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A review by tumblehawk
October: The Story of the Russian Revolution by China Miéville
3.0
Really wavered between 3 and 4 stars—yet another instance when I wish Goodreads let you do half-stars.
It's impossible to separate my thoughts about this book from my origin story—I am the son of Soviet dissidents, emigres, refugees who fled the USSR for America. Generations of my family (especially on my mother's side) were brutalized by the Soviet state, and I carry all that in me. Despite this background to my life, my knowledge about the particulars of 1917 in Russia has (until now) been pretty scant. As I dig into a new writing project, I felt it would behoove me to gain deeper knowledge of how the revolution unfolded.
There's many texts about 1917, but I wanted something not too dry, so when I saw that celebrated SF/F writer China Mieville* (the author of some great books I've really enjoyed) had written a history of 1917 for leftist press Verso Books I decided to check it out. I came in cautiously—Mieville is an avowed socialist, writing for a leftist press, and I worried that this book would fall in the category of those that lionize/romanticize the Revolution and especially Lenin, eliding his role in some of the early terrors and abuses of the nascent Soviet regime.
The book is a fun one, written with a novelist's flair but (as the intro notes) drawing all of its information from primary and highly regarded secondary sources. Mieville paints the cast of characters well, and he does a great job portraying the labyrinthine jockeying of various leftist factions during a year that stretches into an epochal moment. (The structure of the book is great—a sort of table-setting followed by chapters for each month of 1917 leading up to that fateful October.)
Finally in the last chapter, Mieville grapples with the question that has to be asked: can October 1917 be held blameless for what came after October? He wrestles with this line of questioning admirably, and is not shy about holding the regime's feet (even the youngest days of it) to the fire. But he seems reticent to undercut the romantic portrait of Lenin that he's painted by then. In what seems to me a totally irresponsible act, considering some of his readers might not know this, he doesn't explain that it was Lenin who instituted the Gulag system long before Stalin cranked it to 11, so to speak.
Nor does he give the Tsar (a fascinating, puzzling character for the first half of the book) a coda. Which seems like his way of avoiding a simple fact: Lenin ordered the execution of the Tsar and his entire family. Including young children. Their bodies mutilated and thrown in unmarked graves.
Still, I'm glad I read it. It was full of rich detail which I will plunder for my own writing, and really gave me a sense of what it was like in tumultuous, wild Leningrad (the city of my family for many generations) in that most interesting and fateful year.
*about halfway through this book I learned about abuse allegations against Mieville. very disappointing to say the least. just as the person who passed me this info felt they were doing due diligence in letting me know, so I am in including that info here.
It's impossible to separate my thoughts about this book from my origin story—I am the son of Soviet dissidents, emigres, refugees who fled the USSR for America. Generations of my family (especially on my mother's side) were brutalized by the Soviet state, and I carry all that in me. Despite this background to my life, my knowledge about the particulars of 1917 in Russia has (until now) been pretty scant. As I dig into a new writing project, I felt it would behoove me to gain deeper knowledge of how the revolution unfolded.
There's many texts about 1917, but I wanted something not too dry, so when I saw that celebrated SF/F writer China Mieville* (the author of some great books I've really enjoyed) had written a history of 1917 for leftist press Verso Books I decided to check it out. I came in cautiously—Mieville is an avowed socialist, writing for a leftist press, and I worried that this book would fall in the category of those that lionize/romanticize the Revolution and especially Lenin, eliding his role in some of the early terrors and abuses of the nascent Soviet regime.
The book is a fun one, written with a novelist's flair but (as the intro notes) drawing all of its information from primary and highly regarded secondary sources. Mieville paints the cast of characters well, and he does a great job portraying the labyrinthine jockeying of various leftist factions during a year that stretches into an epochal moment. (The structure of the book is great—a sort of table-setting followed by chapters for each month of 1917 leading up to that fateful October.)
Finally in the last chapter, Mieville grapples with the question that has to be asked: can October 1917 be held blameless for what came after October? He wrestles with this line of questioning admirably, and is not shy about holding the regime's feet (even the youngest days of it) to the fire. But he seems reticent to undercut the romantic portrait of Lenin that he's painted by then. In what seems to me a totally irresponsible act, considering some of his readers might not know this, he doesn't explain that it was Lenin who instituted the Gulag system long before Stalin cranked it to 11, so to speak.
Nor does he give the Tsar (a fascinating, puzzling character for the first half of the book) a coda. Which seems like his way of avoiding a simple fact: Lenin ordered the execution of the Tsar and his entire family. Including young children. Their bodies mutilated and thrown in unmarked graves.
Still, I'm glad I read it. It was full of rich detail which I will plunder for my own writing, and really gave me a sense of what it was like in tumultuous, wild Leningrad (the city of my family for many generations) in that most interesting and fateful year.
*about halfway through this book I learned about abuse allegations against Mieville. very disappointing to say the least. just as the person who passed me this info felt they were doing due diligence in letting me know, so I am in including that info here.