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3.86 AVERAGE
3.86 AVERAGE
A gripping tale of the Russian Revolution, told with the artistry of a novelist and the rigour of a historian. Considering that it isn't a long book, it does a great job of conveying the multifacetedness of the Revolution, not focusing too much on the leaders but also following the anonymous actors, and mentioning a variety of interesting stories that happened away from the spotlight of St. Petersburg.
I would have liked to see a bit more of analysis (barring some funny takedowns of a few politicians), especially in the Epilogue, which hit me as a bit oversimplistic, but that can be attributed to space constraints.
All in all, this is a great introduction to one of the most interesting events in modern history, as it is well researched and written in such a way that almost makes it a page-turner.
I would have liked to see a bit more of analysis (barring some funny takedowns of a few politicians), especially in the Epilogue, which hit me as a bit oversimplistic, but that can be attributed to space constraints.
All in all, this is a great introduction to one of the most interesting events in modern history, as it is well researched and written in such a way that almost makes it a page-turner.
O livro narra as ações que resultaram na revolução socialista russa de 1917. Cada capítulo conta sobre o que aconteceu em cada mês daquele ano, muitas vezes indo dia a dia. O livro é recheado de citações provenientes de cartas e matérias de jornais da época, o que ajuda bastante na imersão. O autor, que é um ativista comunista, não esconde sua parcialidade sobre o assunto, mas também não deixa passar os atos reprimíveis que foram cometidos pela revolução, principalmente após outubro.
Eu só havia lido livros de ficção escritos pelo Miéville. Neste, mesmo escrevendo um relato histórico, ele segue o mesmo estilo de escrita denso e detalhado, o que me agrada mas que as vezes sentia que me atrasava um pouco a leitura. Os milhares de "personagens" que muitas vezes tem nomes parecidos também não ajudam no entendimento (culpa da Rússia, não do autor), mas pelo menos há um glossário de nomes e pessoas no final do livro.
Em geral é um excelente livro introdutório sobre o tema, que me fez refletir bastante sobre a sociedade em que vivemos, e a que queremos viver. Sendo ou não a favor da revolução, é um livro valioso pois mostra os pensamentos e ações daqueles que a viveram e construíram.
Eu só havia lido livros de ficção escritos pelo Miéville. Neste, mesmo escrevendo um relato histórico, ele segue o mesmo estilo de escrita denso e detalhado, o que me agrada mas que as vezes sentia que me atrasava um pouco a leitura. Os milhares de "personagens" que muitas vezes tem nomes parecidos também não ajudam no entendimento (culpa da Rússia, não do autor), mas pelo menos há um glossário de nomes e pessoas no final do livro.
Em geral é um excelente livro introdutório sobre o tema, que me fez refletir bastante sobre a sociedade em que vivemos, e a que queremos viver. Sendo ou não a favor da revolução, é um livro valioso pois mostra os pensamentos e ações daqueles que a viveram e construíram.
too much momentum. and then just right but too much detail. and then not enough. but readable and fascinating.
"We are sick and tired of living in debt and slavery. We want space and light."
- Letter from Rakalovsk peasants, quoted by China Miéville, October
A nice narrative history of the Russian Revolution in 1917. This isn't an academic book. This book, by design, is meant to be a nonintimidating book of narrative history for the curious. As we look back on the last 100 years, the Communist Revolution still has much to teach us. Hell, Steve Bannon is a self-described Leninist. We might want to pay CLOSE attention to the trains of the past.
I'm still trying to sort out exactly what I thought of this book. On one level it was well-written and paced (Miéville is a gifted story teller, obviously). He even makes the bureaucratic infighting of 1917 seem exciting. But while his technique is similar to others who have approached history or biography from a novelistic perspective, it doesn't quite hit the level of literature (not quite Mailer or Capote) I was hoping for. Next to Miéville's own books, it doesn't rise to the top.
China Miéville is well-versed in political philosophy. Dude has a PhD in it (technically in Marxism and International Law). His own leftist politics is felt from the first to the last pages. That is where the book gets a bit messy for me. This is Red October told by a New Weird SF writer who also happens to be strongly involved in International Socialist causes. This is a bit like having Orson Scott Card write about Mormonism or having Ayn Rand write about Adam Smith. Sometimes gifted people who are "true believers" aren't going to be the best/fairest critics of things they love. To be fair, Miéville spends a bit of the last few pages discussing how the 'revolution' went off the rails. But, he does't dwell too much on it. It is uncomfortable to dwell too long on purges, gulags, and Stalin.
He also doesn't have enough room here to properly examine most of the characters that appear. I would have loved to read more about Lenin, Trotsky, Stalin, etc. Instead, this novel (constrained by an already large topic) passes over some crazy characters like eyes over an active chess board.
