October: The Story of the Russian Revolution

by China Miéville

dvoevlastie – Dual Power.

adroit.

aplomb.

chiliastic

assiduous

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.

Lenin too, months later, argued in Rabochy i soldat that Kerensky’s rule was Bonapartism – but from him that was not a flattering description. He used the term much as Marx and Engels had, in a technical way, to describe ‘the manoeuvring of state power, which leans on the military clique … for support, between two hostile classes and forces which more or less balance each other out’. For Lenin, Kerensky’s degenerating Bonapartism was a balancing act between opposed social forces.

Savinkov was also an advocate of utterly ruthless measures against ill discipline – up to and including, it seems, military dictatorship.

‘The only person who can form a government at this time is Comrade Kerensky,’ said the Menshevik Vainshtein. If Kerensky and the government were to fall, ‘the revolutionary cause will be lost’. The Bolsheviks took the hardest line: that the Provisional Government in toto could not be trusted. They wanted the instigation of democracy in the army, the transfer of land to peasants, the eight-hour day, democratic control of industry and finance, and the devolution of power to revolutionary workers, peasants and soldiers. However. Having made their points, the Bolsheviks in the Soviet Executive Committee, more conciliatory than Lenin or their Vyborg comrades, did not tie up proceedings with a resolution. They kept their oppositionism trenchant but abstract.

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.

invidious

‘Anarchy essentially ruled over Petrograd,’ said K. I. Globachev. A former chief of the Okhrana, he had himself spent the days between February and August in the dark castle of Kresty jail, in punishment for that role. His observations, though, were fair. ‘Criminals multiplied to an unimaginable extent. Every day robberies and murders were committed not only at night, but also in broad daylight.’ The prisons could not hold the prisoners: due to the political upheavals, or the inadequacy of the guards, countless inmates simply walked out of jail to freedom. Globachev himself, fearful of how a secret policeman of the old regime would fare on the post-February streets, remained by choice behind Kresty’s walls. In Ostrogozhsk, a town in Voronezh, looters targeted an alcohol store over three violent days that culminated in a vast conflagration. When troops finally suppressed this apocalyptic nihilo-drunkenness, fifty-seven people were dead, twenty-six of them burned alive. The paper of the Right SRs, Volia naroda, editorialised about the growing anarchy with a terse, jittery, bullet-pointed list of ‘virtually, a period of civil war’. A mutiny in Orel … In Rostov the town hall is dynamited. In Tambov Governorate there are agrarian pogroms … Gangs of robbers on the roads in Pskov … Along the Volga, near Kamyshin, soldiers loot trains. How much worse, the paper wondered, could things get? It blamed Bolshevism.

Lenin felt sure the whole of Europe was growing ripe for revolution, towards which a full-scale Russian revolution would be a powerful shove. And he was very anxious – for good reason, and in this he was not alone – lest the government surrender Petrograd, the red capital, to the Germans. If they did so, Bolshevik chances, he said, would be ‘a hundred times less favourable’.

antediluvian

bowdlerised.

corral

Thus was born the Military Revolutionary Committee – Milrevcom, or the MRC. Trotsky would later characterise this vote in favour of the MRC as a ‘dry’, a ‘silent’ revolution, indispensable to the full revolution to come. The threat of Bolshevik insurrection was now openly discussed on all sides. Indeed, certain of their enemies invited it. ‘I would be prepared to offer prayers to produce this uprising,’ said Kerensky. ‘They will be utterly crushed.’ By contrast, many of the Bolsheviks themselves were more hesitant. The day after the Soviet meeting, a citywide party conference expressed clear reservations about an uprising before the Congress of Soviets. For its part, the CC had no formal position on such an action. Yet.

Their calls were for the inauguration of a ‘Committee of Public Safety’ to work with the Provisional Government in restoring order – and for a radical programme for land and peace. The

The cause for which the people have struggled – the immediate proposal of a democratic peace, the elimination of landlord estates, workers’ control over production, the creation of a soviet government – the triumph of this cause has been assured. Long live the workers’, soldiers’ and peasants’ revolution!

‘Oh, my love, now I know all your freedom; I know that it will come; but what will it be like?’ Nikolai Chernyshevsky, What Is to Be Done? i That strange book What Is to Be Done? casts a long shadow. In 1902, Lenin named his own seminal tract on leftist organisation after the novel of forty years previously.

Lenin’s health is failing. He suffers strokes in 1922 and 1923, and struggles in what has been called his ‘final fight’, against the bureaucratic tendencies, the ossification and corruption he sees growing. He grows suspicious of Stalin’s personality and his place within the machine. In his last writings, he insists Stalin be removed from his post as general secretary. His advice is not followed. Lenin dies in January 1924. The regime swifty launches a grotesque death cult, the most ostentatious element of which remains in place today: his corpse. A gnarled and ghastly relic, receiving obeisance from its catafalque.

‘The tempo must not be reduced!’ he announces in 1931. This is his first Five-Year Plan. ‘We are fifty or 100 years behind the advanced countries. We must make good this distance in ten years. Either we do it or they crush us.’ Thus is justified brutal industrialisation and collectivisation, a ruthless centralised control and command economy and political culture. Party activists are hounded in great numbers, forced to betray others, to confess to preposterous crimes with stentorian declarations. They are executed by this counterrevolution against their tradition, in that tradition’s name. Previous loyalty to Stalin is no defence: the long roll call of Bolsheviks put to death in the 1930s and after includes not only Trotsky and Bukharin, but Zinoviev, Kamenev, and countless others.

There have been a hundred years of crude, ahistorical, ignorant, bad-faith and opportunist attacks on October. Without echoing such sneers, we must nonetheless interrogate the revolution. The old regime was vile and violent, while Russian liberalism was weak, and quick to make common cause with reaction. All the same, did October lead inexorably to Stalin? It is an old question, but one still very much alive. Is the gulag the telos of 1917? That objective strains faced the new regime is clear. There are subjective factors, too, questions we must pose about decisions made.

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.

And though those moments are snuffed out, reversed, become bleak jokes and memories all too soon, it might have been otherwise. It might have been different, for these were only the first, most faltering steps. The revolutionaries want a new country in a new world, one they cannot see but believe they can build. And they believe that in so doing, the builders will also build themselves anew.

In 1924, even as the vice closes around the experiment, Trotsky writes that in the world he wants, in the communism of which he dreams – a pre-emptive rebuke to the ghastly regime of bones to come – ‘the forms of life will become dynamically dramatic. The average human type will rise to the heights o...

In 1937, Bruno Schulz opens his story ‘The Age of Genius’ with a dizzying rumination on ‘events that have no place of their own in time’, the possibility that ‘all the seats within time might have been sold’. Conductor, where are you? Don’t let’s get excited … Have you ever heard of parallel streams of time within a two-track time? Yes, there are such branch lines of time, somewhat illegal and suspect, but when, like us, one is burdened with contraband of supernumerary events that cannot be registered, one cannot be too fussy. Let us try to find at some point of history such a branch line, a blind track onto which to shunt these illegal events. There is nothing to fear.