China Miéville’s novelistic account of the Russian Revolution, written for its centenary, shares a title—but not a subtitle—with the 1928 film that Sergei Eisenstein made to mark its ten-year anniversary. For its international release, Eisenstein’s film was retitled Ten Days That Shook the World, a name borrowed from the most famous English-language account of the revolution: the American journalist John Reed’s eyewitness report (1919, with a foreword by Vladimir Lenin). A certain implicit history of the last century is conveyed just by comparing Reed’s title with Miéville’s. Though nearly a hundred years apart, the two authors have in common a clear and pronounced ideological sympathy with the Bolsheviks, which may strike many readers as the most provocative or unusual thing about Miéville’s work. Miéville states clearly from the outset that he writes from a place of partisan attachment to the revolutionary project, and the guiding ideology of his text could be described as nonsectarian (and often self-critical) Marxism. In moving from Reed’s Ten Days to Miéville’s October, however, we transition from the rhetoric of world-historical, and current, events to that of a contingent, specific tale. The space of action and consequence, Reed’s “World” shrinks to Miéville’s “Russia.” Moreover, the radically disruptive open-endedness denoted by Reed’s title—the world has been shaken, its eventual state of rest yet unclear—yields to the closure of Miéville’s term story, with its connotations of narrative shape and chronological borders. Of course, Miéville, unlike Reed, is writing retrospectively, a quarter century after the fall of the Soviet Union. The word story, though, also points to the most idiosyncratic aspect of Miéville’s book: its literary style. Although a number of scholarly books within the last year or two have been written to mark the revolution’s centenary, summing up its course and legacy from the detached pose of academic history, Miéville’s contribution is unique not only in its leftism but also in its rendering of events in Russia from February to October 1917 as an avowedly literary narrative.The end result is an engaging, beautifully written, thoughtful, and informative book that is hard to locate in a single genre but that might be described as a gripping nonfictional novel. The eminent Soviet historian Sheila Fitzpatrick, surveying a number of recent histories of the revolution and the Soviet order in the London Review of Books, made special mention of Miéville’s work both for its approach to the revolution as an inspiring event, rather than a now-irrelevant failure, and for its often moving artistry.1 Although Miéville’s acknowledgments state that the original idea for the book came from Sebastian Budgen, his editor at the leftist popular and intellectual press Verso, Miéville himself is exceptionally qualified to produce a novelistic work devoted to 1917. Politically, he is a long-standing member of multiple left-wing groups and parties, mostly Trotskyist, as well as the author of a dissertation on Marxism and international law.2 Much more prominently, however, he is an established author of science fiction and speculative (or, as he puts it, “weird”) fiction: like October, his celebrated fictional oeuvre evinces a fascination with both left politics and urban settings, including Embassytown (2012), The City and the City (2009), and the Bas-Lag trilogy (2000–2004), among other works. The only aspects of his October that much resemble those of a conventional or popular history are an insert of black-and-white photographs in the middle, depicting key historical players and scenes, and an extensive bibliography, with lively and admittedly nonscholarly annotations. The experience of reading October is most comparable to that of reading a novel, but when the text’s contents are taken into account, it sits somewhere at the border of novel, history, and even propaganda. (I do not use this last term to October’s detriment or as a synonym for “simplistic.”) The closest thing to a statement of purpose that Miéville offers comes in his introduction, which describes the tale of the revolution and, by implication, the account of it Miéville hopes to produce, as “an astonishing story . . . an epic, a concatenation of adventures, hopes, betrayals, unlikely coincidences, war and intrigue” (o, 2)—and, as he takes care to point out, a story with heroes and villains, shaped by its author’s sympathies.Accompanying this generic indeterminacy is the issue of the book’s audience or audiences, both actual and intended. Miéville’s cult fame and the excitement and accessibility of his narrative make October a likely candidate for the most widely and popularly read of the historical accounts of 1917 to have emerged in 2016–17. Yet more specialized readerships might take issue with various aspects of Miéville’s work, perhaps in mutually exclusive ways. Other Marxists in the Anglophone world, not known for their comity to one another at the best of times, may