Anyway, I liked it (probably 3.5 tsars). Enjoyed it even. Like Red October, however, it was boring in parts and seemed constrianed by a leftist genius who at times seemed blind to the dangers of his own ideology.
- Letter from Rakalovsk peasants, quoted by China Miéville, October
A nice narrative history of the Russian Revolution in 1917. This isn't an academic book. This book, by design, is meant to be a nonintimidating book of narrative history for the curious. As we look back on the last 100 years, the Communist Revolution still has much to teach us. Hell, Steve Bannon is a self-described Leninist. We might want to pay CLOSE attention to the trains of the past.
I'm still trying to sort out exactly what I thought of this book. On one level it was well-written and paced (Miéville is a gifted story teller, obviously). He even makes the bureaucratic infighting of 1917 seem exciting. But while his technique is similar to others who have approached history or biography from a novelistic perspective, it doesn't quite hit the level of literature (not quite Mailer or Capote) I was hoping for. Next to Miéville's own books, it doesn't rise to the top.
China Miéville is well-versed in political philosophy. Dude has a PhD in it (technically in Marxism and International Law). His own leftist politics is felt from the first to the last pages. That is where the book gets a bit messy for me. This is Red October told by a New Weird SF writer who also happens to be strongly involved in International Socialist causes. This is a bit like having Orson Scott Card write about Mormonism or having Ayn Rand write about Adam Smith. Sometimes gifted people who are "true believers" aren't going to be the best/fairest critics of things they love. To be fair, Miéville spends a bit of the last few pages discussing how the 'revolution' went off the rails. But, he does't dwell too much on it. It is uncomfortable to dwell too long on purges, gulags, and Stalin.
He also doesn't have enough room here to properly examine most of the characters that appear. I would have loved to read more about Lenin, Trotsky, Stalin, etc. Instead, this novel (constrained by an already large topic) passes over some crazy characters like eyes over an active chess board.
Anyway, I liked it (probably 3.5 tsars). Enjoyed it even. Like Red October, however, it was boring in parts and seemed constrianed by a leftist genius who at times seemed blind to the dangers of his own ideology.
Good book. Enjoyed reading it. Just didn't quite hit home, felt a bit disorganised and even though much of the information was in summary of extremely complicated events it felt as though it was bogged down by them at times, as though going into exhausting detail while giving you none of that detail.
Admire Mieville's attempt at and in many ways succeeding at making the revolution quite accessible. Enjoyed the lightheartedness of the book and didn't find his acknowledged partisanship to present a problematic influence (though perhaps in the very brief skimming through the two decades post October it shone through the most).
The chapter on the month of October itself was great and fast-paced, really pulling out Mieville's skills as a novelist. The end of the book definitely likely to leave you yearning for a revolution that could have taken hold outside of Russia, for what could have been.
Admire Mieville's attempt at and in many ways succeeding at making the revolution quite accessible. Enjoyed the lightheartedness of the book and didn't find his acknowledged partisanship to present a problematic influence (though perhaps in the very brief skimming through the two decades post October it shone through the most).
The chapter on the month of October itself was great and fast-paced, really pulling out Mieville's skills as a novelist. The end of the book definitely likely to leave you yearning for a revolution that could have taken hold outside of Russia, for what could have been.
"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."
I write this a few days after the centenary of the meeting of the Russian Constituent Assembly that polemicist-historians always throw in the faces of those who think perhaps there was something of value in the 'October' Revolution. 'It was a coup,' they argue, 'not a revolution at all.' China Mieville's book, read sympathetically, gives the lie to such assertions.
This book is a straightforward narrative of how Russia travelled the road it took between the 'February' (actually March in the New Style calendar that Russia needed a Bolshevik revolution to adopt) and 'October' revolutions. The first ended the tsarist regime. The second instituted the Soviet one. In-between, power had been released from the channels of the tsarist regime and flowed about the streets of Russia's cities and its farmlands available for any group with will and a vision to redirect to its ends. The process was by no means straightforward, nor were the Bolsheviks successful at imposing their scheme until very late in the game. The best thing about this book is its recognition of the contingency of so much of history. We don't have to fall under the yoke of Carlyle to see how individuals can influence the course of events through their decisions.
