October: The Story of the Russian Revolution

by China Miéville

Russia eyes the east, pushing into Asia, grasping at Turkestan and Pamir, as far as Korea: continuing work on the Trans-Siberian Railway, with China’s collaboration, puts it on a collision course with a similarly expansionist Japan. ‘We need’, says Minister of the Interior von Plehve, ‘a little victorious war to stem the tide of revolution.’ What better foil in a jingoist epic than a ‘lesser race’ such as the Japanese, whom Tsar Nicholas calls ‘monkeys’?

There is something almost Herculean about the tsar’s ability to refuse reality while his capital went up in flames, his police fled, his soldiers rebelled, and his officials, his own brother, implored him to do something, anything.

A constitutional monarchy? The mere insinuation provoked in Nicholas a kind of glazed satori of his own limits. This ‘was incomprehensible’ to him, he muttered. To come around to something like that, he said, he would have to be reborn.

‘Cabinet, appanage, monastery, church, and major estate owners’ lands must be surrendered to the people without compensation, for they were earned not by labour but by various amorous escapades,’

‘We are sick and tired of living in debt and slavery,’ the Rakalovsk peasants had their chairperson write. ‘We want space and light.’

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

In response to this invasion, some of the Soviet members, in Sukhanov’s exquisite formulation, ‘did not reveal a sufficient courage and self-restraint’. They cowered from those furiously insisting that they take power.

it is a curio of the moment that hard-left advocates of ‘all power to the soviets’ were delegated by a soviet opponent to defend the Soviet currently arguing furiously against taking the power they wanted it to take.

In came the Izmailovsky Guards, then the Preobrazhensky and Semenovsky Regiments. Their bands played the Marseillaise, and the Mensheviks and SRs sang along in delight. The Soviet had been saved, was safe to not take power.

that night, the cabinet issued warrants for the arrests of all the ‘organisers’ of the troubles, including Lenin, Zinoviev, Kamenev, Kollontai, and Lunacharsky. To which list Trotsky, with typical twinkling arrogance, would soon demand to be added, a request the government granted.

Kerensky struggled to make sense of what he was hearing. He had Lvov put Kornilov’s ‘demands’ in writing. Martial law; all authority including civil to devolve to the commander-in-chief; all ministers, including Kerensky, to resign. What Kornilov had thought was a discussion of possibilities now read as the declaration of a putsch.

At his headquarters, Kornilov exhaled mightily in relief. Kerensky, he thought, would now come to Mogilev, and submit to – even join – a government under him. Kerensky, meanwhile, believed ‘the definite decision’ which Kornilov had just validated was not just that he, Kerensky, should come to him, but that Kornilov would take dictatorial powers. That Kerensky had been given an ultimatum. That he was being dispensed with.

The previous day, the Conference had approved coalition, but rejected coalition with Kadets. Now they rejected coalition, while mooting political cooperation with the bourgeoisie, including Kadets. The proceedings were outdoing their own absurdity.

Just after 4 p.m., he was formally invested with power. Thus began the brief reign of Kishkin the dictator, all-powerful ruler of a clutch of palace rooms and a few outlying buildings.

‘A rising of the masses of the people requires no justification,’ he said. ‘What has happened is an insurrection, and not a conspiracy. We hardened the revolutionary energy of the Petersburg workers and soldiers. We openly forged the will of the masses for an insurrection, and not a conspiracy. The masses of the people followed our banner and our insurrection was victorious. And now we are told: renounce your victory, make concessions, compromise. With whom? I ask: with whom ought we to compromise? With those wretched groups which have left us or who are making this proposal? But after all we’ve had a full view of them. No one in Russia is with them any longer. A compromise is supposed to be made, as between two equal sides, by the millions of workers and peasants represented in this congress, whom they are ready, not for the first time or the last, to barter away as the bourgeoisie sees fit. No, here no compromise is possible. To those who have left and to those who tell us to do this we must say: you are miserable bankrupts, your role is played out. Go where you ought to go: into the dustbin of history!’

‘And we had thought’, he said, ‘that Martov at least would remain with us.’ ‘One day you will understand’, said Martov, his voice shaking, ‘the crime in which you are taking part.’

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.