 Hello, and welcome to this week's edition of Navara FM, brought to you by Navara Media, and broadcast live on Resonance 104.4 FM, one of the last remaining redoubts of the old London, resolutely and obstinately broadcasting from amid the metastasizing luxury apartments and glass buyers of finance capital. I'm James Butler, and joining me in the studio this week is China Mieval, a novelist whose work will likely be familiar to many of our listeners, and now the author of an extraordinary narrative history of the revolutions of 1917, October. That book is where our focus will be today, but there's also a political dimension to all of the novels, I think. Sometimes latent, sometimes pronounced from the explicit concerns of iron counsel through to the astonishing exploration of the politics of language and embassy town, the admissible and yet inextricably interdependent experiences of the border in the city and the city as well as an enduring concern about the urban, about the nature of cities, a theme which runs throughout one of my favourite of the novels, the loving take on the occult pot boiler, Kraken, as well as all of that, those who have followed your career know that you are a committed socialist, and I think we might talk about commitment and what that means today, and you're also part of the editorial team, collective crew at Salvage. Welcome to the show. Thank you so much for having me. A hundred years, a hundred years after the revolution, and in a sense it's obvious in a very banal sense, why one would write a book for the centenary, but it's not obvious that one would do so in such a manner as you have, and at many points during the past hundred years, it's been easy to talk of 1917 as an epochal event, a bursting forth onto the historical plane of a new thing which alters forever the story of humanity thereafter, so conflicts about its meanings, about its origins, its replicability, its inevitability, its ownership rose and fell, and these were meaningful conflicts because what we said about the revolution said a lot about what we thought the world was or could be, and now the world defined by it is no more, and for many among the latest wave of historical research as the revolution itself disappears under their microscope, it disarticulates into mere happenstance, luck, and it's no more myth than truth, and it would be easy to write the blustering socialist defence of the revolution full of bad faith and bad hope, and that book has been written many times, instead you chose to write the story of a revolutionary period from February to October, month by month, and its protagonists shift and change the expected Bolsheviks but also the soldiers at the front, the many sympathetic left Mensheviks and revolutionaries, the provincial Soviets, the streets which explode away from the kind of worried meeting chamber of the provisional government or the Soviet or whatever. Why this month by month structure and what is the story of the revolution? Well, I'll duck the second question for a moment. I mean, the initial idea was actually quite prosaic, which was without in any way wanting to sort of duck or disavow the obvious political questions and indeed commitment and so on. I and my editor Sebastian Buzhen, we were sort of talking two or three years ago, and obviously the centenary was coming up and we thought that you know, it would be really useful and interesting, hopefully to have precisely unapologetically a kind of narrative history, a popular narrative history for the, I think quite a lot of people who are interested know that this was a really big thing, but literally just don't know what happened when so that so there was there was very much a sense of trying to kind of prioritise that storytelling aspect. You know, we kind of using the fact that I'm better known for fiction and trying to write it sort of unapologetically as a sort of as a narrative with that sense of almost novelistic rhythm and acceleration and so on and so forth. So that on one level, it's just, you know, if particularly if you're relatively new to the topic, you know, and you just want to know what happened when in this extraordinary year, this idea is that the book the idea is that the book will will give you a good, rigorous, you know, researched but non specialist introduction. And then, obviously, with within that, there are, you know, sort of discussions of the politics and particularly at the end, there's a kind of there's a certain kind of looking back and a certain kind of elegiac approach, I suppose. But the reason for kind of doing it as a kind of month by month chapter by chapter thing was kind of emerged quite early on, which was the the increasing rhythm of the events, you know, it sort of presented itself. And that that sense of wanting to to kind of submerge the reader into that kind of tide of acceleration. One of the things that was interesting is when when I was planning it when we were planning it, we thought we would be jostling in a really crowded marketplace, we thought politics aside, irrespective of where you stand on the revolution, simply in terms of the importance of this, as you say, as a big story, centenary, we're going to be, you know, it's going to be crowded. And for all the genuinely interesting exhibitions and so on, in terms of introductory narrative histories, that has not been the case. And that's been a genuine surprise to me. And I think that's been replicated actually across media. I don't know, you know, there isn't there hasn't been sort of great television history that you might expect there hasn't been the kind of endless radio discussion that you might think. And you know, and I think the reasons for that are worth exploring. And I think, you know, it's quite a depressing thing, actually. Yeah, people just, you know, regard it as as the foundational event of a period of history that's over. Yeah, yeah. Well, we're so thinking, you know, it swings and roundabouts, because obviously, for me, on the one hand, less commercial pressure, less competition for the book, on the downside, the triumph of a decades long ideological project of reactionary forgetting. So, you know, swings and roundabouts, really. But I mean, I think so I think the temptation, you know, there could be temptations here about sort of, you know, the kind of post facto justification or to say, you know, okay, so here are the bits of the revolution that are important and that must remain and, you know, to extract from the from this story, you know, a cataclysm, cataclysm of revolution. And you don't do that. And I think I think that's a good thing. Whether temptations here for you is, you know, I mean, you know, whether things that were difficult to look in the face and whether surprises. Surprises, certainly. In terms of difficult to look in the face, that's that's an interesting formulation. I suppose my, my thoughts would be that it was it was a question of kind of anguish, because in for the most part, you know, if you have as as I do a solidarity with the revolution, hopefully a non dogmatic and not uncritical solidarity, but a solidarity. A lot of these degenerations and mistakes and indeed crimes at a certain point. One's aware of them. One's one