locate various points of doctrinal disagreement with Miéville’s account: he relies heavily on the scholar Lars T. Lih, whose work provides a revisionist account and reconstruction of the political positions of key revolutionary figures (particularly Lenin) over their lives, to polarizing effect among Marxists. Meanwhile, some academics, particularly historians and Slavists, may find the desire to extract the revolution’s positive legacy inherently disreputable, and the claim for its continued relevance unconvincing. The scope of Miéville’s bibliography and list of “further reading” makes plain that he is well read in the immense body of literature on the revolution, including both scholarly work and primary sources, but the bibliography, which makes reference to “those of us only confident in English” (o, 330), also suggests that Miéville lacks reading knowledge of Russian. This linguistic limitation is not prohibitive, given the extent of translated material available—the Bolsheviks themselves, at least in the early years of the revolution, were famously committed to internationalism, a commitment that extended to translation—as well as the fact that the acknowledgments thank several prominent Russian intellectuals whom Miéville has consulted. Yet a restriction to English necessarily mediates his approach to the events in question and to archival materials.The relevance of fluency in Russian to writing a book on the Russian Revolution raises, in turn, the question of the revolution’s specificity and scope, a question also latent in the aforementioned disjuncture between the “World” in Reed’s title and the “Russia” in Miéville’s. Certainly, the Russian state under Vladimir Putin shows no interest in claiming or celebrating the legacy of October. The Russian Revolution was understood by its participants, and most observers, as a world-historical event: the Bolsheviks (as well as allied communists in other countries) intended not just to overturn the Russian empire but to ignite an international worker’s revolution, which would put a permanent end to capitalism worldwide. This, of course, did not take place. By the 1930s the doctrine of “socialism in one country”—propounded by Stalin, whom Miéville, like most leftists, abhors—was enshrined as official Soviet policy, revising Marx and Engels’s own insistence on proletarian internationalism. In this light, Miéville is confronted with the historiographical problem of how to responsibly negotiate between the world-historical conception, stakes, and ramifications of the revolution, on the one hand, and its regional and geographic particulars, on the other. Forswearing the hazy mystifications of the discourse of the “Russian soul,” the introduction sets its sights on “the world-historic causes and ramifications of the upheaval”: “That there are Russian specifics to the story is hardly in doubt; that they explain the revolution, let alone explain it away, is” (o, 2). Yet the epilogue, after three hundred pages of closely following the highly situated Russian details of 1917, asserts that “the specifics of Russia, 1917, are distinct and crucial” (o, 318). Much of the weight borne by the novelistic or pseudonovelistic form that Miéville employs in those three hundred pages lies in its ability to trace the geographically and historically located specifics of the story while still, implicitly, opening up the legacy of 1917 in a transnational or transhistorical manner: “This was Russia’s revolution, certainly, but it belonged and belongs to others, too. It could be ours” (o, 3).Given the narrative style of the work, its ideology is advanced less as an explicit argument than as a guiding ethos, although its basic position of critical solidarity with the Bolsheviks is clearly articulated. (Following Lih and others, much attention is devoted to the debates and disagreements among Bolshevik leaders throughout the year and to the rapid shifts in position of both the party at large and figures like Lenin and Trotsky as individuals.) Following the brief introduction, the first chapter, “The Prehistory of 1917,” covers an enormous amount of historical context in a concise, fast-moving, epigrammatic style, from Ivan the Terrible’s sixteenth-century reign through the mid-nineteenth-century abolition of legal serfdom, the development of Russian agrarian radicalism and then Russian Marxism, and the short-lived Revolution of 1905. This “prehistory” ends on the eve of the February Revolution in 1917, with World War I in full swing, and the Russian monarchy and Romanov dynasty, in the person of Tsar Nicholas II, tottering obliviously toward collapse. After these preliminary chapters, the rest of the book follows the nine months from February to October, shifting from the extremely wide chronological perspective of the first chapter into the steady, fine-grained narrative rhythm that sustains the bulk of the book. Each month receives a chapter of its own, with a short subtitle that sums up the developments of that month: for