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3.85 AVERAGE
3.85 AVERAGE
Brilliant piece of non-fiction. As all the best in this genre, it is written by a fiction writer. The book is bit of a misnomer, as it could really have been called 1917. October is just a closing chapter.
The beginning of the book is really wild. Narrative explodes and writing fizzes with details and events. As the year rumbles on, as the situation becomes more confusing and contradictory so does the text. The closing chapter provides great shift in timescale & perspective.
All in all, I wish there were more histories as accomplished as Mieville's one is.
The beginning of the book is really wild. Narrative explodes and writing fizzes with details and events. As the year rumbles on, as the situation becomes more confusing and contradictory so does the text. The closing chapter provides great shift in timescale & perspective.
All in all, I wish there were more histories as accomplished as Mieville's one is.
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?
The timing appears apt. A sunny Sunday in June begs for calm. Jihadis again rocked the night before. There is a thirst for deliverance in the air, again. Always. While I appreciate the urgency of the book, I am doubtful about the necessity. I applaud Miéville for the effort and especially the Further Reading section. His analysis is painfully fair but emotionally neutral. This measured approach is leery of ghosts: Bunny Wilson and Nabokov frothing in polemic, Sartre and Merleau-Ponty, Figes making sock puppet accounts on Amazon to denounce authors. Shit, if I didn't exist would Orlando invent me? That's enough vanity for one day. Edward Crankshaw provided a solid narrative history of these events, as have many others. This isn't a waste of anyone's time, nor is it revelatory.
The timing appears apt. A sunny Sunday in June begs for calm. Jihadis again rocked the night before. There is a thirst for deliverance in the air, again. Always. While I appreciate the urgency of the book, I am doubtful about the necessity. I applaud Miéville for the effort and especially the Further Reading section. His analysis is painfully fair but emotionally neutral. This measured approach is leery of ghosts: Bunny Wilson and Nabokov frothing in polemic, Sartre and Merleau-Ponty, Figes making sock puppet accounts on Amazon to denounce authors. Shit, if I didn't exist would Orlando invent me? That's enough vanity for one day. Edward Crankshaw provided a solid narrative history of these events, as have many others. This isn't a waste of anyone's time, nor is it revelatory.
Chine Mieville at his best! This book about what was probably the most interesting period in the history of Europe since tumultuous years of the fall of the Roman Republic, is easily the best book about the Russian Revolution that I've ever read.
This is a neat narrative history of 1917 and the events leading up to the October revolution. There's a useful afterword about the civil war, the 'rot' that set into the regime during those years, and the historiography of the revolution. There's very little on the ideology behind the revolution--indeed, the uninitiated might struggle to figure out the difference between the provisional government and the soviets--but very little about the social structure of Russia in 1917. It's a popular book, of course, but Mieville certainly has the expertise to discuss these things, so the strictly narrative focus is a bit disappointing. Worth the story, anyway.
medium-paced
A narrative re-telling of the story of the Russian revolution from February through to October. This book provides a little context at either end of the story (the lead up to February, developments after October) but concentrates on a detailed description of the action with a chapter for each month.
This structure broadly meets the brief that Mieville sets himself in the introduction - to lay out the story for the general reader from a position that he acknowledges is broadly sympathetic to the aims of the revolutionaries. It has similarities in this sense to Catherine Merrivale's "Lenin on the Train", although Merrivale focuses more strongly on Lenin himself while Mieville concentrates on more general events Petrograd where Lenin is an occasional (although very influential) presence. Both books engage the general reader in the story of the revolution with well-researched foundations.
If there is a flaw it is that Mieville sometimes gets a little lost in the detail of the debates of the various bodies created in the gap between February and October. It is sometimes a little hard to keep up with whether the description is of the Petrograd Soviet or the Congress of all-Russian Soviets or one of many other bodies. Perhaps it is a little unfair to criticise Mieville for this, what this reflects is not confusion in the retelling but confusion in the times themselves.
Mieville only touches briefly at the very end on the subject that is at the heart of much left-leaning debate on the revolution - was the Stalinist horror built in from the very start, was it part of the revolution itself or something created uniquely by Stalin and bolted on from outside?
This is a subject tackled by Slavoj Zizek, and about which I wrote briefly a year ago here https://marxadventure.wordpress.com/2018/06/05/repeating-the-past in a way that I think is similar to the conclusion reached by Mieville. The revolution itself may have ended in terror, but the attempt to create a more just society should not end there. We can and must keep trying.
This review is also on my blog here: https://marxadventure.wordpress.com/2019/06/01/review-october-the-story-of-the-russian-revolution
This structure broadly meets the brief that Mieville sets himself in the introduction - to lay out the story for the general reader from a position that he acknowledges is broadly sympathetic to the aims of the revolutionaries. It has similarities in this sense to Catherine Merrivale's "Lenin on the Train", although Merrivale focuses more strongly on Lenin himself while Mieville concentrates on more general events Petrograd where Lenin is an occasional (although very influential) presence. Both books engage the general reader in the story of the revolution with well-researched foundations.
If there is a flaw it is that Mieville sometimes gets a little lost in the detail of the debates of the various bodies created in the gap between February and October. It is sometimes a little hard to keep up with whether the description is of the Petrograd Soviet or the Congress of all-Russian Soviets or one of many other bodies. Perhaps it is a little unfair to criticise Mieville for this, what this reflects is not confusion in the retelling but confusion in the times themselves.
Mieville only touches briefly at the very end on the subject that is at the heart of much left-leaning debate on the revolution - was the Stalinist horror built in from the very start, was it part of the revolution itself or something created uniquely by Stalin and bolted on from outside?
This is a subject tackled by Slavoj Zizek, and about which I wrote briefly a year ago here https://marxadventure.wordpress.com/2018/06/05/repeating-the-past in a way that I think is similar to the conclusion reached by Mieville. The revolution itself may have ended in terror, but the attempt to create a more just society should not end there. We can and must keep trying.
This review is also on my blog here: https://marxadventure.wordpress.com/2019/06/01/review-october-the-story-of-the-russian-revolution
My first foray into Russian non-fiction. It was a febrile read, about the heady months leading up to October 1917. It was a thrilling account of a constantly changing, barbaric and fatal revolution. The text was not necessarily an easy read, though, for two reasons: firstly, the dizzying number of individual’s and political groups’ names as well as their implied politics; and secondly the many obscure and seldom-used words. I’ve never looked up so many words in reading one book.
funny
informative
inspiring
reflective
sad
medium-paced
adventurous
dark
emotional
informative
inspiring
tense
medium-paced
informative
reflective
tense
medium-paced