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3.86 AVERAGE
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.
A good outline of the revolution and a good intro to Miéville. I've never been able to get more than a few pages or so into Perdido Street Station, and I haven't looked at the Russian Revolution since high school, and of course I realize now what I'd learned about it was more than a little bare. I really liked my high school history teacher, who was both eccentric and encouraging, but we spent more time on the Romanovs and Rasputin then on the Revolution proper. But like I said, this is a good retelling of the Russian Revolution.
My highlights:
A graphic strike:
A Cossack ca'canny :
But they followed the command with absolute precision. Like dressage riders, their mounts high-stepping elegantly through the slush, they advanced in slow, neat single file. The troops winked at the dumbfounded crowd as they came, dispersing no one at all.
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. That chill evening, the Cossacks did not disobey orders – they conducted a ca’canny cavalry charge.
Their furious officers ordered them to block the street. Once more the men respectfully complied. With their legendary equestrian skills, they lined up their horses into a living blockade breathing out mist. Again, in their very obedience was dissent. Ordered to be still, still they remained. They did not move as the boldest marchers crept closer. The Cossacks did not move as the strikers approached, their eyes widening as at last they understood the unspoken invitation in the preternatural immobility of mounts and men, as they ducked below the bellies of the motionless horses to continue their march.
Lenin keeping sicko libs out of the washroom:
My home's small role in the Russian Revolution:
Anarchists:
Lenin knows how to fill a room:
Trotsky demands equal treatment:
All of these slogans are good, why pick only one?
This is like something out a fairy tale:
The man begged shelter from the downpour. Lenin had little choice but to stand aside and let him in. As they sat together listening to the drumbeat of water, Lenin asked his visitor what brought him to this out-of-the-way spot.
A manhunt, the Cossack said. He was after someone by the name of Lenin. To bring him back dead or alive.
And what, Lenin asked cautiously, had this reprobate done?
The Cossack waved his hand, vague about the details. What he did know, he stressed, was that the fugitive was in some way ‘muddled’; that he was dangerous; and that he was nearby.
When the skies lightened at last, the visitor thanked his temporary host and set out through the sodden grass to continue the search.
After that alarming incident, Lenin and the CC, with which he remained in secret communication, agreed that he should move to Finland.
Lenin really does come off like a fox in a fairy tale:
Classic liberal trick still used today:
The right wingers demand to be shot:
‘What will you do?’ yelled someone at the sailor who doggedly refused to murder him.
John Reed’s eyewitness account of what happened next is famous. ‘Another sailor came up, very much irritated. “We will spank you!” he cried energetically. “And if necessary we will shoot you too. Go home now, and leave us in peace.”’
That would be no fit fate for champions of democracy. Standing on a box, waving his umbrella, Prokopovich anounced to his followers that they would save these sailors from themselves. ‘We cannot have our innocent blood upon the hands of these ignorant men! … It is beneath our dignity to be shot down’ – let alone spanked – ‘here in the street by switchmen. Let us return to the Duma, and discuss the best means of saving the country and the Revolution!’
With that, the self-declared morituri for liberal democracy turned and set out on their embarrassingly short return journey, taking their sausages with them.
Fantastic part from the epilogue:
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 specifics of Russia, 1917, are distinct and crucial. 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 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.
A good outline of the revolution and a good intro to Miéville. I've never been able to get more than a few pages or so into Perdido Street Station, and I haven't looked at the Russian Revolution since high school, and of course I realize now what I'd learned about it was more than a little bare. I really liked my high school history teacher, who was both eccentric and encouraging, but we spent more time on the Romanovs and Rasputin then on the Revolution proper. But like I said, this is a good retelling of the Russian Revolution.
My highlights:
A graphic strike:
Spoiler
Moscow printworkers are remunerated per letter. Now, in the Sytin publishing house, they demand payment for punctuation, too. An arcane orthographic revolt that prompts a wave of sympathy strikes.A Cossack ca'canny :
Spoiler
Two thousand five hundred Vyborg mill-workers took a narrow route down Sampsonievsky Prospect, stopping short, horrified, when they met a Cossack formation. The officers grimaced, grabbed their reins and spurred their horses, and with weapons aloft they shouted for their men to follow. This time, to the crowd’s rising terror, the Cossacks began to obey.But they followed the command with absolute precision. Like dressage riders, their mounts high-stepping elegantly through the slush, they advanced in slow, neat single file. The troops winked at the dumbfounded crowd as they came, dispersing no one at all.
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. That chill evening, the Cossacks did not disobey orders – they conducted a ca’canny cavalry charge.
