A review by uselessmathom
October: The Story of the Russian Revolution by China Miéville

3.0

Anyone familiar with Miéville's work knows he primarily writes sci-fi, which this isn't, and the peculiarity of this book is that it is not an academic work: there are no defined references, no bibliography, or footnotes; and it's not a novel either, it's just a composed narrative of February-October 1917 in Petrograd (with a few nods to other places).

If you've ever had trouble grasping the play-by-play of the Russian revolution, who said what, what decisions were made and in what order, this is a very good book for that, thanks to the format and the very easy to digest style of prose. The characters are vivid, and it does brush against some figures that don't necessarily get brought up too much nowadays, like Maria Spiridonova, and events such as the All-Muslim Russian Congress comprised of 112 female delegates (out of 900) that made some pretty progressive decisions, especially for the time.

The book does try to stay politically sober and clearheaded, as much as you can write a book like this without prejudice and bias, however, to nobody's surprise, some of Miéville's Trottyness does bleed through, especially in the Epilogue which is essentially handwringing about how the revolution was later betrayed by Stalin and yet we should celebrate it because there is no reason to think "its telos was always the gulag".

If I had one significant criticism in terms of what it covers, I feel like the book ended far too soon. It really ends with October, no less, not counting the epilogue which cursorily covers some of the ensuing events, mostly as a way for the author to explain his position on the Revolution. Be that as it may, the narrative of the Russian revolution seems a bit incomplete without the Civil War in my opinion.

I did like a lot of the anecdotes that aren't huge moments in history, but that still add a lot of interesting texture. I read in Orwell's Catalonia that during the SCW people (at least in Barcelona) all switched to "tu" and that left me wondering why eastern European (Russian, Yugoslav etc.) revolutions never abolished the T-V distinctions in language, even though "mister" and "miss" went away? Well apparently that actually was a big sticking point, Russian soldiers hated the fact that their superiors could use "ty" with them and petitioned the Soviet to forbid that practice because it was demeaning, but unlike the Anarchists of Barcelona who chose to use the singular "you" for everyone, the Russian soldiers and workers desired to be addressed with the polite form "vy" instead. Similarly, Russian waiters apparently would not accept tips because they saw it as a form of noblesse oblige, i.e. flaunting your superior circumstances in a worker's face through a display of chivalric mercy for the meek. Many moments such as that breathe life into what otherwise would have been just a textbook retelling of political events.