has a sense of them. But to kind of really start researching them and and you know, really see where this happened where that happened was painful, rather than something that I felt like, you know, I had to kind of overcome an internal resistance, not least because one of the things that you find when you're researching it is that these were very contested at the time, including from within, you know, the Bolshevik party, the left sars, they're they're initially comrades, you know, so it's not as if there was this kind of, you know, ineluctable tide towards the catastrophe. And it's certainly not. And I think at its worst, the left has sometimes done this. It's not as if to defend the revolution necessitates sort of rather scurrying over those issues. You know, I mean, I think, you know, one can take a leaf from people like Victor Surge's book, who Victor Surge who absolutely refuses to do this, including at that moment. And of course, that also means understanding the the external without pitching it as, you know, therefore it was no one's fault. But you know, understanding the the constraints and the external circumstances and so on. So painful very much so. Yeah. Talk to me about the surprises. The surprises were, again, I sort of formally knew that, for example, within the Bolsheviks, despite the sort of the the smears, if you like, of history, that there was a lot of kind of internal debate and so on. But when you're actually really kind of working through the, the literature, and I read a lot of the, you know, as many of the histories I could, the sheer amount of like, jostling, irritation, argument, disagreement, people getting things wrong, including people like Lenin, you know, for all the kind of post, you know, post facto hagiography and so on. That was, you know, not a bolt from the blue, but the scale of it was was was a real surprise. The, also there were certain figures that I was surprised to find myself with what I can only describe as a kind of narrative affection for. So most obviously someone like Karenski, whose politics were, you know, invidious and appalling and confused and so on and so forth, but who it's very difficult not to find yourself kind of wanting to him reappear on the story, because he's just such an extraordinary figure, you know. And then there were the the figures that I knew very little about, like Maria Spirit de Nova of the left socialist revolutionaries who one of the surprises was the extent to which I, you know, she she ended up shining for me and I wanted to know more and I was really, you know, fascinated and so on. So those were the things that kind of that kind of jumped out and the sense of fast at times, not always. I mean, she really shines out of the narrative here. And I was left wanting to know more about her. And because I think it's, you know, and there is a sense and we'll come on to talk about it, about that halo of people around or close to the Bolsheviks, who are not Bolsheviks, who are, you know, they are the in some in some senses throughout the narrative, they bear the possibility of an unrealized future. Right. I think that's one of the themes that we can come on to. But in terms, I just wanted to pick, because you mentioned exhibitions, now I was on that question of kind of a long history of or a project of ideological forgetting, which I think is an absolute way of putting it. And it really is possible to enter into kind of polemic with the enormous condescension of post actually this phrase that E.P. Thompson uses about the Luddites, but it's it's now increasingly actually used in this case, as if every participant in the revolution were a dupe of a few, a few central characters or as if, you know, the notion of emancipation was not current or shared at all. I and I was thinking this when I went to see the Royal Acasemus show, which collects together some extraordinary art, and then curates it in, you know, almost unbelievably offensive way. It says, you know, every artist was secretly doing something else, you know, Tatlain is secretly a mystic, as is, you know, as is Malovich. And then, you know, they're just having to, you know, make that art fit in with the revolution. Yeah. They're never interested in the question of revolution itself. So I think there's a historical drift that's necessary to correct here. And it's also just worth saying on that topic that, you know, a cursory look at the at the literature, at the letters, you know, at the at the diaries at the discussions just shows that to be flatly false. Like you can you can disagree with with these people, you can argue about their politics and so on. But the idea that there was not this immense explosive fascination and drive towards precisely and self articulatedly, articulately the idea of revolution and necessity of revolution. One of the things that you see, for me, I think my favorite documents that I that I read where they were the letters, letters from the front, letters from the rural Soviets, letters from the villages and so on. And repeatedly throughout the middle of the year, you have this yearning that like, you know, we had a revolution in February, but it hasn't worked. Something's not it's the you know, it isn't finished something that we need more. You know, I mean, it's it's as you say, it's not just a condescension. It's it to a certain extent, it's an insult because you're kind of, you know, these people knew precisely what it was they wanted in many of those cases. Yeah, I mean, I think one of the things that struck me actually when when reading the book was the figure of Lunacharski, particularly at the beginning of the books, this guy who is fascinating to me. And he's a very, very eccentric, actually. And one of the things I think that comes out of of the book is actually how thick the revolution is with ideas and visions of the way in which the world could be different. And I mean, actually, Lunacharski relatively conventional tastes, things and very strange things and gets sort of all sorts of unfortunate things happen to him. But you know, it really struck me that there is there is one of the things that's made possible by at the beginning of the book by by the February revolution is is simply that that potentiality is made possible. Totally. And this, you know, this explosive kind of, I mean, we use the phrase carnival and carnival, but for a reason, there were literally carnival, you know, and these kind of this this amazing efflorescence of again, very, very explicitly a sense of total potentiality and so on. And one of these very interesting kind of reconfigurings of of allegiances around a lot of these axes, these these axes of potentiality. So Lunacharski and Lenin, for example, who'd had a very fractious relationship for many years, you know, finding themselves, you know, abruptly on the same side in terms of this this driving towards this explosion of alterity and and just to repeat in various different modes, including the religious but not not restricted to that kind of groping for a sense of kind of radical otherness, complete renewal and something that was literally unspeakable and unthinkable. A pluroma was completely there on the surface being articulated repeatedly. It reminds