October: The Story of the Russian Revolution

by China Miéville

Only two years previously, the Bessarabian city of Kishinev suffered the first pogrom of the twentieth century. 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 declare that ‘the times of Kishinev have gone forever’.

The travellers were six members of the Bund, three followers of Trotsky and nineteen Bolsheviks. A gathering of revolutionary heavyweights, including Lenin and Krupskaya; Zinoviev, the intelligent, hard-working, tousled-haired man viewed as Lenin’s henchman; Zlata Lilina, Bolshevik activist and the mother of Zinoviev’s young son Stefan; and the remarkable, controversial Polish revolutionary Karl Radek. Here too was Inessa Armand, the French-Russian communist, feminist, writer and musician, Lenin’s close collaborator and comrade, with whom, rumours have long suggested, his relationship was at various points more than platonic.

It was dusk when they stumbled down the swaying gangplank into Sweden’s southernmost town of Trelleborg. Their journey had become news, and journalists trailed them. The mayor of Stockholm welcomed the party before it continued on to the Swedish capital, where Lenin went shopping for books, scorning his comrades’ pleas that he buy new clothes, and found time to attend a meeting of Russian leftists.

Nadezhda Lokhvitskaya, aka ‘Teffi’, quipped, ‘If Lenin were to talk about a meeting at which he, Zinoviev, Kamenev and five horses were present, he would say: “There were eight of us”’ – and it does not have a good record of acknowledging its failures.

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.

Zurich earlier that year, trying to convert the Romanian poet Valeriu Marcu to revolutionary defeatism, Lenin had coaxed him with what would become a famous phrase. ‘One must always’, he said, ‘try to be as radical as reality itself.’ And what is a radicalism that does not surprise?

But now it endorsed Trotsky’s decision to send guards to the Trud press, because ‘the Soviet of Workers’ and Soldiers’ Deputies cannot tolerate suppression of the free word’.

Ironically so.

The revolutionaries had agreed that the final assault on the Winter Palace would begin when his men raised a lighted red lantern on the fortress flagpole – and no one, it had transpired, had such a lantern. Hunting for one throughout the dark grounds of Peter and Paul, Blagonravov promptly fell into a mud-pit. When, dirty and sodden, he finally found a suitable light and hared back to raise it, he discovered, nearly out of his mind with frustration, that ‘it proved extremely difficult to fix it on the flagpole’. It was not until 9:40 p.m., almost ten hours after the original deadline, that he overcame these obstacles and was at last able to signal the Aurora to fire.

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 of an Aristotle, a Goethe, or a Marx. And above this ridge new peaks will rise’.

The revolution of 1917 is a revolution of trains. History proceeding in screams of cold metal. The tsar’s wheeled palace, shunted into sidings forever; Lenin’s sealed stateless carriage; Guchkov and Shulgin’s meandering abdication express; the trains criss-crossing Russia heavy with desperate deserters; the engine stoked by ‘Konstantin Ivanov’, Lenin in his wig, eagerly shovelling coal. And more and more will come: Trotsky’s armoured train, the Red Army’s propaganda trains, the troop carriers of the Civil War.