October Quotes

“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. Looming trains, trains hurtling through trees, out of the dark. Revolutions, Marx said, are the locomotives of history. ‘Put the locomotive into top gear’, Lenin exhorted himself in a private note, scant weeks after October, ‘and keep it on the rails.’ But how could you keep it there if there really was only one true way, one line, and it is blocked? ‘I have gone where you did not want me to go.’ In”
― China Miéville, October: The Story of the Russian Revolution

“The poet Osip Mandelstam, in a poem that goes by various names, a celebrated first-anniversary commemoration of the start of 1917, speaks of 'liberty's dim light'. The word he uses, '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?'

Perhaps the glow at the horizon is neither of longer sunsets nor less sudden dawns, but is rather a protracted, constitutive ambiguity. Such crepuscularity we have all known, and will all know again. Such strange light is not only Russia's.”
― China Miéville, October: The Story of the Russian Revolution

“In August 1914, the name of St Petersburg itself is changed to the more Slavonic Petrograd: in semiotic rebellion against this idiocy, the local Bolsheviks continue to style themselves the 'Petersburg Committee'.”
― China Miéville, October: The Story of the Russian Revolution

“the actions of village communes against landlords were often scrupulously articulated in terms of a moral economy of justice. Sometimes this entailed the presentation of their demands in quasi-legal form, through manifestos and declarations formulated by sympathetic local intellectuals, or in the careful prolixity of autodidacts. This was an ad hoc realisation of the traditional chiliastic yearning for equal shares of the land for all who worked it – ‘black repartition”
― China Miéville, October: The Story of the Russian Revolution

“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 decriminalization of homosexuality, 100 years ago. Moves towards national self-determination. Free and universal education, the expansion of literacy. And with literacy comes cultural explosion, a thirst to learn, the mushrooming of universities and lecture series and adult schools. A change in the soul, as Lunacharsky might put it, as much as in the factory. And though those moments are snuffed out, reversed, become bleak jokes and memories all too soon, it might have been otherwise.”
― China Miéville, October: The Story of the Russian Revolution

“We are sick and tired of living in debt and slavery,’ the Rakalovsk peasants had their chairperson write. ‘We want space and light.”
― China Miéville, October: The Story of the Russian Revolution

“There is something in the Russia-ness of Russia that often seems to intoxicate. Again and again, discussions of the country’s history, particularly those of non-Russians but sometimes those of Russians themselves, veer into romanticised essentialism, evocations of some supposed irreducible, ineffable Russian Spirit, with a black box at its heart. Not only uniquely sad but uniquely inscrutable, evasive of explanation: mnogostradalnaya, much-suffering Russia; Little Mother Russia.”
― China Miéville, October: The Story of the Russian Revolution

“integument”
― China Miéville, October: The Story of the Russian Revolution

“prison of Peter and Paul”
― China Miéville, October: The Story of the Russian Revolution

“Maria Spiridonova”
― China Miéville, October: The Story of the Russian Revolution

“His wife, Alexandra Fedorovna, a granddaughter of Queen Victoria, is deeply unpopular. In part this is jingoism – she is German, after all, at a time of mounting tensions – but it is also due to her frantic intrigues and patent contempt for the masses. The French ambassador Maurice Paléologue sketches her concisely: ‘Moral disquiet, constant sadness, vague longing, alternation between excitement and exhaustion, constant thought given to the invisible and supernatural, credulousness, superstition.”
― China Miéville, October: The Story of the Russian Revolution

“Twilight, even remembered twilight, is better than no light at all. It would be equally absurd to say that there is nothing we can learn from the revolution. To deny that the sumerki of October can be ours, and that it need not always be followed by night.”
― China Miéville, October: The Story of the Russian Revolution

“[Lenin] wonders pugnaciously, however, whether a people ‘influenced by the hopelessness of its situation’ could be blamed for ‘fling[ing] itself into a struggle that would offer it at least some chance of securing conditions for the further development of civilisation that were somewhat unusual’.”
― China Miéville, October: The Story of the Russian Revolution

“Our next move’, he said, ‘will be to transfer the whole power into the hands of the Soviets.’ The formula could”
― China Miéville, October: The Story of the Russian Revolution

“In those late days of summer, as the right ruminated a cleansing, there flourished a millennial indulgence.”
― China Miéville, October: The Story of the Russian Revolution

“As in Kiev, so across the cities of Russia, among the dreaming rich.”
― China Miéville, October: The Story of the Russian Revolution

“It would be absurd, a ridiculous myopia, to hold up October as a simple lens through which to view the struggles of today. But it has been a long century, a long dusk of spite and cruelty, the excrescence and essence of its time. Twilight, even remembered twilight, is better than no light at all. It would be equally absurd to say that there is nothing that we can learn from the revolution. To deny that the sumerki of October can be ours, and that it need not always be followed by night.”
― China Miéville, October: The Story of the Russian Revolution

“Здоровенный рабочий побился вперёд и потряс кулаком перед лицом у Чернова.
"Принимай власть, сукин сын, коли дают!" - проревел он одну из самых знаменитых фраз 1917 года.”
― China Miéville, October: The Story of the Russian Revolution

“The early days of revolution were remarkable for how submerged and scattered that hard right was. Most of its high-profile figures had left the country or been arrested after February. Only the erratic Purishkevich remained at large, more or less powerless, tolerated and toothless. The political integument of Petrograd in particular had lurched leftward, repositioning radicals as moderates and moderates as right-wingers. In those days everyone was, or claimed to be, a socialist. No one wanted to be bourgeois.”
― China Miéville, October: The Story of the Russian Revolution

“But the powerful and respected party right, particularly Stalin, went so far in the direction of moderation as to support a merger of Bolsheviks and Mensheviks - the proposal of Irakli Tsereteli, the outstanding Menshevik intellect and orator, recently returned from Siberian exile and now in charge of the Petrograd Soviet.”
― China Miéville, October: The Story of the Russian Revolution

“Democracy' was a sociological term in Russia in 1917, denoting the masses, the lower class, at least as strongly as it did a political method. For many b those heady moments, Kerensky exemplified 'the democracy'.”
― China Miéville, October: The Story of the Russian Revolution

“Lenin turned to page 2 of the Neue Zürcher Zeitung. There, a short report informed of a revolution in Petrograd. Lenin, too, looked u in thought, his eyes wide.”
― China Miéville, October: The Story of the Russian Revolution

“Either way, 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. Those”
― China Miéville, October: The Story of the Russian Revolution

“The Romanovian method becomes one of appointing adventurer after incompetent after nonentity to grand offices of state. The liberals and the sharper-witted right grow ever more apoplectic.”
― China Miéville, October: The Story of the Russian Revolution