me of Kristen Ross's book on the Paris Commune, a communal luxury where she talks about the the astonishing explosion of creativity in the defense of the commune itself that legitimated these ideas that it made them possible for the first time. I think for me, this is one of the reasons that the the various the particular kind of articulations of religion of orthodoxy in particular, but certainly not only and it end of dissenting sects and so on are both incredibly moving and also incredibly fascinating in terms of kind of symptomatic readings. So you have talk about surprises. You have these sort of asides from journalists talking about how monks and nuns in the in the collective, you know, in the in the monasteries and so on are like overthrowing their own abbots and reading the Bible as an apocalyptic renewal text and so on. And some of the kind of dissenting religious traditions, not only unfortunately of the left. So you also get this kind of the eonity, this kind of essentially kind of proto, well, more or less explicitly fascist ecstatics for whom the pogrom becomes an almost kind of holy act and so on. So that kind of apocalyptic apocalyptic discourse is everywhere. It saturates that year. And I think you're right, that's why Luna Charsky is such an interesting figure, because in some ways he represents a particularly pregnant point of connection between the kind of if you like mainstream Bolshevik and Marxist tradition and that sort of kind of yearning, poeticised tradition. Yeah. Yeah. So I want to talk a little bit about the left and the Russian Revolution, the temporary left as well as the historical left. And I suppose to boldly say the importance of the Russian Revolution for left is that revolution is possible. Yeah. Here is how some people did it sometimes reduced to a series of historical laws about how it must happen. And possibly here is where things went badly. Yeah. And yet I think your emphasis in the book, and maybe people won't notice it if they're not kind of familiar with the way in which the subject is treated throughout left history and the history of its reception, is quite a way away from it in some ways. And I mean this in a couple of ways. One is that your attention to protagonists of the revolution, who are not, for example, workers. So it's not it's not a story about the workers of the Putunov factory, for instance, they're there, but they're not the only protagonists of the revolution. And this gets away from the kind of schematic approach of some sort of rather doctrinaire Marxism says, you know, workers reach a certain state and then revolution happens. So that's one thing. The second is you draw from, I assume, Lars T. Lee and various works on on Lenin in drawing a portrait of him that doesn't make him a kind of supernatural political figure. But but certainly a cunning political operator, sensitive to kind of tides and shifts in political mood, but really capable of error, sometimes kind of overweening in force. And this has perhaps implications about how we might treat his work. Well, I mean, on the first question, I the book like all books is trying to do more than one job. And there are contradictions. And so, as I was saying, I, you know, I have my own politics and I don't want to blur those. And those politics are very sympathetic to the to the Bolsheviks and that tradition and and and the the scale of what was done and was attempted and so on. But the the sort of the the first purpose of the book was, as I said, to present a kind of narrative story, including to those who aren't necessarily interested in, you know, the politics in a particularly blooded way, not to foreground analysis in a way that's going to be off putting to the non specialist and so on. And that meant that, for example, some of the kind of details that may be sort of epiphenomenal to the for the real historian, if you like, for the professional historian, I could sort of detain myself on simply because they're wonderful anecdotes, they're amazing stories. And and and also that does mean, as you say, as you suggest, bringing sort of forth various of the kind of particularly colourful and and and and remarkable individuals, the constant attempt is to kind of oscillate between doing it justice as a narrative and as a narrative history, and also not being misleading about the idea that, you know, that this was what created the revolution that it was, you know, this particularly remarkable figure is the reason for it. Similarly talking about the regions beyond Petrograd like constantly trying to bring those in so that there's a sense that this is a, you know, an empire wide phenomenon, you know, in Azerbaijan and in Latvia and so on. And then sort of circling back to inevitably what becomes the centre of gravity, which is St. Petersburg Petrograd. My suspicion is that, again, I suspect like a lot of books that ultimately you can't quite square those circles. So the best what you do is you do the best you can do it's a question of kind of failing as well as you can. So that attempt to to get away from that kind of rather arid sense of iron laws to unabashedly indulge the anecdotal as far as one can simply because it's so beautiful and fascinating to tell as rigorous a story as you can and to and simply to keep people turning pages. It's a juggling. In terms of what you're saying about Lenin, I mean, there has been particularly under the work of people like Lars Lee this this kind of renovation of a lot of our approaches to Lenin and so on. And I remain, you know, profoundly admiring of this man. And I think, you know, one has to kind of walk, you know, that doesn't mean, as I say, hagiography. It doesn't mean certainly doesn't mean never saying he was wrong. It also means putting a lot of his positions into a kind of historical context, which is something that Lee has done very well. And, you know, not not being embarrassed or worried or concerned about saying, you know, he was wrong there. You know, he really didn't help his own case there. You know, that he was ducking the issue a bit there, which which does happen because he was a human being. It's no particular surprise. So in terms of the one thing I think that I do keep coming back to with him is what Lunocharski calls his ability to raise opportunism to the level of genius. And he doesn't mean it as a criticism. He means, you know, he has an almost uncanny antenna for the moment for the weak link. I say almost because sometimes it goes wrong. Sometimes he's wrong. But nonetheless, compared to the other figures compared to, you know, wonderful figures, Spiridonova, Matov, you know, various others, he does have this this this remarkable radar for when to push, where, how far and so on. And he's unconstrained by dogma, which I think is interesting in terms of kind of the reception of them because, you know, one of the things that's really noticeable is the way in which a lot of these forces are restrained by their kind of stages and by their economism. And, you know, they they're like, you know, they they and it gets in the way of like acting politically. And, you know, now I'm not a kind of, you know, anti ideological actionist. But it is really, really striking about how how