Their furious officers ordered them to block the street. Once more the men respectfully complied. With their legendary equestrian skills, they lined up their horses into a living blockade breathing out mist. Again, in their very obedience was dissent. Ordered to be still, still they remained. They did not move as the boldest marchers crept closer. The Cossacks did not move as the strikers approached, their eyes widening as at last they understood the unspoken invitation in the preternatural immobility of mounts and men, as they ducked below the bellies of the motionless horses to continue their march.
Lenin keeping sicko libs out of the washroom:
Spoiler
At the Swiss border, the exiles transferred to a two-coach special: one carriage for the Russians, one for their German escorts. The journey across Germany began. Lenin spent hours writing and making plans, breaking off late at night to complain to his boisterous comrades about their noise. To disperse the loud crowd outside the toilet, he instituted a system of slips for its use, either for its intended function or to have a smoke, in the proportions, he decided, three to one. ‘This’, Karl Radek remembered drily, ‘naturally evoked further discussions about the value of human needs.’My home's small role in the Russian Revolution:
Spoiler
During all the drama of the month, the Soviet had been attentive to the plights of various revolutionaries stranded abroad, prevented from returning home to Russia, possibly being held in conditions of questionable legality. The Soviet demanded the intercession of the government. One of Milyukov’s last tasks as foreign minister was to intervene with the British and Canadians on the matter of a Russian national detained by the British at a camp in Nova Scotia, considered a threat to the Allies. The prisoner’s name was Leon Trotsky.Anarchists:
Spoiler
In the same chaotic expropriatory post-February wave during which the Bolsheviks moved into the Kshesinskaya Mansion, revolutionaries had taken and retooled the Vyborg summer home of the official P. P. Durnovo. Its gardens were now a park, with facilities for local children, and the building was hung with black banners reading ‘Death to all capitalists’. The house was the headquarters of several groups including the district bakers’ union, some far-left SR-Maximalists, and an Anarchist–Bolshevik group grandly styling itself the Soviet of the Petrograd People’s Militia. This last, desiring better facilities to produce its leaflets, on 5 June decided with staggering chutzpah to send eighty gun-toting members to occupy the press of the right-wing Russkaya volia. After only a day, two regiments easily forced them out. But the authorities were ruffled. Up with these anarchists, they decided, they would not put.Lenin knows how to fill a room:
Spoiler
The question was pertinent. While it may not be alone in this, the socialist left has always tended to exaggerate its successes – the vinegary humorist Nadezhda 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 fear, perhaps, is that fallibility undermines authority. 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.Spoiler
‘Take power, you son of a bitch,’ he bellowed, in one of most famous phrases of 1917, ‘when it’s given to you!’Trotsky demands equal treatment:
Spoiler
For now, though, the Bolsheviks were hardly in a position to demand anything. The more pressing question was safety: that night, the cabinet issued warrants for the arrests of all the ‘organisers’ of the troubles, including Lenin, Zinoviev, Kamenev, Kollontai, and Lunacharsky. To which list Trotsky, with typical twinkling arrogance, would soon demand to be added, a request the government granted.All of these slogans are good, why pick only one?
Spoiler
On 3 August, the Sixth Russian Social Democratic Workers Party Congress – the Bolshevik Congress – unanimously passed a resolution in favour of a new slogan. It was a compromise between the impatient ‘Leninists’, who saw the revolution entering a new post-Soviet phase, and the moderates, who still thought that they might be able to work with the socialists to their right to defend the revolution. Nonetheless, the symbolic importance of the shift in phraseology was immense. The lesson shook out, the calls changed. July had done its work. No longer did the Bolsheviks call for ‘All Power to the Soviets’. Instead they aspired to the ‘Complete Liquidation of the Dictatorship of the Counterrevolutionary Bourgeoisie’.This is like something out a fairy tale:
Spoiler
Huddled in his hut, on a day of heavy rain, Lenin was startled by the sound of cursing. A Cossack was approaching through the wet undergrowth.The man begged shelter from the downpour. Lenin had little choice but to stand aside and let him in. As they sat together listening to the drumbeat of water, Lenin asked his visitor what brought him to this out-of-the-way spot.
A manhunt, the Cossack said. He was after someone by the name of Lenin. To bring him back dead or alive.
And what, Lenin asked cautiously, had this reprobate done?
The Cossack waved his hand, vague about the details. What he did know, he stressed, was that the fugitive was in some way ‘muddled’; that he was dangerous; and that he was nearby.
When the skies lightened at last, the visitor thanked his temporary host and set out through the sodden grass to continue the search.
After that alarming incident, Lenin and the CC, with which he remained in secret communication, agreed that he should move to Finland.
