What makes the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917 a milestone in world history is the achievements of the Soviet Union and the Communist International during the 25 years after Leon Trotsky’s exile in 1929. These achievements are the reason that the revolution of 1917 remains a world-historical event. Like his hero Trotsky and the whole tribe of anticommunists, Miéville slanders these triumphs.
During the 1930s Leon Trotsky himself was widely published in, and handsomely paid by, the capitalist press. Miéville’s October is a partisan Trotskyist screed that is similarly celebrated by that capitalist press and for the same reason: it is an anti-communist attack on the heroic period of the Soviet Union, the historical legacy of the revolution of 1917.
October is a one-sided interpretation of the insurrection of October 25 / November 7, 1917 in Petrograd and the events leading up to it. At the end Miéville outlines an explicitly Trotskyist, and completely inaccurate, interpretation of the subsequent development of the history of the Soviet Union. The flagrant dishonesty of this false thumbnail sketch of Soviet history naturally raises the question: How historically accurate is the main part of the book?
The primary requisites for any historical work are evidence and objectivity in studying that evidence. Miéville’s book has neither.
A few examples of Mieville’s Trotskyist falsifications:
“…the embrace of ‘Socialism in One Country’ is a dramatic reversal of a foundational thesis of the Bolsheviks …”
This is a Trotskyist lie. In fact, Lenin had repeatedly said Russia had “all that is necessary and sufficient” for building a socialist society. (On Cooperation, 1922).
Miéville also claims that building socialism in the USSR was a “bad hope” (sic). Better that the Soviet Union fail than that it attempts to build socialism! Hitler, Winston Churchill, and all the capitalists and imperialists of the world, would certainly have agreed.
Miéville:
“[Lenin] grows suspicious of Stalin’s personality and his place within the machine. In his last writings, he insists Stalin be removed from his post as general secretary. His advice is not followed.”
Moscow University professor Valentin Sakharov’s detailed and well-known study of Lenin’s supposed “Testament” was published in 2003. Sakharov concludes these documents are forgeries. Sakharov’s evidence is summarized and studied in Grover Furr’s book, The Fraud of the ‘Testament of Lenin’ (2022). Miéville ignores Sakharov’s study entirely.
Following his hero Trotsky Miéville can say nothing but lies about Stalin. A few examples:
“There is a rare hint at something more troubling about the man in the assessment of the party’s Russian Bureau in Petrograd, which allowed him to join, but only as advisor, without the right to a vote – because, it said, of ‘certain personal features that are inherent in him.’”
Viacheslav Molotov, one of the three members of the Russian Bureau already in Petrograd in March, said this never happened! Another member, Aleksandr Shliapnikov, mentions nothing about this in his three-volume memoir of 1917. Even Trotsky, who misses no opportunity to attack and belittle Stalin, doesn’t mention it.
In fact, it can’t be true because Stalin was already a member of the Russian Bureau! He had been appointed to it and to the Central Committee in 1912 by the All-Russian Conference of the Bolshevik party.
Miéville claims that “Stalin went so far in the direction of moderation as to support a merger of Bolsheviks and Mensheviks …” This is a lie.
Miéville copied it straight from Trotsky, who cites no evidence.
Miéville calls collectivization “brutal”. In reality collectivization was “a real reform.” (Mark Tauger) that modernized Soviet agriculture and stopped the thousand-year cycle of killer famines, four of which had struck Russia and Ukraine in the 1920s alone. See Professor Mark Tauger’s article at https://www.historynewsnetwork.org/article/review-of-anne-applebaums-red-famine-stalins-war-o Tauger’s research on Russian and Soviet agriculture is the best in the world.
Miéville on the Moscow Trials:
“Party activists are … forced to betray others, to confess to preposterous crimes with stentorian declarations.”
False again. We have had strong evidence of the guilt of the Moscow Trials defendants for decades. Beginning in 1980 the discoveries of Trotskyist historian Pierre Broué proved that Trotsky had consistently lied about the Moscow Trials and his own conspiracies in all his writings. Trotskyist writers do not mention it.
Stalin, however, did not lie about Trotsky! He acknowledged Trotsky’s leading role in winning over the Petrograd garrison (Pravda November 6, 1918). Stalin reprinted this passage in his book The October Revolution, published in 1934, even though the exiled Trotsky had been slandering Stalin for years.
According to Molotov Stalin even complained that Trotsky’s contribution to the revolution was being suppressed.
“In 1939 Stalin looked through the second volume of the “History of the Civil War” and asked me:
But where is Trotsky’s picture?
But he is an enemy of the people!
He was the People’s Commissar of the Army and Navy! — said Stalin.”
At the second and third Moscow Trials Trotsky was charged with conspiring with Nazi Germany and fascist Japan against the USSR and with plotting assassination and sabotage in the USSR. There is a great deal of evidence to support these charges (see the book by Grover Furr, Leon Trotsky’s Collaboration with Germany and Japan). Like all Trotskyists and anticommunists, Miéville ignores this evidence.
The accomplishments of the socialist Soviet Union: collectivization, industrialization, broad social welfare benefits for workers, the defeat of the Nazi hordes, the feats of the Communist International under Soviet leadership – these were the pivot on which the history of the world in the 20th century turned.
If we are to learn the lessons of 1917 we must discard biased, subjective, and anticommunist accounts like Miéville’s and face the evidence squarely. The new and better world the communists of the last century fought for can only be built on a foundation of historical truth.
