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mrdashwood 's review for:
October: The Story of the Russian Revolution
by China Miéville
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.