Lenin really does come off like a fox in a fairy tale:
Spoiler
He needed a disguise. Kustaa Rovio escorted him to a Helsingfors wigmaker, who threatened to scupper the pressing plan by insisting it would take a fortnight to personalise something suitable. The shopkeeper was flabbergasted to see Lenin impatiently fingering a ready-made grey hairpiece. Most buyers were attempting to rejuvenate themselves: this would have the opposite effect. But Lenin rebuffed all the man’s attempts to dissuade him. For a long time after that day, the wigmaker would tell the story of the youngish client who had wanted to look old.Classic liberal trick still used today:
Spoiler
As power evaporated, some convulsions took predictable, ugly forms. On 2 October in Smolensk, the town of Roslavl received, as the Smolensk Bulletin put it, ‘the following cup of poison to drink: a pogrom’. A mob of Black Hundreds chanting ‘Beat the Yids!’ attacked and murdered several people they accused of ‘speculation’– a charge provoked by finding galoshes in a Jewish-owned store the clerks of which had claimed they had none. The rampage continued throughout the night and the next day. The newspapers and authorities tried to link the Bolsheviks to the violence. This was a growing theme in the liberal press, despite its patent political absurdity, and despite the recorded efforts of Bolshevik soldiers in the town to stop the carnage.The right wingers demand to be shot:
Spoiler
The peculiar standoff continued. The left refused to shoot, the right demanded their right to pass and/or be shot.‘What will you do?’ yelled someone at the sailor who doggedly refused to murder him.
John Reed’s eyewitness account of what happened next is famous. ‘Another sailor came up, very much irritated. “We will spank you!” he cried energetically. “And if necessary we will shoot you too. Go home now, and leave us in peace.”’
That would be no fit fate for champions of democracy. Standing on a box, waving his umbrella, Prokopovich anounced to his followers that they would save these sailors from themselves. ‘We cannot have our innocent blood upon the hands of these ignorant men! … It is beneath our dignity to be shot down’ – let alone spanked – ‘here in the street by switchmen. Let us return to the Duma, and discuss the best means of saving the country and the Revolution!’
With that, the self-declared morituri for liberal democracy turned and set out on their embarrassingly short return journey, taking their sausages with them.
Fantastic part from the epilogue:
Spoiler
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 of an Aristotle, a Goethe, or a Marx. And above this ridge new peaks will rise’.
The specifics of Russia, 1917, are distinct and crucial. 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 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.
I felt like I learned a lot but the book suffers from overwrought distracting prose. Like this line "But up with their protestations, he would not put." HA
challenging
funny
informative
reflective
medium-paced
Δεν έχω ξαναδιαβάσει ιστορικό βιβλίο και θεωρώ ότι έκανα μια καλή αρχή, με αυτό εδώ.
Η γραφή είναι απλή και οι περιγραφές είναι τόσο ατμοσφαιρικές που ένιωθα ότι διάβαζα μυθιστόρημα.
Ο συγγραφέας, ενώ μπορούσε να αναλύει γεγονότα που θεωρούνται σημαντικά, δίνει έμφαση στην ουσία της επανάστασης και μόνο, με αποτέλεσμα να μην κουράζει τον αναγνώστη.
Σίγουρα το προτείνω σε όσους θέλουν να μάθουν γεγονότα για την Οκτωβριανή επανάσταση.
Η γραφή είναι απλή και οι περιγραφές είναι τόσο ατμοσφαιρικές που ένιωθα ότι διάβαζα μυθιστόρημα.
Ο συγγραφέας, ενώ μπορούσε να αναλύει γεγονότα που θεωρούνται σημαντικά, δίνει έμφαση στην ουσία της επανάστασης και μόνο, με αποτέλεσμα να μην κουράζει τον αναγνώστη.
Σίγουρα το προτείνω σε όσους θέλουν να μάθουν γεγονότα για την Οκτωβριανή επανάσταση.
Prior to reading Mieville's account my knowledge of the Russian Revolution was pretty weak, I mention this both to recommend the book, it is accessible to readers with minimal context for Russian history, and to admit that I cannot really assess the book's narrative or interpretative accuracy. Mieville's background as a novelist is evident, he has a great knack for descriptive detail and language. I really enjoyed the insights into people and politics outside of Petrograd, for example the excerpts from soldiers' letters to politicians and the account of the All-Russian Muslim Women's Congress.
informative
inspiring
medium-paced
Starts out strong but meanders way too quickly. I was hard-pressed to keep up with the different factions, their leaders, and who held control at any given time.
challenging
informative
reflective
tense
fast-paced
informative
inspiring
medium-paced
Denser than lead, but hugely interesting and well written.