China Miéville on “October: The Story of the Russian Revolution”

China Miéville, author of October: The Story of the Russian Revolution, in discussion with Barbara C. Allen and Bhaskar Sunkara. At Verso Books in Brooklyn, May 19, 2017.
Award-winning writer China Miéville has long been inspired by the ideals of the Russian Revolution and here, on the centenary of the revolution, he provides his own distinctive take on its history.
In February 1917, in the midst of bloody war, Russia was still an autocratic monarchy: nine months later, it became the first socialist state in world history. How did this unimaginable transformation take place? How was a ravaged and backward country, swept up in a desperately unpopular war, rocked by not one but two revolutions?
This is the story of the extraordinary months between those upheavals, in February and October, of the forces and individuals who made 1917 so epochal a year, of their intrigues, negotiations, conflicts and catastrophes. From familiar names like Lenin and Trotsky to their opponents Kornilov and Kerensky; from the byzantine squabbles of urban activists to the remotest villages of a sprawling empire; from the revolutionary railroad Sublime to the ciphers and static of coup by telegram; from grand sweep to forgotten detail.
Historians have debated the revolution for a hundred years, its portents and possibilities: the mass of literature can be daunting. But here is a book for those new to the events, told not only in their historical import but in all their passion and drama and strangeness. Because as well as a political event of profound and ongoing consequence, Miéville reveals the Russian Revolution as a breathtaking story.
Purchase "October: The Story of the Russian Revolution" from Verso Books:
www.versobooks.com/products/1...
About the speakers:
China Miéville is the multi-award-winning author of many works of fiction and non-fiction. His fiction includes The City and the City, Embassytown and This Census-Taker, and has won the Hugo, World Fantasy and Arthur C. Clarke awards; his non-fiction includes the photo-illustrated essay London’s Overthrow and Between Equal Rights: A Marxist Theory of International Law. He has written for various publications, including the New York Times, Guardian, Conjunctions and Granta and he is a founding editor of the quarterly Salvage.
Barbara C. Allen is Associate Professor of History at La Salle University in Philadelphia, USA. She has published articles in Cahiers du Monde Russe, Jahrbücher für Geschichte Osteuropas, and Revolutionary Russia. She is the author of Alexander Shlyapnikov, 1885-1937: Life of an Old Bolshevik (Haymarket Books).
Bhaskar Sunkara is an American political writer, editor and publisher of Jacobin magazine. He is the editor of several books including the ABCs of Socialism (Verso) and Europe in Revolt: Mapping the New European Left (Haymarket).

[@Sherjan0077]

Good Discussion, Well Done comrade China Miéville and red salute From Afghanistan

[@kurtzmenabrea]

China Melville he is a great person, as well as an excellent writer, he won't change a thing about this horrible ultra-liberal capitalism, but he remains great. An affectionate greeting from Milan Italy

[@OdwallaJuice]

Wow, that bomb shell at the end by China was chilling.

[@ERRATICCHEESE2]

Which bombshell?

[@OdwallaJuice]

That liberalism at a time of crisis-as an institution, as a movement, as a group, as a political ideal-will choose reaction rather than change.

[@quarkraven]

Shame that the front of the table was more in focus than their faces. But great meeting, discussion and topic.

[@TrueKerrad]

Russia wth you, China. Thanks

[@SDG.12]

If only the German Revolution succeeded....
If only Trotsky succeeded Lenin....

[@zackwyvern2582]

And not that power-hungry bastard Stalin, belittled as an intellectual even among the Bolsheviks. Russia would be a 200 years younger America, and perhaps even more influential, in the ushering of successful world communism, the global overthrow of the bourgeois establishment...
Surely communism would not today be so demonized under Trotsky.

[@dedg0st]

Trotsky was a garbage egoist.

[@got-riffs]

@@zackwyvern2582 It would be demonized either way. America would propagandize Trotsky just like how they propagandize Stalin, and you'd be saying "If only Stalin succeeded Lenin" because you are incapable of realizing that there are lies about Stalin that stem from the bourgeoisie's desire to induce a Stockholm Syndrome onto the proletariat. Stalin was not a perfect man, and he did many things that are indefensible. But Trotsky would've turned the USSR into a bourgeois state 30 years earlier than it did with his petty-bourgeois revisionism and opportunism.

[@albertbenson4395]

Sunkara look bored

[@MuskPumpkin]

Albert Benson right?? 😶

[@davidmoulton1991]

Bhaskar always looks so uncomfortable

[@davidmoulton1991]

China is such a windbag, but he can get away with it as he's so smart and eloquent

[@phinhager6509]

This is an author who is himself dangerous as any of his characters.

[@jbmuggins8815]

good