JOHN REED AND THE RUSSIAN REVOLUTION Also by Eric Homberger JOHN REED * AMERICAN WRITERS AND RADICAL POLITICS, 190~1939 JOHN LE CARRE THE ART OF THE REAL: POETRY IN ENGLAND AND AMERICA SINCE 1939 EZRA POUND: THE CRITICAL HERITAGE (editor) * THE TROUBLED FACE OF BIOGRAPHY (editor with John Charmley) THE CAMBRIDGE MIND (editor with Simon Schama and William Janeway) * THE SECOND WORLD WAR IN FICTION (editor with Holger Klein and John Flower) * Also published by Macmillan John Reed and the Russian Revolution Uncollected Articles, Letters and Speeches on Russia, 1917-1920 Edited by ERIC HaMBERGER Visiting Professor of American Studies University of New Hampshire with JOHN BIGGART Lecturer in Russian History University of East Anglia M MACMILLAN ISBN 978-1-349-21838-7 ISBN 978-1-349-21836-3 (eBook) DOI 10.1007/978-1-349-21836-3 Editorial matter and selection © Eric Hornberger and John Biggart 1992 Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 1992 978-0-333-53346-8 All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission. No paragraph of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, 33-4 Alfred Place, London WClE 7DP. Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. First published 1992 Published by MACMILLAN ACADEMIC AND PROFESSIONAL LTD Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 2XS and London Companies and representatives throughout the world British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Reed, John, 1887-1920 John Reed and the Russian revolution: uncollected articles, letters and speeches on Russia, 1917-1920. 1. Russian revolution, 1917 I. Title II. Hornberger, Eric III. Biggart, John 947.0841 ISBN 978-0-333-53346-8 Contents Acknowledgements viii Introduction ix Editorial Note xx Glossary and Key to Abbreviations xxii Part I 1917 Chronology: John Reed in 1917 3 1 The Fall of the Russian Bastille 7 2 Russia 13 3 The Russian Peace [written with Louise Bryant] 17 4 A Letter from John Reed 19 5 Letter to Sally Robinson 23 6 Letter to Boardman Robinson 26 7 A Visit to the Russian Army 28 8 Letter to Boardman Robinson 59 9 Red Russia: Kerensky, I 63 10 John Reed Cables the Call News of the Bolshevik Revolt 69 11 Red Russia: The Triumph of the Bolsheviki 74 12 Red Russia: Kerensky, II 96 Part II 1918 Chronology: John Reed in 1918 101 13 The Origins of Workers' Control in Russia 104 14 Two Manuscripts on the Revolution 110 I Introduction [to a Book] 110 II Fragment: 'History of the Rev.' 118 15 Bolsheviki Foes of All Imperialism 130 16 A Lecture on Conditions in Russia 136 v vi Contents 17 A Message to Our Readers from John Reed Who Has Just Returned from Petrograd 139 18 'Foreign Affairs' 144 19 Revolutionary Controversies 152 I Norman Hapgood and Socialist Journalism 152 II Letter to Upton Sinclair on Maxim Gorky 159 20 The Case for the Bolsheviki 163 21 'Kerensky is Coming!' 169 22 Memorandum to Colonel House on Intervention in Russia 185 23 Address to the Jacob Schwartz Memorial Meeting 196 24 Letter to Upton Sinclair 199 25 The Second Day 204 26 The Constituent Assembly in Russia 210 27 They Are Still There! 221 Part III 1919-20 Chronology: John Reed in 1919-20 227 28 How Soviet Russia Conquered Imperial Germany 233 29 The Latest from Russia 246 30 Doctor Rakovsky 251 31 Prinkipo and After 253 32 Bolshevism: What It Is Not 258 33 Notebook Entries on an Interview with Trotsky 265 34 The Bolsheviks in 1919: Notebook Entries 267 35 Soviet Russia Now 268 Biographical Notes 281 Index 314 For Martin and Margaret, with love Acknowledgements Support for the work on this project came from the Research Committee of the School of English and American Studies, Univer­ sity of East Anglia. The kindness of Mr George Abbott White, Keeper of the Matthiessen Room, Eliot House, Harvard Univer­ sity, made research visits to Harvard a pleasure. Mr Corliss Lamont and Dr Richard Abraham were kind enough to respond to queries. Permission to print the following manuscript material is hereby acknowledged. In the Edward M. House Papers, Yale University Library: Memor­ andum by John Reed in Russia sent to Colonel House, 26 September 1918. Material in the John Reed Papers, Houghton Library, Harvard University, by permission of the Houghton Library. Material in the Alexander Berkman Papers, Tamiment Library, New York University, by permission of Tamiment Library. Material in the Upton Sinclair Papers, Lilly Library, Indiana Uni­ versity, Bloomington, Indiana, by permission of Lilly Library. viii Introduction The present volume collects John Reed's articles, letters, tran­ scripts of speeches, unpublished manuscripts and material from his notebooks on the Russian Revolution. It complements