these opportunities are missed. And, you know, it seems to me a unfortunate fact that the reception of Lenin has kind of boiled down particularly in the West into these kind of really, really arid cliches about how revolution happens, about, you know, what you have to do. Right, right, right. Well, I mean, as you say, the one of the things that is repeatedly remarked on again at the time is the extent to which and the ways in which he breaks from Marxist orthodoxy that he himself was expressing, you know, really quite a short time beforehand and shocks his own comrades to the core in some cases with with his own sort of, you know, breakings from that sort of position. So it was never an anti intellectual thing. He's always, you know, attempting to kind of work out his own sort of theoretical and tactical position. But it is, it does change and it responds very, very minutely to moments and is not scared to kind of go against, you know, certain sort of traditional nostrums of his own movement. You talk about, I can't remember the formulation you use, but again, it's worth pointing out that he is, you know, famously, incredibly splenetic and like rude, you know, and so on about his opponents. And it's worth, you know, you can, you can say that that's not a problem. You can say it's a problem. Certainly, it's worth pointing out that many of his own comrades, a thought it could be a problem at times and be would sort of say to him, dial that down a little bit, you know, so I think that this is another of the paradoxes of I don't want a parody, but a lot of modern day self styled Leninism is not only that it has a kind of frozen and hypostatic notion of his own positions as, as dogma for today, which is absurd. But even down to a sense of kind of style and language, it's somehow he sometimes mimics him in this unconscious, but extraordinarily kitsch way. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, no, it's true that you you find, you know, I find a pick up a pamphlet or a leaf. Wow, these are these are like, like fragments, like shored against your own ruin, that they're like pulled out of these kind of 100 year old texts and like, like the translations of you know, absolutely, maybe 100, maybe 70 years ago. There's something about the very particular oddly stilted register of particularly the kind of some of some aspects. Again, I don't want a parody of the British left, that one has this epiphany at a certain point was like, oh, you're riffing off 100 year old translation. It can have its own poetry, but it's a little absurd. Question about contingency, I think, and one of the things that's very, very clear is there's no historic inevitability about the course of the revolution, although I think actually one of the things that comes up very early in the book is that that kind of brectine line, because things are as they are, they won't remain as they are. Yeah. But you know, the course of the revolution depends on an enormous number of contingencies, coincidences and not only large scale ones like the war, but also particular personalities. And that's true of Lenin, but it's also true of Karensky. It's true of Kornilov, the kind of right wing wannabe dictator, kumunga. And for me, the contingencies get very difficult or very kind of upsetting historically when you think about Germany. You think about the failure of the Spartacist and then of the 1923 revolutions in a sense, you know, and in fact, you know, for Lenin as well, these are the things that would have sustained a Russian revolution. And you know, in terms of the course of history, that comes very upsetting. But there are moments too where it seems even within this revolution that things might have taken a different course. And look, I mean, counterfactuals are very often preserved at the right. OK, you know. But there are moments that I think you suggest that had dispositions been a little bit different, the course of post-revolutionary history might have been changed as well. And I think that that's that's true, particularly in October itself, when the failure to bring together a kind of socialist, you know, beyond Bolshevik. Absolutely. Yeah. Government is is is a real yeah. Error. Well, I think so. I mean, I for the thing about counterfactuals is we all do it all the time. And in a way, I don't think you can think rigorously about history without thinking about counterfactuals as carefully as you can. You're quite right that it's not only a question of a kind of explosion of potentiality. There is also this sort of the sheer aleatory, the sheer, you know, the contingent that gets thrown up. The one thing that does feel inevitable, I think early on, like in January, is that this cannot stand. Like it might not be October 1917, it's going to happen, but something is absolutely going to happen because this system can't can't survive. And people are completely explicit about that. Then at the other end, you know, towards the end of the book and in the epilogue, I think that the kind of primary sort of conditioning factors for what ultimately the catastrophe that followed were, I do think sort of external and to do with, you know, sort of the large scale political and economic structure and so on, like the failure of the European Revolution, so on. But I do also think that from from that kind of ground, if you like, there are certain subjective dispositions and interesting way of putting it factors that not only among the Bolsheviks, among their allies and their sort of conflictual allies that one feels probably couldn't have solved the situation, but certainly might have obviated some of the catastrophe. Very, very early on, you know, on the night of the revolution itself, the walk out of the left of Martok's left Mensheviks, this isn't, I mean, to be clear, this isn't just the kind of, you know, history, but you know, twenty twenty of history. You know, Sukhanov himself, very, very close to Martok, writing quite quickly afterwards and for the rest of his life, it was a catastrophe. It was a crime we never should have left because there was earlier that evening, scant hours earlier, you know, not just an appetite for a motion passed for a collective non Bolshevik specific government, so on. And of course, one can argue about the difference it would have made, but one can argue about the difference it would have made, you know, other things as well, that goes to me, like, you know, the bizarre hesitancy of Trotsky to take a position, a political position who wants to, you know, maybe be press officer for the revolution, but doesn't want to doesn't want to take a ministerial position. Now, it's partly because he's aware that he's a Jew and he's worried about how that will play out. And you think it really could have changed the course of the kind of post Lenin. Anyway, I mean, that's a very interesting that his, his, his concern about, you know, giving soccer to anti seamites by being, you know, prominent in the government is well known and and of course, for argument. But that but your kind of further point about the difference that might have made is a very, very good one and not one that gets talked about as much actually. Yeah. So for me, I'm sorry. Go ahead. Well, I mean, for