the Marxists organise into the Rossiskaya Sotsial-Demokraticheskaya Rabochaya Partiya, the Russian Social-Democratic Workers Party (RSDWP). For several years, despite such periods of exile, Martov and Lenin remain close collaborators and friends. With characters so different, exasperations are inevitable, but they complement and like each other, a pair of Marxist Wunderkinder.

From Marx, whatever their divisions over other points, the RSDWP thinkers take a vision of history as necessarily proceeding through historical stages. Such ‘stageist’ conceptions can differ wildly in terms of detail, degree and rigidity – Marx himself opposed extrapolating h...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Halftitle Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Maps
• Introduction
• 1. The Prehistory of 1917
• 2. February: Joyful Tears
• 3. March: ‘In So Far As’
• 4. April: The Prodigal
• 5. May: Collaboration
• 6. June: A Context of Collapse
• 7. July: Hot Days
• 8. August: Exile and Conspiracy
• 9. September: Compromise and Its Discontents
• 10. Red October
• Epilogue: After October
• Glossary of Personal Names
• Further Reading
• Acknowledgements
• Index