A brave new world – at gunpoint

Of the many books published this year to mark the centenary of the Russian revolution, this is perhaps the most curious. China Miéville is best known as an imaginative and entertaining writer of ‘weird’ (his word) science fiction and magic realism. October is a narrative history of the two 1917 revolutions in Russia, written from an ultra-left perspective — with a novelist’s eye for a good story and colourful characters. So it’s an examination of why the communist experiment failed miserably — at the cost of much blood — that is also wonderfully well written: smart, witty and full of fresh insight. But it can also read like an A-level essay, regurgitated from textbooks. Weird indeed.

I was brought up on similar Marxist histories that were sympathetic to the revolution and took its idealism as a given: the revolutionaries’ hearts were in the right place, even if ‘mistakes’ (a murderous purge or a bread queue) occurred. But — with a very few Hobsbawmite or Trotskyite exceptions — nothing like Miéville’s book has appeared from mainstream publishers in English for around 40 years. So it’s nostalgic to read once again an account that starts from the premise that the revolutions in Russia — which irrevocably changed the world — were in essence and intent a good thing. As Miéville puts it:

It was an epic adventure… of hopes, betrayals, unlikely coincidences, war and intrigue and bravery and cowardice and foolishness, farce, derring-do, tragedy; of epochal ambitions and change…

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But barring the occasional descent into Marxist-Leninist jargon — ‘revolutionary defencism’ gets several mentions — when Miéville gets to the action he writes a sparkling narrative: fair, accurate and surprisingly nuanced. It is much more lively than most books on the subject produced in the last two generations — especially about the revolutions outside Petrograd and Moscow, which are often ignored.