me, you know, maybe we'll get on to this later. But for me, one of the things that that really does raise kind of intense sorrow about it is what I continually in terms of the the dispositional factor is a kind of psychologically understandable, but I think very baleful collapsing into making virtues of necessities later on. And this recurs again and again. And I think, again, I don't think it was causal, but I think it was at the very, very least deeply unhelpful. And in some cases, fed into a particularly reactionary dynamic. Yeah. I mean, so there aren't, I think, historically inevitable processes here in the way that we sometimes talked about through the course of the 20th century. But if there aren't strict laws governing revolution, if there aren't laws that are like laws of nature, what solace do we take from 1917? Well, I mean, for me, I think. On one level, it is, as you say, the the simple fact that, you know, revolutions can happen. But I would go a bit further and say, you know, revolutions against capital, against capitalism, against imperialism can happen and are sustained and driven forward by, you know, a glimmer, but a but a visible glimmer of a kind of a sense of absolutely radical renewal, not not just a kind of tinkering, but, you know, a fundamentally different system. So there's that. But allied to that, for me, is a move away from precisely the inevitability you're talking about to say, not only was it this kind of, you know, beautiful utopian vision, because that can be expressed in a very counter revolutionary way. And such a tragedy, revolutions always fail, you know. But but precisely, I think this is where a concrete analysis does come in, because because all of that that sense of the kind of epochal glimmer and how moving that is, is as nothing, if you sort of think it was doomed. So allied to that, for me, is a sense that in battled, you know, denigrated, attacked, yes, but doomed, no. And I think you have to be able to make that case to actually draw a concrete inspiration from it. I mean, I think it's interesting the way this gets inflect, you know, you know, inflected on temporary left, which is that if you, you know, you know, we have to reconcile ourselves to a very minimal account of social possibility, a kind of very minor reformism now against the horror, precisely because revolutions always devour their children, this kind of cliche, which is which is an old cliche. It goes back to yeah, absolutely. Yeah, exactly. Before the and the thing I've said repeatedly at events for this book, and I'm completely sincere about it, like I welcome a serious argument about this, including with like right wing historians who are actually prepared to make the case that it was doomed or that it was, you know, you know, whatever, that's fine. I'd much rather actually have that because then you can actually have a serious systematic debate. But this nostrum that is thrown around that like, you know, it, you know, are the tragedy, you know, a people's tragedy, if you will, you know, you know, are the inevitable. That's that's not an argument, you know, I mean, that that's it's the evasion of an argument. So there's a question about history and inevitable, which is Stalin. And I think that's that's the meat of this this this argument. And throughout the book, I think anyone familiar with the history can encounter these numberless and extraordinary personalities and know that they have like a very particular terminus inscribed for them, right? But it's a corner of Kamenev Bukar and Trotsky, of course. And and you use Sukhanov's phrase about starting the kind of grey blur. That grey blur comes to define for many the meaning of the revolution itself. And the cliche of every reactionary is exactly that, you know, that because of October Gulag, because of October Shotras, because of October, as if the kind of tell-offs of the revolution itself were, in fact, historically inevitable when it's unfolding, right? But accounting for the historical arc does matter. And, you know, you're quite Victor Serge at the end, and it's what I think it's worth exploring Serge a bit, because he's the most acute and I think unblinking chronicler of this problem. But you know, how do you deal with it? And you know, I think the other danger that that allies itself to these reactionary accounts is this idea. And again, it's something that comes from Burke, actually, is this idea that an armed doctrine, revolution made in the name of an abstraction is always poisonous. It's always destructive. It's always going to destroy its participants. What is the, you know, how do we deal with that? How, you know, what is the best way of facing both Stalinism, but also this kind of, you know, almost kind of foundational attack on the notion that the revolution at all is conceivable? Yeah. Well, I mean, to bring it to the book for one second, I mean, I had, if you like, the luxury, the sad luxury that that is not the focus of the book. So the epilogue kind of gestures towards these questions and draws in some of the key issues that I think are important to beginning to deal with this seriously. And there's this odd, again, trying to do two different jobs, because if you are new to this story, then, you know, the kind of roll call at the end of who dies when and so on is pretty wrenching. And if you're not, as you say, there is this sense of this kind of knowing the terminus. After having kind of brought in the factors that I do think are important, I think, really, the best thing I can think in terms of actually kind of accounting for it is trying to be as unflinching and as rigorous as possible and as concrete as possible. So not merely saying, you know, not not not saying either, well, revolutions always eat their children, or well, you know, Stalin was a very forceful personality and therefore dead to death, but actually saying, well, you know, these were the social and economic conditions in 1921. And that means that you can make sense of the following decisions, including decisions that now look really bad among people that otherwise you would agree with and so on. So inevitability is absolutely not indicated, but a kind of a kind of rational derivation of how we got from from here to there. And as you say, the one of the great tragedies of Stalin is the extent to which he feels really contingent in a in a good way for our purposes, you know, early on and Sukhanov describing him as a gray blur. And he certainly features, but he's by no means, you know, one of the kind of leading figures and certainly not one of the leading intellectual figures. I anecdotally there is I need to kind of state an irate for this book. There is a mistake in this book, which is in the dramatic persona at the end of the list, the one so there's a little potted history of all the major participants and the one person that I forgot to mention in that section was Stalin. And not only did I forget to but everyone else had forgotten to write, which I I owe the reviewer at the Morning Star from pointing this out, I promise promise. And, you know, and I hold hold my hands that it was a mistake. And it's obviously it's the most I think it's the kind of the most symptomatic omission, you