October: The Story of the Russian Revolution

by China Miéville

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’.