October: The Story of the Russian Revolution

by China Miéville

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.

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.

‘Take power, you son of a bitch,’ he bellowed, in one of most famous phrases of 1917, ‘when it’s given to you!’

The revolution of 1917 is a revolution of trains. History proceeding in screams of cold metal. The tsar’s wheeled palace, shunted into sidings forever; Lenin’s sealed stateless carriage; Guchkov and Shulgin’s meandering abdication express; the trains criss-crossing Russia heavy with desperate deserters; the engine stoked by ‘Konstantin Ivanov’, Lenin in his wig, eagerly shovelling coal. And more and more will come: Trotsky’s armoured train, the Red Army’s propaganda trains, the troop carriers of the Civil War. Looming trains, trains hurtling through trees, out of the dark.