know, the kind of unstated yearning in that omission was I couldn't help but smile about that. As regards the surge thing, I mean, I I find that surge quote that you're talking about where he talks about the multiple possible outcomes of Bolshevism, very powerful because, as I say in the book, generally it is deployed by anti Stalinist socialists to say it didn't inevitably lead to Stalin. I think that's 100 percent true. So let me be very clear about that. However, also in his quote, which doesn't get talked about as much is it certainly didn't inevitably, but there were aspects of the practice that may well have cleaved in that direction, given other things. And so he is both not exonerating, but he's both sort of defending but also criticizing. And I think that's incredibly powerful, which he then does, you know, he did around Kronstadt and so on. You know, and I think there's no problem with disagreeing with him or any of the other internal critics at particular points. That's a legitimate if you like debate, you know, that's a comradely debate. But the willingness to actually have that kind of unflinching solidarity based but critical approach to what happened is the only way we can possibly go forward and not just constantly operating as counsel for the defense in a kind of knee jerk way. It's understanding why we would do this. There have been a century of bad faith reactionary attacks and defending, you know, defending the revolution, I think is is both understandable and incredibly important. But the best way to do that is not by the jerking of the knee. Yeah, I'm there's a line from search, I think, which is really interesting in terms of how it feels. And he's in it's in 1913 when he's in prison in France. He's defending French anarchists. And he and he talks about the doctrine of French anarchism in this way. So he's talking about the anarchists. What had preserved me from their linear thinking, their cold anger, their pitiless vision of society was ever since my childhood, my contact with the world imbued with tenacious hope and rich in human values that of the Russians. And it's striking to me how much this could describe, you know, not only Stalinism, but the kind of epigenes of Stalinism in the West afterwards, this kind of pitiless visions in capacity for and he gets in trouble in the Soviet Union for befriending Mensheviks, for befriending reactionaries even, almost but reactionary people. And this sense of that, you know, that I think it's this double duty that, you know, for both defense and criticism, for him, it also becomes, I think, that question of how you deal with differing convictions as well, right? So that that possibility of democratic plurality, right? Because he enters. He enters the Soviet Union, his description of this kind of moment of deep joy crossing this bridge. And he picks up a paper to have to read Zinovia denouncing the demand for democratic freedoms. And then it's already something there that's and so I mean, Victor Sergei, I love deeply. But absolutely. But he was part of a current. I think that's, you know, and and there are, you know, there are times when, you know, I think you can make a very kind of strong case for if you like a certain sort of, you know, mainstream Bolshevik position as a tragic necessity. For example, you know, some of the issues censorship around the Civil War, this was a this is a legitimate debate, you know, it wasn't all just kind of rah rah, you know, proto Stalinists who were for it. But but let's, you know, let's actually have that debate as they did at the time, you know, until things became impossible. So so Sergei's if probably the most prominent of the people who had that kind of critical, but I'm sort of sympathetic but critical vision, you know, solidarity based. But we need an adjective Solidaritas but critical vision. Yeah. But there were there were others. And and and and they were, you know, even even their opponents and in their sort of in their better moments, we sort of acknowledged that that was, you know, they were crucial to kind of keeping that kind of culture of radical discussion and so on alive, I think. So 20 minutes left. There's a tonal shift through the book where this kind of latent apocalyptic begins to flash forth. So from the astonishing movements at the beginning of the year, things become more desperate with the war and become more desperate at the front, they become more brutal in the street hunger takes hold. And something I'm interested in something that's been sort of floating around our conversation is that kind of secularized religious sense about about revolution, which occurs in revolutionary moments not just a matter of tone, I think, but something which attends any talk about the achievement of a kind of new dispensation. Yeah, lots of silly cliches about communism as a religious. Yeah, as if anti communism, the secular religion of the United States. But I think this disposition is interesting. And it's interesting in a letter from a soldier from the front, which you quote, and I'm just going to read, because I think it's I think it's incredible. And this this soldier Kuchlovok, I don't know, probably pronouncing it Kuchlovok, I don't know. And he sends it, he writes to his vestia, which is the left-wing paper, Auschwitz paper. He writes, now another savior of the world must be born to save the people from all the calamities in the making here on earth, and to put an end to these bloody days so that no beast of any kind living on the earth created not by princes and rulers, but by God given nature is wiped out. For God is an invisible being inhabiting whoever possesses a conscience, and tells us to live in friendship. But no, there are evil people who so strife among us, and poisonous one against another pushing us to murder, who wish for others what they would not wish for themselves. They used to say that the war was foisted off on us by Nicholas. Nicholas has been overthrown. So who's foisting the war on us now? And I just just an extraordinary, extraordinary letter. And, you know, that sense of having achieved something, but it not yet arriving. Deflected apocalypse. Yeah. I mean, you you feel it very much from the that I think that letter is from late July. And that after particularly after the failure of the offensive, the Russian offensive at the front, that sense of deflected and stalled millennial change becomes more and more pronounced. I mean, yes, I think that letter that letter in its original form goes on for three or four pages and is by some way my favorite document of the revolution, it's almost unbearably moving. And I think for me, that kind of messianic millennial sense within the revolutionary tradition, including Marxism, is something that I find not just very interesting, not just very kind of effectively powerful, but something worth defending. And I know that there are radicals and Marxists and socialists and so on who are somewhat embarrassed of that aspect. And I'm I think I'm much closer to Luna Charsky here. You know, I mean, I certainly don't think it's the only aspect. I mean, I think, you know, it has to be kind of allied to what Luna Charsky called the cold stream of Marxism. But I think that is that