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October: The Story of the Russian Revolution
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, Miéville reveals the Russian Revolution as a breathtaking story.
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Part of the Russian Revolution 1917 series
Reviews
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“Best Summer Books of 2017”
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“When one of the most marvellously original writers in the world takes on one of the most explosive events in history, the result can only be incendiary”
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“An intriguing march to revolution, told here with clarity and insight.”
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“Miéville is an ideal guide through this complex historical moment, giving agency to obscure and better-known participants alike, and depicting the revolution as both a tragically lost opportunity and an ongoing source of inspiration.”
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“Readers will be satisfied that October gives them the literary equivalent of bearing witness to world history.”
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“To give a new generation of readers a fresh account of the great revolution, incorporating all the post-1989 archival discoveries and scholarly research, is a singularly daunting task. To render it in vivid, oracular prose, moving across the pages with the gathering force of a hurricane, is something that only China Miéville could achieve.”
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“It’s as if John Reed, author of the classic piece of revolutionary journalism, Ten Days That Shook the World, woke from a decades-long sleep to tell the story of 1917 once again.”
Blog
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Revolutions: Great and Still and Silent
History and Revolution: Refuting Revisionism, edited by Mike Haynes and Jim Wolfreys and published by Verso in 2007, collects essays on the English, French, and Russian Revolutions and the body of revisionist historiography — developed or publicized by historians like François Furet, Simon Schama, Orlando Figes, and Conrad Russell — that dominated public conception of them during the high years of "the end of history."
"Revisionism generally shares a view of revolutions," the editors write, "as, to paraphrase George Taylor, political acts with social consequences rather than social acts with political consequences."The lasting achievement of revisionist historiography of the French Revolution has been to discredit the idea that the event brought about a change in France's social order. Against the "determinism" of social explanations of historical change, which focus on class antagonisms, revisionists emphasize the primacy of the political. Their tendency to see revolutions as narrow political events rather than broader social transformations means that extraordinary circumstances — war, famine, counter-revolution — figure little in explanations of why protagonists sometimes act in ways which would otherwise be considered extreme or intolerable. The focus on elite activity and the attempt to establish a causal link between ideas and events leaves little room for the active role played by groups who do not form part of the elite. Popular insurgencies, violence and insurrection are no longer integral to revolutionary change but an unnecessary distraction, or worse, a reactionary brake on modernization and peaceful reform.
In the book's final chapter, reprinted below, Daniel Bensaïd takes on some of the broader themes of the revisionist literature, picking up Marx's figure of the old mole to trace the persistence of revolution during even the most apparently static of times.
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BOO! It's China Miéville on Marxism and Halloween
In the spirit of Halloween, here's China Miéville celebrating the spooky holiday as a sanctified area of social relief against the wishes of the rural elite.
China Miéville introduces the quincentenary edition of Thomas More's Utopia, and in 2017 Verso will publish his distinctive narrative take on the events of 1917, October: The Story of the Russian Revolution, as part of our celebrations of the centenary of the Russian Revolution. Find out more here.
Upcoming Events
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May 02, 2017
London, United Kingdom
London Review Bookshop @ St George's Church
The Russian Revolution: Tariq Ali, China Miéville, Helen Rappaport and Alex von Tunzelmann
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May 03, 2017
Liverpool, United Kingdom
Liverpool: WoWFest
Revolution!
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May 04, 2017
Manchester, United Kingdom
Manchester: HOME
China Miéville: October