October: The Story of the Russian Revolution Read online

  October

  First published by Verso 2017

  © China Miéville 2017

  Illustrations supplied by Press Association Images, with the exception of

  the pictures of Maria Spiridonova, Baku, and the Aurora, which came from

  Alamy, and the picture of the Red Guard, supplied by the author.

  All rights reserved

  The moral rights of the author have been asserted

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  Verso

  UK: 6 Meard Street, London W1F 0EG

  US: 20 Jay Street, Suite 1010, Brooklyn, NY 11201

  versobooks.com

  Verso is the imprint of New Left Books

  ISBN-13: 978-1-78478-277-1

  ISBN-13: 978-1-78663-450-4 (EXPORT)

  ISBN-13: 978-1-78478-279-5 (US EBK)

  ISBN-13: 978-1-78478-280-1 (UK EBK)

  British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

  A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Miéville, China, author.

  Title: October : the story of the Russian Revolution / China Mieville.

  Description: London ; Brooklyn, NY : Verso, 2017.

  Identifiers: LCCN 2016051217 | ISBN 9781784782771 (hardback)

  Subjects: LCSH: Soviet Union – History – Revolution, 1917–1921. | BISAC:

  HISTORY / Europe / Russia & the Former Soviet Union. | HISTORY /

  Revolutionary.

  Classification: LCC DK265 .M475 2017 | DDC 947.084/1 – dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016051217

  Typeset in Fournier by MJ & N Gavan, Truro, Cornwall

  Printed in the UK by CPI Mackays

  To Gurru

  ‘………………………………

  ………………………………’

  Nikolai Chernyshevsky,

  What Is to Be Done?

  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

  Introduction

  Midway through the First World War, as Europe shuddered and bled, an American publisher released Alexander Kornilov’s acclaimed Modern Russian History. Kornilov, a liberal Russian intellectual and politician, concluded his narrative in 1890, but for this 1917 English-language edition, his translator, Alexander Kaun, brought the story up to date. Kaun’s final paragraph opens with minatory words: ‘One need not be a prophet to foretell that the present order of things will have to disappear.’

  That order disappeared, spectacularly, as those words appeared. In the course of that violent and incomparable year, Russia was rocked and wracked by not one but two insurrections, two confused, liberatory upheavals, two reconfigurings. The first, in February, dispensed breakneck with a half-millennium of autocratic rule. The second, in October, was vastly more far-reaching, contested, ultimately tragic and ultimately inspiring.

  The months from February to October were a continuous jostling process, a torquing of history. What happened and the meaning of what happened remain overwhelmingly controversial. February and, above all, October have long been prisms through which the politics of freedom are viewed.

  It has become a ritual of historical writing to disavow any chimerical ‘objectivity’, a disinterest to which no writer can or should want to cleave. I duly perform that caveat here: though not, I hope, dogmatic or uncritical, I am partisan. In the story that follows, I have my villains and my heroes. But, while I do not pretend to be neutral, I have striven to be fair, and I hope readers of various political hues will find value in this telling.

  There are already many works on the Russian Revolution, and a good number of them are excellent. Though carefully researched – no event or spoken word described here is not recorded in the histories – this book does not attempt to be exhaustive, scholarly or specialist. It is, rather, a short introduction for those curious about an astonishing story, eager to be caught up in the revolution’s rhythms. Because here it is precisely as a story that I have tried to tell it. The year 1917 was an epic, a concatenation of adventures, hopes, betrayals, unlikely coincidences, war and intrigue; of bravery and cowardice and foolishness, farce, derring-do, tragedy; of epochal ambitions and change, of glaring lights, steel, shadows; of tracks and trains.

  There is something in the Russia-ness of Russia that often seems to intoxicate. Again and again, discussions of the country’s history, particularly those of non-Russians but sometimes those of Russians themselves, veer into romanticised essentialism, evocations of some supposed irreducible, ineffable Russian Spirit, with a black box at its heart. Not only uniquely sad but uniquely inscrutable, evasive of explanation: mnogostradalnaya, much-suffering Russia; Little Mother Russia. The Russia where, as Virginia Woolf puts it in her most dreamlike book, Orlando, ‘the sunsets are longer, the dawns less sudden and sentences are often left unfinished from doubt as how to best end them’.

  This cannot stand. That there are Russian specifics to the story is hardly in doubt; that they explain the revolution, let alone explain it away, is. The story must honour those specificities without losing sight of the general: the world-historic causes and ramifications of the upheaval.

  The poet Osip Mandelstam, in a poem that goes by various names, a celebrated first-anniversary commemoration of the start of 1917, speaks of ‘liberty’s dim light’. The word he uses, sumerki, usually portends twilight, but it may also refer to the darkness before dawn. Does he honour, his translator Boris Dralyuk wonders, ‘liberty’s fading light, or its first faint glimmer?’

  Perhaps the glow at the horizon is neither of longer sunsets nor less sudden dawns, but is rather a protracted, constitutive ambiguity. Such crepuscularity we have all known, and will all know again. Such strange light is not only Russia’s.

  This was Russia’s revolution, certainly, but it belonged and belongs to others, too. It could be ours. If its sentences are still unfinished, it is up to us to finish them.

  A Note on Dates

  For the student of the Russian Revolution, time is literally out of joint. Until 1918, Russia used the Julian calendar, running thirteen days behind the modern Gregorian. As the story of actors immersed in their moment, this book follows the Julian, the one they used at the time. In some of the literature one might read that the Winter Palace was stormed on 5 November 1917. But those doing the storming did so on the 26th of their October, and it is their October that is a clarion, more than a mere month. Whatever the Gregorian calendar might claim, this book is written in October’s shadow.

  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 drives 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, chief of the St Petersburg police, 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 fai
led 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 Ryasov 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, Ryasov’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.