sense, that kind of ecstatic sense of the sublime and and the apocalyptic is completely constitutive to what it is to be human. And that means human as including as a as a political actor and a political agent, let alone as part of a program for fundamental social renewal. So I if you like unembarrassedly as part of a kind of total a kind of general approach to radicalism, see that as part of my tradition. And so it's no surprise that it recursed throughout the book. And frankly, it would be doing violence to the story if it didn't because it was the way this was expressed repeatedly on the ground. There's something about the moment of the October Revolution itself that has almost the quality of a miracle, right? These these guards that change these boundaries that are transgresses. It's just, you know, these quite minimal changes, almost pathetically. And yet also there's a sublimity to it, which I think is astonishing. Well, this gets to a question about language that I try to I've been becoming even more interested since I finished the book, but is in the book which is the the question of the limits of language and the limits of language in in radical politics. And there's a there's a there's a kind of metaphor that recurs throughout 1917, which is of of words failing. And you know, you see it in some of the poets talking about the time talking about language, initially being being scrubbed clean by the sandpaper of the revolution, but then later on in the year words breaking down into the howl of beasts. And you see, you know, I use the metaphor from a Chernochevsky book where he writes the key the key passage of his book is just two rows of dots because the language is inexpressible. But as you say, that this inexpressibility is the culmination of everyday words. And that that that dialectic if you like that that that what I'm increasingly thinking of as a kind of apathetic revolution is and is also something that I would want to defend and investigate rather than be embarrassed of. I could draw on this forever so but I'm not going to because I want to talk about trains. The other great metaphor the other great metaphor, right? You highlight the theme in the epilogue, but let's kind of shadow it forth a bit. Network of iron roads veined through this vast empire, connecting capital to province, but Russia to Finland to Germany, Lenin sealed train, Lenin the cold stoker in disguise crossing the country. It's also, to my mind, it mirrors the network of correspondence and idea which binds together the international papers and publications across vast distances, the kind of distances that no longer exist for us. And trains in some way seems to be the necessary technology of the revolution. Would it have been thinkable without them? Trains and wires. Yeah, also the the Hughes machine, this early telegraph machine. No, I suspect not is the short answer there, but I also have to kind of unembarrassedly sort of hold up my hands and say that for me they were trains are important at least as much as anything else as a as a metaphor. And I hope that I can make the case that for me at least and hopefully for some readers, that's not if you like merely a filigree. And I have no problem with filigrees, but it's not me. It's also a heuristic way of making sense of things. One of the things that I like, one of the few things I like about getting older is becoming clearer about my own fascinations over the years. And something has become clearer about my own interest in trains, which is draws on this Bruno Schultz quote I use at the end, which is we have grown up in a sort of in a culture in which the default metaphoric resonance of the train is of ineluctability and a single road, a single rail. But there is a kind of occult counter tradition within, you know, fiction like Schultz like Stefan Grubinski and various others, which is to point out that just as constitutive of the main line is the siding. And there's something quite interesting ideologically that that is just abnegated in the mass of culture, which when I discovered that there's this a line in John Reed and Bessie Beatty's description of the revolution where they mention in passing and say that they can't understand it, that the counter evolution is described the revolution is a switchman. And, you know, I later discovered that the switchhuts of the railways were where the revolution areas used to meet. And this idea of the revolutionaries as people who are prepared to switch the kind of train of history onto a siding onto a less frequented track was incredibly powerful to me. So I think partly, you know, there's something very kind of liberating symbolically for me about the idea of rescuing trains from the idea of ineluctability and thinking of them instead relating to them instead as a as about a plurality of potentiality. I found very moving in Marx, obviously, talks about revolutions, locomotive history, but this this this part of the epilogue reminds me of the Schole on the Benjamin rights to the thesis on philosophy of history, he talks about revolutions as the emergency break. Right, really, which is when I look at the contemporary world is how I increasingly feel like I feel like then that you know, that that that also is an aspect of it, which is which is which is particularly interesting, and maybe it's kind of actually kind of, you know, not it's the unspoken part, yeah, of this tradition. It also reminds me of, you know, because the Andre Platonov, the great, great, great Soviet novelist, who's the novel, the novella, really, the foundation, it's an extraordinary piece of melancholy and seriousness about what it is to build socialism pieces. He says locomotives and revolution are inseparable for him. It and although not in as explicitly a kind of kind of politically inflected vein, you see this repeatedly within kind of Russian radical Khlebnikov, one of my own favorite figures of the kind of avant-garde talks has a kind of constant return to a rumination of trains as a way of relating to history. And he talks about putting movable monuments on the platforms of trains so you can kind of have monuments that move around. But the resonance of these images works as you as you imply precisely because they are also concretely real that this is a territory of, you know, defined by this kind of crisscrossing of rails. And you can watch the spread of radical ideas of revolution along the train lines and the train lines and the wire lines. So you get, you know, early on in March, you get sort of a diary entry saying, oh, you know, there's some word that something's happening in Petrograd, but nothing really is happening here. And then a week later after some trains have arrived, you know, like, everything has changed and nothing will be the same again from the same guy, you know. So I'm aware again in terms of the hot and cold streams that there are some interested in these traditions who get quite whose skin starts to itch when one talks about metaphors and so on. And I would just unabashedly say this is, you know, this they work because they are both concrete and more than I would take the last few minutes to talk about the contemporary. Now, there's a lot here that speaks to the contemporary