I don’t think Reed suffered because a 1000 interlocutors had taken a chance at revising his eye witness account.
Oh, I know. The only reason he didn’t immediately kill all the anarchists was because he needed them to fight the White Russians first.
As for Mieville, I honestly don’t know what his current political beliefs are. The last I heard was that he had left the SWP after it was found out that the leadership was trying to cover up a rape investigation into a senior member, and that he was now a member of Left Unity, which is meant to be a united front against austerity and was founded by Ken Loach (who wasn’t kicked out of the Labour party in the 80s, so probably isn’t a trotskyist).
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They tend to come under the heading of ‘tiresome’ if not in power and ‘zomg, who knew they were so keen on rounding people up and murdering them’ when they are.
Any idealistic ideology is bad news. Human and systems failing that made them fulminate when they ran blogs (par example) cause mass murder when they gain power and find the world stubbornly refuses to comply with historical logic. See Bannon for details. And FFS, keep Doctorow away from anything closer to the levers of power than the EFF.
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Indeed. though both come from a sympathetic view point. Mieville understands the eventually outcome of the revolution. I want to say that Reed died pretty soon after he wrote 10 Days that Shook the World (or maybe it was even publish as a book after his death? maybe i’m misremembering).
Could be. At some point, though I suspect that some radical historian will get a wild hair and give it a new take. From what I remember, along with the influx of capitalism into Russia after the end of the USSR, the archives opened up, so we’ve gotten a lot of great histories of the USSR, often social and cultural histories, which has been a major direction in Cold War studies in the past couple of decades. Now, I think the post-Soviet openness of the archives have snapped shut again under Putin, a damnable shame. Maybe there have been some new takes on the Russian Revolution that just haven’t been published as books? I can’t imagine that someone didn’t take the opportunity to recontextualize the revolution itself?
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