Read ‘October’ China Miéville has written a suspenseful history of the Russian Revolution
WHEN ENGLISH AUTHOR China Miéville sat down to write October, a new history of the Communist revolution that led to the formation of the Soviet Union, he was nervous. A Marxist since his days at Cambridge University, he’d long been inspired by the events of 1917. With that passion, however, came pressure.
“I had a bit of performance anxiety,” says Miéville, 44. “I am not a trained historian, and I suspect there will be some raised eyebrows, because this sort of thing is not what I’m known for.”
He’s right: Miéville has built his reputation writing often ominous and unpredictable fantasy fiction—like the Bas-lag trilogy (2000-04) and the award-winning and surreal crime novel The City and The City (2009). It turns out his talents as a storyteller are transferable. Miéville navigates the tumultuous narrative of the Russian Revolution without assuming any prior knowledge in the reader, while injecting an element of suspense for readers who might feel the subject is overfamiliar. His vision is cinematic and vivid, painting scenes of shut tramcars, shops and kiosks, and tense late-night discussions in a parliament “foul with cigarette butts, bottles, and the smell from plates of half-eaten food.”
Miéville’s account includes less well-known characters, including Alexander Kerensky, the “token socialist” who served as the charismatic face of the short-lived provisional government, and the rotund imperial State Councilor Mikhail Rodzianko, tasked with goading Czar Nicholas II into responding to the changes in his country. His Nicholas is a negligent monarch—insidiously chauvinistic and lethargic in the face of unrest. The czar’s and czarina’s myopia about what was happening around them “made them seem to me almost operatic,” Miéville says. But his characters are not one-dimensional: Even Nicholas comes across as pitiable at times, and the book is just as prone to amplify the flaws of the revolutionaries as it does with the monarchy.
As he researched and wrote the book, Miéville found himself fascinated by the experience of ordinary people, as well as the leading figures in the momentous events. “The revolution is also a story of people eagerly seeking information about this riotous upheaval. I read some amazing things in archives—like letters sent from peasant organizations being read out to groups of illiterate soldiers on the front. All of these people were not just on the outside, being passive— they were hungrily seeking out information through any means available.”
In that sense, Miéville’s book puts a positive spin on the revolution, not, as he says, to “exonerate” the founders of the Soviet Union but to resurrect the idea that change is within the grasp of ordinary people. Just because the revolution ended with Lenin—and then Stalin— in power, Miéville says, shouldn’t make the ideas behind the change any less inspiring.
“The disparity between the initial drives of so many people and the tragic outcome was not inevitable,” Miéville says. “Even after all the catastrophe, the idea that one would not find something empowering in the idea that people should govern themselves—i can’t think of a more impoverished view.”