example, “February: Joyful Tears” (for the February Revolution), “April: The Prodigal” (Lenin’s return to Russia from years of exile in Switzerland), “July: Hot Days” (for the abortive uprising known as the “July Days,” whose failure led to the renewed suppression of the Bolsheviks by the state), and, finally—with no subtitle—“Red October.”These nine chapters provide a blow-by-blow account of the actions, reactions, spontaneous movements, and sudden collapses that dispatched first the Romanov dynasty, then the bourgeois Provisional Government headed by Alexander Kerensky, and that saw the Bolsheviks grow from a small band of determined antiwar left-Marxist activists to the most powerful and influential party in Petrograd, backed by significant militant sectors of the city’s workers and armed forces. (St. Petersburg, the Imperial Russian capital, was renamed Petrograd after the outbreak of World War I in an anti-German gesture.) Besides the Bolsheviks, and the right wing of Russian monarchists and military hard-liners (such as General Lavr Kornilov, who attempted to impose martial law in August), Miéville’s story closely follows the non-Bolshevik socialist parties who played decisive roles in 1917. These include the Mensheviks, the non-Bolshevik faction of the former Russian Social-Democratic Workers’ Party. (The two parties’ names point to this originary split: Bolshevik and Menshevik derive from the Russian words for “majority” and “minority,” although the relative memberships of the two groups fluctuated over time.) Arguably more significant, and the party with the largest membership, are the Socialist Revolutionaries (SRs), populists with a peasant base who were heirs to the nineteenth-century radical (and terrorist) tradition. Representing the moderate to right wing of Russian socialism, Mensheviks and SRs tended to support an alliance with the liberal capitalist bourgeoisie, whose political representatives were the Kadet party, on the grounds that Russia’s feudal, agrarian order required a bourgeois revolution on the western European model to foster the economic development that might, eventually, lead to a socialist revolution. When workers took to the streets of Petrograd in February, these more conservative socialists saw a chance for bourgeois liberalism to finally take root in Russia, after years of monarchical absolutism, repression, and stagnation. This “stageist” conception of Marxism was opposed by the Bolsheviks, along with left-wing factions of the Mensheviks and SRs, who argued for accelerating the transfer of power to workers, soldiers, sailors, and peasants, and their organs of elected delegates, the soviets (the word soviet means “council” in Russian). The institution of the soviet was first formed by striking workers during the Revolution of 1905, then revived in February twelve years later. The soviets were the official representatives of both the masses and, soon, the army, furious and exhausted after years of European warfare.The compelling core of Miéville’s story is constituted by the deep antagonisms, ambiguous alliances, and occasional clashes among these actors. Particularly significant is the convoluted institutional stalemate known as dvoevlastie or “dual power.” The spontaneous nature of the uprising that became the February Revolution brought about this awkward arrangement, in which the Provisional Government of liberal and procapitalist ministers drawn from the Duma (a largely powerless legislative body founded by Tsar Nicholas after 1905) was obliged to share authority with the newly reconstituted Petrograd Soviet, representatives of the working and soldiering masses. Yet the Soviet was dominated by the aforementioned moderate and conservative socialists, Mensheviks, and SRs, whose understanding of Marxism led them to insist on bourgeois rule by the Provisional Government as a matter of historical necessity. Consequently, the Soviet resisted claiming power or ending Russia’s involvement in the catastrophic world war. The slogan proclaimed by Lenin after his return to Russia from Swiss exile in 1917, “All power to the soviets,” was in large part a provocative attempt to force the Soviet into embracing its authority as representative of the people, rather than yielding it to the Provisional Government. The ensuing political tangle is elegantly exemplified by Miéville’s gloss on an episode during the July Days, when the Menshevik Soviet leader Fyodor Dan deflected the arrival of militant soldiers from the army’s 176th Regiment, who had arrived to join an anti–Provisional Government uprising that was gripping Petrograd, by ordering them to sentry duty: “It is a curio of the moment that hard-left advocates of ‘all power to the soviets’ were delegated by a soviet opponent to defend the Soviet currently arguing furiously against taking the power they wanted it to take” (o, 182).The institution of soviets would inspire the name of the Soviet Union, the federative state that became the Russian Revolution’s primary product after it failed to spread throughout Europe as planned. The grim trajectory of Soviet history is the crucial context for any retrospective consideration of the revolution, and Miéville engages with it in a short epilogue, “After October.” This epilogue, while proclaiming a resistance to “a hundred years of crude, ahistorical, ignorant, bad-faith and opportunist attacks on October,” insists on the need to “interrogate the revolution” and curtly sketches how “the bureaucrats become custodians of a top-down development towards a monstrosity they call ‘socialism.’ . . . Stalinism: a police state of paranoia, cruelty, murder and kitsch” (o, 314–15). The book ends, however, less than five pages after committing itself to this “interrogation.” To offer a new theorization or reckoning with the legacy of Bolshevism, its political and moral stakes, seems outside the scope of Miéville’s avowedly synthetic and introductory work. Miéville’s ultimate answer to perhaps the central question raised by his epilogue—“All the same, did October lead inexorably to Stalin? . . . Is the gulag the telos of 1917?” (o, 315)—is to insist, after all, on the promise of contingency, and of different paths left untaken, as the central positive lesson of 1917 and of the Leninist intervention in history. Miéville closes with the image, which recurs throughout the book, of a diverted train, symbolizing the possibility of such a historical shift away from what seemed inevitable or forbidden.But how might the train, once diverted, be diverted again? How could October, and especially what followed in its wake, have gone differently? Miéville frustratingly refrains from attempting to answer this question. Indeed, one of the most distinctive features of October is the principled refusal of Miéville, author of speculative fiction, to speculate. Despite the novelistic style of October, every detail in the text is derived from a historical or documentary source, including every document mentioned and every line of dialogue. Miéville has claimed that even his imagery, which a casual reader might well have chalked up to artistic license—such as the figures he describes wandering through the streets of Petrograd during the February Revolution, including “a young teenager with a kitchen knife . . . [a] student with machine-gun bullets slung around his waist, a rifle in each hand . . . [a] man wield[ing] a pole for cleaning tramlines as if it were a pike” (o, 50)—is derived from real sources. Having scoured the firsthand accounts of 1917 (or at least those of them available in English), Miéville demonstrates a keen eye for the latent novelistic potential of real events.The rigorously nonfictional ethos of October places it, perhaps consciously, in an artistic lineage with much of the work of the Soviet avant-garde. Although never very popular among domestic audiences of the time, practitioners of avant-garde or left art were inspired by the revolution to proclaim the primacy of reality over fiction in their creative manifestos and practice. A collection, Literature of Fact (Literatura fakta, edited by Nikolai Chuzhak), released by the Left Front of Arts (LEF) in 1929, offers a forceful statement of this view: that the world’s first workers’ and peasants’ state requires an art of “fact” and “reality,” rather than belletristic invention; that Soviet literature should be informed by the reportage principles of newspapers, newsreels, and photographs. Outside of LEF’s projects, the fascination with documentary in early Soviet culture gave rise to multimedia experiments that, relying primarily on images rather than words, have attained wider international appreciation and even canonization, notably the photography and photomontage pioneered by Alexander Rodchenko and the formally groundbreaking documentary films of Dziga Vertov (Man with a Movie Camera) and Esfir Shub (Fall of the Romanov Dynasty).3 Particularly given the popularity of the Soviet avant-garde among the British left-wing intellectual milieu to which Miéville belongs, the influence of this early Soviet documentary tendency is detectable in his commitment to invent nothing, to never stray from the documented historical record of what people actually said and did.Yet in other crucial respects, Miéville’s novelization of the facts diverges sharply from Soviet avant-garde practice, embracing aesthetics, imagery, and tropes that derive from more traditional sources. Wearing its literary presentation on its sleeve, October is framed by allusions to, and borrowings from, canonical texts of Russian literature. Some of these texts were written in direct response to the revolution, such as Osip Mandelstam’s 1918 poem “Sumerki svobody” (“Twilight/Dawn of Freedom”—the Russian sumerki can be translated either way, a fact that Miéville lingers on as an emblem of the revolution’s ambiguous legacy). Others, however, constitute long-standing topoi of the Russian canon and Russian culture. This is the point at which, especially for specialists in Russian literature, Miéville’s