bloodygranuaile | "We will spank you! And if necessary, we will shoot you too."

This year is the 100th anniversary of the Russian Revolution — both of them; the one in February and the one in October. While I still have a hefty reading list backed up from last year's binge on Easter Rising-related stuff, I really can't let a good revolutionary centenary go to waste. So I was pretty stoked when Boston DSA — along with probably half the DSA chapters in the country — organized a reading group for China Miéville's October, his new nonfiction book from Verso Books that details months from the February to the October revolutions.

Miéville is better known as "weird fiction" spec fic writer; the only other book of his I've read is The City and the City, a noir murder mystery detective kind of thing that is not at all about Northern Ireland, but looking through the rest of his oeuvre I think this is something I should fix, and possibly even prioritize fixing.

October is broken down month by month, with a prologue and a "before February 1917" chapter that do an impressive job of covering an enormous amount of ground in a short space while remaining quite accessible, and an "epilogue" that basically poses the question, "And then it all went to shit, but did it have to go to shit?" which is really the only question available to ask when you look at the mismatch between the empowering ideals of the revolutionaries and the brutally repressive police state that was actually built.

Miéville doesn't make anything up; all the dialogue in the book is things that have actually been recorded, with the result that there's not a whole lot of dialogue. What dialogue there is is exceptionally well chosen, however; even with the little bit of stiltedness that comes from being translated out of hundred-year-old Russian, the quotes that pop up manage to get bring people's personalities across the years and right up into your face. Some of them are also hilarious.

Because there's so much to cover and so many people involved, many of whom have multiple names, it's easy to get a bit lost in the enormous cast. To remedy this, there's an appendix of important figures in the back, which is exactly the kind of useful feature that I hate using. Even more complex is the rapidly shifting political alliances and the periodic realignments of what's considered left and what's considered right, so you wind up with factions being referred to as things like "left-left" and "right-left" and then I give up. I can't even follow all this splintery nonsense among leftist groups now. The upside of this is that it's hilariously familiar to anyone even a little involved in leftist organizing or who has been peripheral to and thus witnessed leftist organizing. Oh, leftists. Haven't changed in a hundred years. Even some of the fashions are coming 'round again.

What really does come through wonderfully, largely due to Miéville's novelistic touch and his willingness to ditch pretensions of academic objectivity and judge his characters ("Vladimor Nikolaivich Lvov — not to be confused with the ex-premier — was a dunderheaded Muscovite busybody, an ingenuous ruling-class Pooter" [p. 214]), is what an absurdly human endeavor the revolution was. We tend to think of revolutions as very serious things, which they are, and as either noble or terrifying or both (depending on how much we sympathize with the revolutionaries), which they are as well. But revolutions are committed by humans and humans are messy absurd creatures, prone to missteps and miscommunications and general egotism, and coming up with a new government from scratch is the sort of project management challenge from hell that seems to bring to the forefront every type of possible human dysfunction. A modern aspirational-class reader, raised under the cult of productivity that evaluates all leisure time by how it adds efficiency to non-leisure time and who judges other people primarily by how in one's way they are, just might spend most of the book getting exasperated with various historical figures for failing to get over themselves and do something useful. Yes, in a book with two revolutions. It's because the revolutions come about when the people in charge pass up every discernible chance to fix things and avoid them.

Patient Zero and the Platonic ideal of willfully denialist inefficiency is of course His Majesty Tsar Nicholas Romanov, a nice enough dude as long as you literally never need anything in the country to get done at all, which is, unfortunately, not really how countries work. He spends the first few chapters steadfastly refusing to acknowledge or try to solve any problems, even in the face of the aristocrats and bourgeois liberals in the Duma begging him to let them make real reforms, because things were bad enough that basically everyone except the tsar knew it. He is still in denial as the worker's soviets are taking over the government buildings in St. Petersburg; he is off on a train somewhere else, and reacts to the telegram he receives about the revolution by saying "That fat Rodzianko has written me some nonsense," and refusing to reply to it. Truly a brilliant move.