moment, I think. Certainly for me, I've been thinking about, you know, since Gramsci the question for us in the West has been placed less in terms of kind of assault on the winter palace and trying to find what kind of thing the modern winter palace might be. Insurrection of the Lennon assault now looks quite improbable in Europe, if only because the army is much better, better armed than it was then. So the part of my question is about how we deal with the real conditions here and I'm interested in your own work on kind of social sadism here. But I'm also interested in the question of pessimism. Perry Anderson once remarked that the kind of secret imprint of Western Marxism is failure, right? It's a body of theory precipitated by both failure and historical catastrophe. It's the secret both of its strengths and its weaknesses. It's caused it critiques but the kind of self lacerating resignation as well. Now you're part of a project, at least partly in that lineage as other political lineages as well. And the themes of that work is about facing historical catastrophe and a return to a kind of historical pessimism as a method. And if I understand the position, it's, you know, drawing the poison of bad hope out. So is the present moment one in which pessimism is necessary? I think so. I think I mean, and I should say that my own relationship to this was a question of kind of theory, making sense of an effective reality, which is that, you know, having come out of a tradition that for many years was extremely moralistic about lack of lack of hope or lack of not just lack of hope, but lack of sort of rah rah optimism and that sort of excoriated that as being in some way, you know, objectively counter revolutionary and liable to, you know, lead to, you know, the Cardinals in demoralization. And what I discovered when I essentially was kind of freed with my fellow salvage editors to to kind of explore the scale of what seems to me that the problem is affecting us to be to not to not be moralized against fulfilling pessimistic. Far from being demoralized, I feel more politically motivated than I have for many, many years, well over a decade. So simply as an equation, pessimism equals inactivity, I think this is fallacious nonsense and based on moralism as well. So so that was one of the driving things. And I think obviously on one level, there is a kind of utopian hope to any radical project. There has to be because if you genuinely think there's no point doing anything, if that is then then there's no point doing anything. But I think that prioritizing that over a kind of hardheaded pessimism if the times demand it. And that's that's a corollary there. Like pessimism is not or should not be a point of principle. It's a question of it's a question of a result of an analysis of a concrete situation. So it's not that, you know, it's not that, you know, I like to wake up in the morning and say right now to be pessimistic about whatever comes my past comes past my door. It's about saying, looking at the world at the moment, you know, I love being surprised by joy to quote Lewis, you know, I love that, you know, I was delighted by Corbin and I'm very excited by that and so on. So this is not about a kind of eorish wallowing in gloom. What it's about saying is trying to be trying to be concrete about the every day. And this comes into what you're talking about the stuff I've been trying to do about social sadism. I don't think history is, you know, I don't think we just kind of keep on going through a thing called capitalism. I think it gets better and it gets worse and it gets worse. And I think that we are in, you know, a historically particularly curdled and poisonous moment and have been sort of certainly, you know, it's been moving that way since the 70s. And I think that there is a new iteration of a kind of overt sadism of kind of ruling class power that I don't think was there in the 50s, not in the same way. I don't think it was there in the 60s, even in the early 70s. And I think that, you know, I think we would be kidding ourselves if we did not face up to that and to what that does to general consciousness and so on. So there is one sense. This is where it kind of allies to the activism. For me, part of the point about pessimism, being pessimistic, I should say, is the yearning to prove that pessimism wrong. And that's constitutive to it. So yeah, does that turn? Yeah, it does. I mean, do you find this social sadism? Does it does it touch the practice of the left? Because I mean, I think it does actually. I mean, there's quite a brutal aspect to a lot of kind of contemporary left politics, which is almost, you know, apocalyptic in the bad sense. I think it does. I mean, I, again, I've tried to talk about this in a couple of essays in salvage. I mean, I do think it's worth making a distinction between, you know, not sort of talking into sweeping terms as if this is all equally bad. I don't think that's at all. And I think that, you know, the kind of new iterations of cruelty in the criminal justice system in the US are not the same thing as people being mean on Twitter. Let's be very clear. But I do think that, you know, we are interpolated by neoliberalism, we're neoliberal subjects, among other things, and a degree of that kind of the schwaamerei and the the jouissance in a certain kind of in shaming, for example, I think is a kind of mediated iteration of this. It's not only that, but I do think it's in part that. I mean, one of the things I think, because I have a tendency to pessimism anyway, it's one of the reasons that I was never able to be part of the same political tradition you come out of. But it seems that it's one of the things that allows me to look at the Corbyn project with a kind of rational basis, which is vital, right? You don't have to invest with the kind of Beal and Endel because whatever happens on June the end, June the 9th is still going to happen. And so I think I think that's essential two minutes left. Well, in terms of the pessimism and bad hope, October is crucial to this because for me in 1924, the triumph of the idea of socialism in one country is the triumph of bad hope. That is a point of which pessimism would have been a lesser evil to say the international revolutions haven't worked. This is a catastrophe, but we have to face it head on. So, you know, I hope in not too tendentious a way there is clearly a relationship between my commitment to a kind of unflinching optic and this historical work that I've been doing, I think it politically matters. Your right to immense imagination, we have one minute left. I think sometimes we need that kind of imagination, the French Revolution, the piece of Samizdat most circulated was a utopian fiction. What would winning look like? It is, as I try to say in the book, I'm going to dignify ducking the question by saying that it is out of fidelity to the scale of the reconfiguration that it is constitutive of me as someone who hasn't yet got there, that I can't answer that. Because in doing so, I would change myself to be capable of living in it. As the hope goes, so would we all. Great. Trying to be able, thank you very much for joining me today. Thank you for having me.