October: The Story of the Russian Revolution

by China Miéville

torquing

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’.

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?’

protracted,

crepuscularity

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’.

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’.

It is forced labour that lays those streets down, that drains the wetlands and raises columns in the quag.

One hundred thousand corpses lie beneath the city. St Petersburg will be known as ‘the city built on bones’.

Tsar Ivan IV, whom history calls the Terrible, slaughters his way into territories east and north until he becomes ‘Tsar of All Russias’,

Orthodox Church elect Michael I tsar in 1613, founding the Romanov dynasty that will continue to 1917.

muzhik, the Russian peasant,

narodniki, activists for the narod, the people.

Zemlya i Volya, Land and Liberty,

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 ...

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 failed attempts, they take their most coveted prize.

epaulets,

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.

Jewish persecution, like in fiddler on the roof

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.

As thousands of new workers struggle to eke out livings in cavernous plants under desperate conditions, subject to the contemptuous paternalism of their bosses, the labour movement takes unsteady steps forward. In 1882, the young Grigory Plekhanov, later to be Russia’s leading socialist theorist, joins the legendary Vera Zasulich herself, the failed assassin of Trepov, to found Osvobozhdenie truda, Liberation of Labour – the first Russian Marxist group.

‘The true realm of freedom’, in Marx’s words: ‘the development of human powers as an end in itself’. This is what they want.

Vladimir Ulyanov, brother of Alexander Ulyanov, the narodnik student executed eight years before. Noms de politique are the norm: Tsederbaum, the younger of the two, a scrawny figure peering through pince-nez over a thin beard, calls himself Martov. Vladimir Ulyanov, a striking, prematurely balding man with distinctive narrow eyes, is known as Lenin.

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. Capable of occasional verbal ogees and lumbering metaphors, he is a plain rather than a sparkling wordsmith.

There are pics of him posing with his cat

his sense of the political moment, of fracture and traction.

It is mid-morning as the marchers approach. Cossacks draw their sabres and gallop at them. The crowd scatters in confusion. The tsar’s forces face them down. The people do not disperse. The troops raise their guns and begin to fire. The Cossacks flail nagaikas, their vicious whips. Gore melts the frost. The desperate people scream and slip and fall. When the carnage comes to an end, as many as 1,500 people lie dead in the drifts. This is Bloody Sunday.

Warsaw. In May, a mutiny over spoiled meat shakes the battleship Knaz-Potemkin. Further revolts come in November, in Kronstadt and Sebastopol.

The regime is frantic. It experiments with combinations of concession and repression. And the revolution provokes not only bloody official crackdowns, but the traditional ultra-right sadism quasi-sanctioned by the

For thirty-six hours, marauding bands, untroubled by the police and blessed by Orthodox bishops, practised butchery. Jewish adults and children were tortured, raped, mutilated, killed. The tongue of a toddler was cut out. Murderers emptied out the disembowelled bodies of their victims and stuffed them with feathers.

Forty-one people died, almost 500 were wounded, and, a journalist observed, most Gentile citizens expressed ‘neither regret nor remorse’. Amid the anguish, many claimed that the Kishinev Jews had not resisted hard enough.

This supposed ‘shame of passivity’ provoked soul-searching among Jewish radicals. So now, in April 1905, when the Ukrainian Jews of Zhitomir get word of an impending attack, the response is defiant: ‘We will show that Zhitomir is not Kishinev.’ And when, indeed, they fight back against the murderers, limiting damage and death, the Zhitomir defenders inspire the Jewish Bund to decla...

