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A review by mattycakesbooks
October: The Story of the Russian Revolution by China Miéville
4.0
Absolutely gripping and fascinating, especially coming from a background where the Revolution has always been taught as a group of scoundrels murdering the innocent Tsar and his family. It is amazing to me how much sympathy people are able to drum up for the Tsar, and how little they are able feel towards the millions his regime oppressed and threw into the slaughterhouse that was WWI.
The book gets four stars instead of five for a couple of reasons -- first, as closely as I was paying attention, I was having trouble keeping track of each group. While there was a cast of characters at the back of the book, there was no cast of organizations, and seeing as the Russian Revolution was not as much a story of individuals but of mass movements, that seems like an oversight, and it sent me to Wikipedia throughout the read.
The second reason is the noticeable lack of Stalin in the book. It's clear that Mieville holds him in contempt, and is irritated at how Stalin's legacy is used to discredit socialism these days, but it seems to me that more or less ignoring the man is not the way of confronting him. If Stalin did little personally to push the Revolution along, it seems that highlighting this would bolster rather than hinder Mieville's point that he was an incidental thug whose only ideology was power. I would have been more forgiving about his absence if Stalin's name had, in fact, been included in the cast of characters at the back of the book. He is conspicuously absent. And given Stalin's own history of erasing inconvenient political figures, this really irritated me.
That said, this is a great book. Read it.
The book gets four stars instead of five for a couple of reasons -- first, as closely as I was paying attention, I was having trouble keeping track of each group. While there was a cast of characters at the back of the book, there was no cast of organizations, and seeing as the Russian Revolution was not as much a story of individuals but of mass movements, that seems like an oversight, and it sent me to Wikipedia throughout the read.
The second reason is the noticeable lack of Stalin in the book. It's clear that Mieville holds him in contempt, and is irritated at how Stalin's legacy is used to discredit socialism these days, but it seems to me that more or less ignoring the man is not the way of confronting him. If Stalin did little personally to push the Revolution along, it seems that highlighting this would bolster rather than hinder Mieville's point that he was an incidental thug whose only ideology was power. I would have been more forgiving about his absence if Stalin's name had, in fact, been included in the cast of characters at the back of the book. He is conspicuously absent. And given Stalin's own history of erasing inconvenient political figures, this really irritated me.
That said, this is a great book. Read it.