Mieville makes the following points clear:
a) 'Soviet power' was not a Bolshevik conspiracy, but a genuine movement of working people to create a platform from which to secure their political goals. Certainly the Soviets (local councils usually organised around workplace representation) were dominated by leftists, but both at the time of the July crisis and the October Revolution the Soviets declined to follow the Leninist line. It was the failure of alternatives that mean 'All Power to the Soviets' was the only solution, and was a policy only the Bolsheviks were committed to.
b) Leading Russians tried very hard to avoid their government falling into the grip of socialists. But it was their own failure to deliver an end to the war, to manage land reform and to function as administrators of the economy and law-and-order that eroded their authority. The Bolsheviks and other socialists demanded 'Peace. Land. Bread.' The fact that their initial years failed on all three counts was down to the reality of an armed uprising against them, supported by foreign powers and the dislocation caused by the resulting war.
To return to the Constituent Assembly, by the time it met, the circumstances of its creation had been overtaken by events. The Provisional Government that had summoned it had collapsed because it was neither tough enough to satisfy the generals and business leaders who wanted to arrest and execute the Bolsheviks and other socialists, nor was it radical enough to satisfy the popular mood in Petrograd in particular but in the country more widely. It was the Constituent Assembly's own unwillingness to recognise the state of affairs in January 1918 that rendered it irrelevant and justified its being dismissed.
Mieville races through what happened after October 1917 in many fewer pages, and gives more analysis than he does for Feb-Oct. He definitely sees this as a missed opportunity, as the Bolsheviks, at times unwillingly, laid the groundwork for the one-party state that followed, and the slide into Stalinist terror that did so much harm to the vision of 1917. Reading this, one wonders if a Soviet Union that had eschewed building 'Socialism in One Country' with the consequent centralised planning disasters and autarkic economic thinking generally -- and GULAG -- might still be with us.
Recommended highly if you want to know how the Bolshevik Revolution happened -- but you'll probably need to keep notes of all the names, even with the 'cast of characters' listed at the back.
This book is a straightforward narrative of how Russia travelled the road it took between the 'February' (actually March in the New Style calendar that Russia needed a Bolshevik revolution to adopt) and 'October' revolutions. The first ended the tsarist regime. The second instituted the Soviet one. In-between, power had been released from the channels of the tsarist regime and flowed about the streets of Russia's cities and its farmlands available for any group with will and a vision to redirect to its ends. The process was by no means straightforward, nor were the Bolsheviks successful at imposing their scheme until very late in the game. The best thing about this book is its recognition of the contingency of so much of history. We don't have to fall under the yoke of Carlyle to see how individuals can influence the course of events through their decisions.
Mieville makes the following points clear:
a) 'Soviet power' was not a Bolshevik conspiracy, but a genuine movement of working people to create a platform from which to secure their political goals. Certainly the Soviets (local councils usually organised around workplace representation) were dominated by leftists, but both at the time of the July crisis and the October Revolution the Soviets declined to follow the Leninist line. It was the failure of alternatives that mean 'All Power to the Soviets' was the only solution, and was a policy only the Bolsheviks were committed to.
b) Leading Russians tried very hard to avoid their government falling into the grip of socialists. But it was their own failure to deliver an end to the war, to manage land reform and to function as administrators of the economy and law-and-order that eroded their authority. The Bolsheviks and other socialists demanded 'Peace. Land. Bread.' The fact that their initial years failed on all three counts was down to the reality of an armed uprising against them, supported by foreign powers and the dislocation caused by the resulting war.
To return to the Constituent Assembly, by the time it met, the circumstances of its creation had been overtaken by events. The Provisional Government that had summoned it had collapsed because it was neither tough enough to satisfy the generals and business leaders who wanted to arrest and execute the Bolsheviks and other socialists, nor was it radical enough to satisfy the popular mood in Petrograd in particular but in the country more widely. It was the Constituent Assembly's own unwillingness to recognise the state of affairs in January 1918 that rendered it irrelevant and justified its being dismissed.
Mieville races through what happened after October 1917 in many fewer pages, and gives more analysis than he does for Feb-Oct. He definitely sees this as a missed opportunity, as the Bolsheviks, at times unwillingly, laid the groundwork for the one-party state that followed, and the slide into Stalinist terror that did so much harm to the vision of 1917. Reading this, one wonders if a Soviet Union that had eschewed building 'Socialism in One Country' with the consequent centralised planning disasters and autarkic economic thinking generally -- and GULAG -- might still be with us.
Recommended highly if you want to know how the Bolshevik Revolution happened -- but you'll probably need to keep notes of all the names, even with the 'cast of characters' listed at the back.
2.5 Stars I knew zero about the Russian Revolution, and after reading this book, I know 10%. History is my weak-spot. I found it hard to follow.
Kind of odd to have a history book by one of the few fantasy novelists I can stand. Yet here is a short overview of the Russian revolution that while very well written left me with more questions than answered. I found myself grasping for the motivations to some of the groups involved and while that is a gap in my (very little) understanding of the history involved the book it'self should be doing that work for me.