lack of Russian proficiency poses interesting problems. His story is focused almost entirely on St. Petersburg/Petrograd, a decision that he justifies in terms of efficiency: “It is here that politics will move most quickly. . . . St Petersburg will be the crucible of the revolutions” (o, 6).4 Especially given the limits of length, this is a legitimate choice, although historians might justly protest that such a Petrograd-centered approach neglects much compelling work on the revolution.5 However, this choice of setting also seems to constitute an inscription within a specific literary genealogy, a corpus that the critic V. N. Toporov dubbed the “Petersburg Text.” This tradition encompasses some of Russian literature’s most widely read and translated works, both poetic and narrative, including texts by Alexander Pushkin, Nikolai Gogol, Fyodor Dostoevsky, and Andrei Bely. In Toporov’s reading, these authors all participate in rendering the Petersburg cityscape as a specific conceptual system, the monumental and fantastic site of a metaphysical clash of opposites: the sublime and the grotesque, ordered rationalism and elemental irrationality, civilization and tyrannical power, utopian plans and apocalyptic doom.6 (The most familiar work in this tradition for Anglophone readers is probably Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment, a novel intimately linked to the setting and atmosphere of Petersburg.) To put it another way, the Petersburg Text presents Russia’s Imperial capital in inescapably mythic terms, constituting some of Russian culture’s most artistically hallowed myths about itself—about, in particular, the vexed relationship between Russia and the West, given that Petersburg was founded and constructed as a symbol of (European) modernity, at the forefront of Peter the Great’s state-driven modernizing project.Miéville’s debt to this powerful wellspring of Russian domestic literary mythology rests in unacknowledged, and perhaps unconscious, tension with his admirable commitment to resist the pervasive tendency for those who write about Russia (perhaps especially British authors: Miéville singles out Virginia Woolf’s Orlando for criticism) to exoticize it, or to fall prey to the “something in the Russia-ness of Russia that often seems to intoxicate” (o, 2). Chapter 1, the chapter of “prehistory,” directly following the introduction in which this very anti-Woolfian point is made, opens with a foundational scene from the Petersburg Text: the awesome spectacle of a demiurgic Tsar Peter the Great gazing on the barren marshes by the Gulf of Finland and pronouncing, in defiance of nature, that a grand city be built there. (Miéville implicitly credits Dostoevsky, quoting the description of Petersburg from Notes from Underground as “the most abstract and premeditated city in the whole world,” but the tableau actually originates from the opening to Pushkin’s 1833 narrative poem “The Bronze Horseman.” This work arguably inaugurated the Petersburg Text but is much less known to Anglophone audiences than Notes from Underground, perhaps because Pushkin’s poetry poses more difficulties to translators into English than Dostoevsky’s prose.) Miéville himself identifies this scene as mythological (“a tenacious myth” [o, 5]) and adheres to his demystifying credo, carefully pointing out that it never happened. Yet his drawing on the scene to launch his historical narrative calls on the instaurating force of the myth. The ambiguity of this opening scene is exacerbated by the uncertainty of how aware Miéville, given his lack of Russian literacy, might be of the cultural and literary codes he is manipulating.Moreover, the verbal present tense that Miéville uses in sketching this image of Peter, with its accompanying sense of immediacy and perpetual now-ness against the flow of time, continues throughout the “prehistory” chapter: the 1861 abolition of serfdom, the Russian Social-Democratic Labor Party’s 1903 split into Bolsheviks and Mensheviks, the Revolution of 1905, the outbreak of World War I, and the infamous 1916 murder of Rasputin are all rendered in the same quasi-mythical present tense, which resurfaces in the epilogue. The bulk of the book, the nine central chapters covering February to October 1917, is narrated in the past tense. Perhaps not coincidentally, these chapters are also the most concerned with the precise contours and chronology of events. On the one hand, the present tense seems to be a device for Miéville both to cover wide spans of time in brief and to directly address ethical and political concerns that feel pressing and unresolved (such as the above-mentioned questions about the revolution’s telos). On the other, the move into, and then out of, the past tense marks the narrative’s entry into, and exit from, nine months of revolutionary undecidedness. Counterintuitively, whereas the framing present tense of chapter 1 and the epilogue seem to fix both the revolution’s “prehistory” and its post-1917 trajectory in amber, the