Telling October: Memory and the Making of the Bolshevik Revolution (review)

The October Revolution makes a great story, but the problem is that it is only a story, more fiction than fact, the lavishly constructed founding legend of the Soviet Union.

Late at night on 25 October 1917 (by the old Julian calendar), with the Russian Provisional Government in shambles, armed groups occupied strategic buildings across Petrograd. In the early morning hours, Vladimir Lenin declared the overthrow of Aleksandr Kerensky’s government and the formation of a new Bolshevik government under the Petrograd Soviet.

No mass demonstrations occurred in support of the Bolsheviks, and no military assault was launched on the Winter Palace. The streetcars kept running, the shops remained open, and the inhabitants of Russia’s capital barely noticed this “South American–style military junta . . . ‘pronunciamento’ by the Bolsheviks” (p. 25), as the daily Rabochaya gazeta characterized it.

The Winter Palace was not captured until the following night (after the defenders had laid down their arms) and was not seized through a military attack, as alleged by Soviet historiography. Instead, the building was overrun by a mob: “Soldiers, ‘under the influence of drunks in the crowd,’ broke the windows to the wine cellars, allowing the mob to begin a ‘drunken orgy’” (p. 34), the writer Aleksandr Amfiteatrov noted in his diary. That “drunken orgy lasted all day, leaving Palace Square littered with the bodies of inebriated soldiers and sailors. The military units that were sent from Smolny to stop the looting and destruction ended up joining it” (p. 34).

What happened on Palace Square in 1917 was of no significance to the Bolsheviks. They did not regard the Winter Palace as a focus of their coup. Instead, history was made in the Smolny Institute. In November 1918, when the Bolsheviks commemorated the first anniversary of “October,” Palace Square was not even on the route of their celebratory processions.

How, then, did the purported storming of the Winter Palace become the Bolsheviks’ Bastille, their “transcendent ‘total event’” (p. 10), an event that transformed the date of a lesser uprising into an iconic date of history, on a par with 1776 and 1789? This question is at the heart of Frederick Corney’s Telling October, arguably one of the most important books to appear on the rise of totalitarian power in Soviet Russia.

Corney convincingly shows that October, as it entered the collective Soviet memory and the history books, was a thoroughly crafted narrative, laboriously constructed over the first decade of Soviet power. It started to take shape with the third anniversary in 1920, when the Winter Palace became the improbable focus of the story of October. The mythical event reached its climax with Eisenstein’s film Oktyabr’ (1928). Corney writes: “It was in the telling that [October] would acquire the coherence, dramatic flow, and explanatory power of a good story” (p. 9).

Corney’s book is based on a wide range of sources, including contemporary Russian newspapers, memoirs, unpublished diaries, archives, and major films, and he uses the tools of historical anthropology, sociology, psychology, and literary theory. His groundbreaking interdisciplinary study shows how the Bolsheviks slowly transformed the chaotic polyphonic memory of October 1917 by turning contradictory descriptions of what happened into an orchestrated, alluring drama of revolution. They recast themselves as the sole revolutionaries, unified in their mission to fight a heroic battle against the reactionary forces both inside and outside Russia, including their former allies. However, their fabrication of history was by no means a linear process. Initially, the party did not claim any leading role in October. Ironically, the opposition press was the first to accord the Bolsheviks a major part in the coup narrative. Not until 1919, “perhaps surprised by their survival in power and emboldened by their successes in the Civil War” (p. 69) did the Bolsheviks begin blatantly falsifying history and systematically repressing any counternarrative. In 1921 the Bolshevik leaders appointed a special commission (known as Istpart) to commemorate October and construct a narrative. This...