October: The Story of the Russian Revolution

by China Miéville

Nothing seems to stir behind those placid tsarry eyes.

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The revolution and its language seduced him: ‘Tough sandpaper has polished all our words.’

Under Lvov, with pressure from the Soviet, the Provisional Government pursued social measures apace. On 12 March, it abolished the death penalty. The following day, it got rid of courts martial, except at the front. On 20 March, it eradicated legal discrimination on grounds of faith or nationality.

Demonstrations voiced existential demands, even at the expense of income. ‘No tips taken here’, said the signs on restaurant walls. Petrograd waiters struck for dignity. They marched in their best clothes under banners denouncing the ‘indignity’ of tipping, the stench of noblesse oblige. They demanded ‘respect for waiters as human beings’.

On 21 March, the German Embassy accepted his terms. Courtesy of the Reich, Lenin and several other revolutionaries were headed home.

Why was the German embassy interested in returning Lenin to Russia?

Not only did they flout laws and intimidate the authorities wherever they possibly could, there were also direct acts of violence. The state flour trader who did not want to offer them his goods at discounted price was beaten by a band of soldiers’ wives, and the pristav, the local police chief, who wanted to hurry to his help, escaped the same fate by a hair’s breadth.

Police without guns

The left’s typical method has been to brazen out errors; then, as long as possible after any dust has settled, remark en passant that ‘of course’, everyone knows ‘mistakes were made’, back in the mists of time.

A big worker pushed his way through and came up close and shook his fist in Chernov’s face. ‘Take power, you son of a bitch,’ he bellowed, in one of most famous phrases of 1917, ‘when it’s given to you!’

With them, too, was a front-line bicycle brigade: the idea of such soldiers was not then faintly comic, as now, but evocative of speed and modernity, and all major powers were experimenting with the bicycle, what one approving British brigade major called ‘this, the youngest, excrescence’ of the military.

The text closes with a legendary truncation: ‘It is more pleasant and useful to go through the experience of the revolution than to write about it.’

The country was polarising not only between right and left, but between the politicised and the disengaged. Hence, perhaps counter-intuitively, as social tensions increased, the numbers voting in elections for the countless local bodies were declining. In Moscow in June, for example, 640,000 ballots were cast in municipal elections: now, three months later, there were only 380,000. And those who did vote gravitated to harder positions: the Kadet share grew from 17.2 to 31.5 per cent; the Bolsheviks soared from 11.7 to 49.5 per cent. And the moderates plummeted. The Mensheviks went from 12.2 to 4.2 per cent, and SRs from 58.9 to 14.7 per cent.

‘We demand to pass!’ Shreider and Prokopovich shouted. ‘We are going to the Winter Palace!’ A sailor, bemused, refused to let them through. ‘Shoot us if you want to!’ the marchers challenged. ‘We are ready to die, if you have the heart to fire on Russians and comrades … We bare our breasts to your guns!’ The peculiar standoff continued. The left refused to shoot, the right demanded their right to pass and/or be shot. ‘What will you do?’ yelled someone at the sailor who doggedly refused to murder him. John Reed’s eyewitness account of what happened next is famous. ‘Another sailor came up, very much irritated. “We will spank you!” he cried energetically. “And if necessary we will shoot you too. Go home now, and leave us in peace.”’

The Allies pour troops into Russia, screwing down an embargo, stopping food from reaching the starving population of Soviet Russia. And they funnel funds to the Whites, no matter how unsavoury – supporting a dictatorship under Alexander Kolchak, and regarding Grigory Semenov, whose Cossack forces unleash a reign of terror in Siberia, as, in the words of one American observer, ‘tolerably severe’. The fractious, squabbling Whites, however, for all their funding, for all the Allies’ support, are unable to win militarily or to gain popular backing, due to their opposition to any concessions for the Russian peasantry or restive national minorities – and to their barbarism. Their troops engage in indiscriminate butchery, burning villages and killing some 150,000 Jews in enthusiastic pogroms, performing exemplary torture – mass flogging, burial alive, mutilation, dragging prisoners behind horses – and summary execution. Their instructions to take no prisoners are often graphically explicit.

Other agents carry out their work with anguish. One may feel sceptical, even disgusted, at the notion of an attempt, under desperate necessity, at an ‘ethical’ terror, a terror as limited as possible, but the testimonials of agents tormented at what they believed they had no choice but to do are powerful. ‘I have spilt so much blood I no longer have any right to live,’ says a drunken and distraught Dzherzhinsky at the end of 1918. ‘You must shoot me now,’ he begs. One unlikely source, Major General William Graves, who commanded US forces in Siberia, considers himself ‘well on the side of safety when I say that the anti-Bolsheviks killed one hundred people in Eastern Siberia, to every one killed by the Bolsheviks’. Many of the Soviet regime’s leaders struggle to restrain the degrading tendencies of their own Terror, of which they are horribly aware. In 1918, a Cheka newspaper notoriously calls for torture: the CC excoriates the editors and closes it down, and the Soviet renews its condemnation of any such practice. But without question a political and moral rot is setting in.

At the Fourteenth Party Congress, in 1924, against the protests of Trotsky and others, the party performs a giddying about-face. Now it officially accepts Stalin’s claim that ‘in general the victory of socialism (not in the sense of final victory) is unconditionally possible in one country’.

We see a similar curdling tendency in the depiction, at various times by various Bolsheviks, of the dreadful necessities of ‘War Communism’ as desiderata, communist principles, or of censorship, even after the Civil War, as an expression of anything other than weakness. We see it in the presentation of one-person management as part and parcel of socialist transformation. And in the traducing and misrepresentation of opponents; in what, for example, Serge calls the ‘atrocious lie’ according to which the 1921 uprising of Kronstadt sailors against the regime was a White attack, a slander justified (though not by him) as ‘necessary for the benefit of the people’. Nor, considering the aftermath of that revolt, should we gloss over what Mike Haynes – a historian sympathetic to the Bolsheviks – chillingly calls their ‘inability to resist executions

October, for an instant, brings a new kind of power. Fleetingly, there is a shift towards workers’ control of production and the rights of peasants to the land. Equal rights for men and women in work and in marriage, the right to divorce, maternity support. The decriminalisation of homosexuality, 100 years ago. Moves towards national self-determination. Free and universal education, the expansion of literacy. And with literacy comes a cultural explosion, a thirst to learn, the mushrooming of universities and lecture series and adult schools. A change in the soul, as Lunacharsky might put it, as much as in the factory. And though those moments are snuffed out, reversed, become bleak jokes and memories all too soon, it might have been otherwise.

By the Forest Shacks are the points, the switches onto hidden tracks through wilder history. The question for history is not only who should be driving the engine, but where. The Prokopoviches have something to fear, and they police these suspect, illegal branch lines, all the while insisting they do not exist. Onto such tracks the revolutionaries divert their train, with its contraband cargo, unregisterable, supernumerary, powering for a horizon, an edge as far away as ever and yet careering closer. Or so it looks from the liberated train, in liberty’s dim light.