past tense that dominates from February to October renders the revolution as a live, though “past,” site of struggle. Perhaps the greatest merit of Miéville’s narrative is its conveyance of the specifically political stakes of organized action during a period in which central questions of social order—who should hold power, through what means, and why—have been thrown up for contestation. At least to me, October opens up most compellingly to the present when it attends most closely to the speed, and shape, of change and struggle during nine months of 1917 in Petrograd. The possible ongoing relevance of the Russian revolutionary experience to world history is communicated more suggestively the more Miéville shies away from world-historical questions to adhere to the specifics of that experience.For the formalist critic and literary theorist Viktor Shklovsky, himself a participant in the revolutionary tumult of 1917, the function of art lay in its constant complication of perception, its deliberately dragging out the process of seeing in order to resist a final recognition. The poetics of a prose narrative, for Shklovsky, emerge from the panoply of devices it uses to delay our progress, to prevent us from arriving at the end of the story.7 The ultimate benefit of the novelistic mode, as employed by Miéville, might be seen as its enabling of exactly this kind of resistance to finalization. The Russian Revolution is one of the most frequently narrativized moments in modern history, an event from which every political tendency in the world has drawn its own conclusions; rendering its story through artistic prose, as Miéville does, makes it possible to postpone the recognition of its (empirical) conclusion, which is familiar to everyone, and concentrate on how that conclusion came about. The ramifications of this extending of perception, surely, are at least as much political as they are aesthetic.One of the most Shklovskian devices used by Miéville can be found in October’s epigraph, an opaque citation from Nikolai Chernyshevsky’s 1863 novel What Is to Be Done? that consists of nothing but two even rows of dots: ..........................................................(o, vi)While little read now, and generally derided as an aesthetic object, Chernyshevsky’s book was tremendously influential, much beloved by Russian materialists and radicals. What Is to Be Done? is a programmatic treatise for the rational reconstruction of society, which Chernyshevsky wrote from a prison cell; it was also one of Lenin’s favorite novels, as well as the namesake of his famous 1902 pamphlet on party organization. The wordless lines cited by Miéville occur in a famous dream sequence, in which the novel’s heroine, Vera Pavlovna, experiences a prophetic vision of the liberated future.8 The dots both designate and conceal the revolution that will bring this utopia into existence. Chernyshevsky’s most pressing motive for this strategy of representation would have been the need to avoid provoking Tsarist censorship, but it has the significant effect of placing the revolutionary event outside positive representation altogether. Returning to his epigraph in the epilogue, Miéville reads Chernyshevsky’s dots as a kind of religious gesture, “apophatic revolutionism,” the negative designation of an “utter reconfiguration” that cannot be embodied in language: “Chernyshevsky’s dots, then, are one iteration of a strange story. This book has been an attempt at another” (o, 306).Yet, while Miéville (with a tacit nod to Walter Benjamin) movingly locates an “unsayable” excess of “messianic interruption” at the core of Chernyshevsky’s dots, his own iteration of the revolution is in no respect “beyond representation,” nor could it be described as an ontologically negative “unwriting” (o, 305–6). October relates the events of 1917 as a contest of institutions, classes, ideologies, and masses, in which every participant actively and constantly struggled, through both word and deed, to articulate a specific and positive vision of the society to come. In an era when political collapse seems again like a real possibility, the contradictions of capitalism grow starker by the day, and terms like Bolshevik and Leninist are being drained of any meaning and used as obstacles to clear thinking about the global political situation, this intervention is particularly timely.9 After his declaration that the Russian Revolution “belonged and belongs to others, too. It could be ours,” Miéville ends his introduction by writing that “if its [the revolution’s] sentences are still unfinished, it is up to us to finish them” (o, 3). In this light, the analogy he draws between his own October and Chernyshevsky’s dots could be read as an acknowledgment that his book necessarily also stops short of finishing the sentences that might, one day, describe a successful revolution for the liberation of humankind and the abolition of class. But it draws close attention to the syntax and semantics of how such sentences are begun.