Ten Days that Shook the World (1919), Reed's contemporary account of the Russian Revolution in 1917. When Reed and his wife, the writer Louise Bryant, went to Russia, he was not an obvious candidate to write the classic eyewitness account of the Revolution. Important Western accounts of the Revolution, such as M. Philips Price's My Reminiscences of the Russian Revolution (London, 1921) and Albert Rhys Williams' Through the Russian Revolution (New York, 1921), were written by correspondents better informed about events in Russia than Reed, and who were more firmly in command of the language; and indeed who were no less sympathetic to the Russian people, no less engaged in the great drama of the Revolution. 1 Yet his book has survived, to become part of the mythology of the Revolution2 as well as a powerful impression of its actuality. Reed was thirty years old in 1917, and had been a prominent journalist since 1913. A romantic sympathizer with the down­ trodden, his greatest professional success as a journalist came in 1914 when he was sent to Mexico by the Metropolitan Magazine to cover the 'Constitutionalist' revolt against the tyrannical regime of General Victoriano Huerta. The intervention of US military forces in Mexico in 1914 made Reed's Insurgent Mexico necessary reading for anyone concerned with the chaotic conditions south of the Rio Grande into which President Wilson was being reluctantly drawn. Reed spent weeks with Francisco Villa, the legendary guerrilla fighter, and rode with La Tropa in the battle at the hacienda of La Cadena; he interviewed the leader of the Constitutionalists, Carranza, and witnessed the battle at Torre6n which opened the way to Mexico City for the forces of Carranza. An article Reed published in the New York Times in April 1914 was sent by Presi­ dent Wilson to the US Ambassador in Great Britain, with a note saying that Reed 'sums up as well as they could be summed up my own conclusions with regard to the issues and personnel of the pending contest in Mexico'. 3 The freedom of movement which he enjoyed as a war correspondent ix x Introduction in Mexico was not repeated when he was sent by the Metropolitan to cover the war in Europe. Strict control of the movement and the communications of war correspondents denied him access to lead­ ing politicians, as well as to ordinary soldiers and civilians in the war zone. He was no more persuaded by British propaganda, which stressed the Hun atrocities in Belgium, than he was by the German claims to be defending German Kultur and the civilization of the West against barbarous Slavdom; neither side, so far as he could see, had humanitarian goals. He denounced the war, and the propaganda which portrayed the conflict as a tournament between 'the White and Spotless Knight of Modern Democracy' and the 'Unspeakably Vile Monster of Medieval Militarism'. In truth, he argued, it was a 'Traders' War' in which Americans had no interest. 4 The collapse of the Socialist International, and the speed with which bellicose patriotism and chauvinism supplanted the ideals of internationalism, robbed Reed of an important focus for his sympathies. He remained emotionally uninvolved in the European conflict. Reed's opposition to the war was courageous and principled. He abandoned the Socialist Party candidate in the 1916 presidential election to support the Democratic incumbent, Woodrow Wilson. This was a bitter pill for many American radicals to swallow, for Wilson's strongest support came from the corrupt political machines of the urban North and the racist Jim Crow Democratic Party of the Deep South. The issue of neutrality seemed to override political allegiances. He persisted in his opposition to the war after the United States made its declaration against Germany on 2 April. A more cautious person would have hesitated, and perhaps allowed commercial self-interest to temper his deep hostility to the war. But Reed was recklessly outspoken in such matters, and so, too, were the members of the Socialist Party, which proclaimed its opposi­ tion to the war at a special convention in St Louis in Apri11917. Despite his opposition to the war, Reed's reputation as a radical was suspect. His fascination with the aggressive class-conscious style of the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) began in 1913 when he visited Paterson, New Jersey, where thousands of immi­ grant silk-weavers were on strike. He nonchalantly allowed him­ self to be arrested, and wrote a rousing article about his experiences. 5 Reed was one of the principal organizers of the famous Strike Pageant performed by the strikers themselves at Madison Square Garden in New York.