Prominent in the Zhitomir attack were the Black Hundreds, an umbrella name for various cells of proto-fascist ultra-reactionaries, which sprang up out of authoritarian outrage at the 1905 revolution. They are apt to sprinkle a few populist calls, such as for land redistribution, atop fervour for an autocratic tsar – Nicholas II is...

sect known as the Ioannity – spice their race-hate with ecstatic religiosity, directing the enthusiasms of Orthodoxy against ‘Christ-killers’, fever dreams of blood-drinking Jews, icons and eschatology and mysticism in the service of depravity. In October the Black Hundreds commit mass murder in the cosmopolitan city of Odessa, butchering more than 400 Jews. In the Siberian city of Tomsk, they stop up all entrances to a building where a meeting is taking place, set it alight and gleefully burn their scores of victims alive. They throw petrol on the flames. A teenage boy, Naum Gabo, escapes with minutes to spare to witness the depredation. Years later, an elderly man, by then a leading sculptor of his generation, he will write, ‘I do not know if I can convey in words the horror that oppressed me and seized my soul.’ This is the Black Hundreds’ carnival, but they will continue with the work for years. And while reaction is on its violent march, the tsar still flounders, groping for compromise. In August 1905 he announces a consultative parliament, a Duma. But its complex franchise favours the rich: the masses remain unappeased. The Treaty of Portsmouth ends the Russo-Japanese War, and is merciful to Russia, given the circumstances. Nevertheless, the state’s authority has been crushed abroad and at home, among all classes. Insurgency has strange triggers. In Moscow, October 1905, a matter of punctuation sparks the final act of the revolutionary year. Moscow printworkers are r...

It sets strike dates, controls telegraphs, considers public petitions, issues appeals. Its leader is the well-known young revolutionary Lev Bronstein, known to history as Leon Trotsky.

A revolutionary by the age of seventeen, a brief narodnik flirtation took him to Marxism, and in and out of prison. The name Trotsky was borrowed from a jailer in Odessa in 1902. Once considered ‘Lenin’s cudgel’, he sided with the Mensheviks at the contentious 1903 congress, though he soon broke with them. During these, his ‘non-factional’ years, he and Lenin repeatedly exchange ill-tempered polemics on various issues.

‘A worker should not endure a blow from a bourgeois,’ he shouts. ‘ “You hit me? – There, take one back.” ’ On the other hand there is the disgust one activist, Shapovalov, feels at his own impulse to cower, to avoid meeting his boss’s gaze. ‘It was as if two men were living inside of me: one who for the sake of the struggle for a better future for the workers was not afraid of sitting in the [jail of the] Peter and Paul Fortress and in Siberian exile: and another who had not fully liberated himself from the feeling of dependence and even fear.’ In reaction to such ‘slavish feelings’, he nurses a furious honour. ‘I came to hate capitalism and my boss … even more intensely.’

invective.

The German offensive comes in the spring of 1915. Under the barrage Russia loses significant amounts of territory, almost a million soldiers are captured, and more than 1,400,000 killed. The scale of the cataclysm is giddying. Ultimately the war will cost Russia between 2 and 3 million lives – perhaps more.

erstwhile

aide-de-camp,

soi-disant

Rasputin, the so-called mad monk who is neither mad nor a monk, established himself at the heart of the court – where he remains.

He is a man of rude but substantial charisma. Possibly a member of the Khlysty, one of Russia’s many outlawed sects, he certainly emanates a vatic intensity reminiscent of its practices. He represents himself both as the voice of old, simple, royalist Russia, and as a seer, a prophet, a healer. Nicholas tolerates him; Alexandra adores him.

treating his wealthy patrons, especially women, with eroticised discourtesy.

encouraging him to make military decisions based on Rasputin’s ‘visions’. She gives him Rasputin’s comb to brush through his hair before meeting ministers, so that Rasputin’s wisdom may guide him. He obeys. She sends him crumbs from Rasputin’s bread. He eats them.

While ‘Yankee Doodle’ plays repeatedly on a gramophone, Rasputin lounges in his smartest clothes in a dim, arched room, eating the cyanide-laced chocolates and drinking the poisoned Madeira his host has provided.

People flock to the spot where the so-called mad monk died. They bottle the water, as if it were an elixir.

The right are delighted, hoping Alexandra will now repair to an asylum, and that Nicholas will magically gain a resolve he has never had. But Rasputin, colourful as he was, was only ever a morbid symptom. His murder is not a palace coup. It is not a coup at all.

grandiloquent

There is an old Scottish term for a particular technique of industrial resistance, a go-slow or a sabotage by surplus obedience, making the letter of the rules undermine their spirit: the ca’canny.

the Duma