Once the tsar is dispatched, what follows is eight months of factions playing hot potato with power. Most of the socialist groups are religiously committed to a "stageist" version of Marxist theory where there has to be a bourgeois/capitalist/liberal democratic revolution before capitalism collapses and there's a socialist one; as such, the Council of Soviets spends a lot of time trying to push the Provisional Government, basically made up of what had been the Duma, to take power, as long as they don't use that power to do anything the soviets don't like; the Duma really doesn't want be responsible for whatever's going on and they certainly don't want to pretend to be responsible but have everything they decide vetoed by the Council of Soviets. Nobody's supposed to be in both bodies but an exception is made for a popular lawyer named Alexander Kerensky, who is basically a rock star, up until he isn't. Various compromises are almost reached, with wrenches being thrown into them at the last minute — first by Lenin swanning in on his train at the end of March/beginning of April and immediately haranguing all his comrades that they're doing it wrong and what's this crap they're publishing in Pravda and how dare they collaborate with parties that weren't getting them out of the war; later, in May, on the day the Second Provisional government was born, Trotsky shows up from his exile in Siberia and immediately excoriates its existence and calls for the transfer of all power to the Soviets; eventually, Lenin's party members get so sick of him sending in criticisms of everything they're doing from where he's hiding out in Finland that they start sitting on his writings for weeks until they're outdated before they publish them (I laughed and laughed, I admit). There's at least one street revolt that happens completely off-schedule, which is unsurprising since there's an ongoing comedy of errors in the middle of the book of the Bolshevik party trying to pretend it's keeping ahead of developments when really it's not. Lenin erroneously dismisses the existence of a right-wing conspiracy that fortunately failed because the right wing just failed at organizing, which seems ironic in hindsight because pretty much every revolutionary leader since has seen counterrevolution around every corner, and here there really was one and Lenin was playing the I'm Too Reasonable To Fall For That Conspiracy Crap game. The various weak provisional governments all fail to pull out of the war, which is going increasingly badly, allowing the Bolsheviks — a pretty minor party when this all started — to become the largest socialist party and eventually to just sort of walk in and take over the government, arresting what by that point was basically a handful of ministers huddled around the one working phone left in the palace and the guy they had elected Dictator Of This Room for a few hours.

The real stars of the show here, though, are Russian workers, whether they're doing awesome things like participating in nationwide sympathy strikes with a print shop in Moscow that wanted to be paid for punctuation and not just per letter (as an editor, I took outsize joy in this tidbit, because punctuation is important, and if Russian punctuation is anything like English punctuation, it's also a bitch to get right) or slightly less awesome things like engaging in random acts of street violence. All the endless meetings and writing of pamphlets are important, but the people are not always manipulated as easily and in as orderly a fashion as the various factions of organizers would have liked. The thing that really helped recruit for the Bolsheviks, in addition to their antiwar message, was that they advocated skipping over all this stageist crap and giving power directly to the workers who had just had a freakin' revolution to take it. This was both more straightforward and more satisfying to normal people who had jobs and a limited amount of time and energy to spend educating themselves on Marxist theory all day and just wanted to be in control of their own lives. There's some important lessons on political messaging in there, perhaps.

Reading this in discussion group with a bunch of socialists, many of whom are much better versed in Russian history than I am, was definitely a rewarding way to go about it, even though I wussed out of the May-June-July meeting due to feeling under the weather (which was, in addition, crappy that day). It's a pretty accessible book for newbies, but it was also fun to have all the random additional stuff filled in and more book recommendations given. I regret missing the session that I did miss, especially because so much fun stuff went down in July. But overall I recommend the book highly to folks that are interested in history but not necessarily interested in arguments over obscure points of Marxist theory that ineffectual Communist groupuscules with seventeen members are still mad about but nobody else is. The important thing is that someone should make a biopic of Maria Spiridonova, I mean, honestly, how is this not a thing already? (Don't answer that; I know full well it's because Hollywood hates awesome women.)

I definitely feel on more solid ground with this very short but important period in history now, so I will hopefully be less lost when (and if) I get around to reading all the other Russian Revolution-related things being published all year. That said, I could just as equally stand to read the thing a second time, since I'm pretty sure I've got a lot of things mixed up in my head due to my refusal to use the character directory or look at timelines.