October: The Story of the Russian Revolution

by China Miéville

Isn’t this after the feudal system ended or was ending in Europe?

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.

At last, in 1861, Alexander II, the ‘Tsar Liberator’, emancipates the serfs from their obligations to the landlord, their status as property.

how does a movement go about being socialist in an unripe country with a weak and marginal capitalism, a vast and ‘backward’ peasantry, and a monarchy that has not had the decency to undergo its bourgeois revolution?

What fundamentally underlies the membership dispute – in winding, mediated fashion, and far from clearly, even to Lenin – are divergent approaches to political consciousness, to campaigning, to working-class composition and agency, ultimately to history and to Russian capitalism itself.

Nothing seems to stir behind those placid tsarry eyes.

I see what you did there…