Academic paper on John Reed’s book Ten Days That Shook the World, spring 2001
More than 80 years after the Russian Revolution of October 1917, John Reed’s Ten Days That Shook the World holds up in large part because of the on-the-scene reportorial virtues of its narrative. Reed, the “golden boy” journalist whose firsthand account of the Mexican Revolution had won him the accolades of his journalist brethren, particularly among writers possessed of his own radical-activist-Bohemian proclivities, arrived in Petrograd in late August 1917, “predisposed to witness a miracle.”
By then the scene in Russia was one of chaos and transition, a country impaired by three years of war that the “war-weary” Russian army was increasingly indisposed to fight (a mid-June offensive had resulted in the ominous spectacle of hundreds of Russian soldiers fleeing the Germans); an unrelenting wave of Bolshevik-inspired demonstrations and riots, most recently the abortive “July Days” adventure which sent party leaders into temporary exile; and the effete, ineffectual inheritance of the February Revolution – the Provisional Government.
Reed had first come to Russia in 1915 as a European war correspondent, covering the Eastern Front for Metropolitan magazine. Returning in 1917 with a small party of American journalists, including his wife, Louise Bryant, Reed had already formulated the convictions that would inform his reporting during the pivotal winter of 1917-18. Those convictions found vigorous expression in the manifestos of Lenin, himself recently returned to Russia. A pacifist, Reed found in Lenin’s uncompromising rhetoric a conceivable conclusion to the war, whose basic precepts – no annexations, indemnities, self-determination for peoples – corresponded to those later codified in the Fourteen Points of Woodrow Wilson, whom Reed had supported for a second presidential term in 1916. But Reed’s Bolshevist affinities otherwise spoke to an irrevocable break with Wilsonian liberalism. Reed, in Robert A. Rosenstone’s assessment, was “fearful of exactly what American leaders [notably Wilson] desired, that the Provisional Government would strengthen the country and prolong the war.” Rosenstone describes Reed’s initial reactions to the February Revolution as “temperate,” the American looking dubiously upon the Provisional Government’s bourgeois leadership that “promised the advent of Western constitutionalism.” According to Rosenstone, Reed’s view only “began to change as it became obvious that a second center of political power was in existence … soon to be referred to by the Russian word ‘Soviets.’
When The New York Times labeled their members ‘extreme radicals and syndicalists, corresponding to the IWW agitators in this country,’ his interest was stirred.” His perceptions altered, Reed now recognized in the February Revolution “the real thing,” “the long-thwarted rise of the Russian masses … and the purpose of it is the establishment of a new human society upon Earth.” Such statements go a long way in demonstrating Reed’s idealism, a messianic idealism not peculiarly American but closely aligned with other American socialist writers like Edward Bellamy and Upton Sinclair. Perhaps it is both this messianic idealism and Reed’s essentially American sensibility – coupled with a basic ignorance of Russia, its language, its history and its politics – that made Reed so susceptible to Lenin’s realpolitik machinations; these qualities may also account for the narrow, naive and conspicuously biased testimonies that comprise this important, if fundamentally flawed, historical document.
At the time of its writing in 1918, Reed had not yet been disabused of the revolutionary fervor that would never fully disintegrate but would be seriously challenged upon his return to Russia before his death in 1920. Differing with Lenin on Comintern policy concerning the infiltration of trade unions, bristling at the “demagogy of Zivoviev and Radek,” and sickened by the “ostentatious luxury on the official train running through a land of famine,” Reed would come to see what the Communist regime had become, never displacing his romantic vision of what might have been. That vision is given the fullest expression in Ten Days That Shook the World, proving a durable antidote to the harsher reality. Lenin seems to have recognized this potential,
praising the book in 1919, despite its “legends and inaccuracies” only, according to his wife Krupskaya, “because it gave an admirable picture of the spirit of the revolution.”
Reed’s account of the fateful events of October and November 1917 takes on a distinctly propagandistic tone, romanticizing the masses, positing the basic humanity and pristine motives of the drama’s principal actors – the Bolshevik leaders and the amorphous worker-peasant-soldier proletariat, the latter enjoying in his account perhaps more ubiquity and influence than the historical record would show – and depicting as bourgeois counter-revolutionary sellouts all of those whose ideological convictions differed from those of the implacable Bolshevik party line.
Reed’s own ideological convictions – interchangeable with Bolshevist dogma – would not accommodate the vexing historical paradox that locates many of these alleged bourgeois counter-revolutionaries – most of them owning impeccable Socialist credentials – at the forefront of the February Revolution and the subsequent ascent to political power in the wake of the Tsar’s March 3rd abdication. That the Bolsheviks were barely on the scene until spring (many of the party’s leaders, Lenin most notable among them, weren’t even in the country) only expands the irony. But the so-called dictatorship of the proletariat, to which Reed several times refers, and the border-smashing internationalism upon which it was predicated, could be reasonably untroubled by such incongruities. Having as its central component a rigorous nihilism, Bolshevism – and, by extension, Reed – was liberated from the high-minded but wholly constraining ideals of bourgeois-liberal statecraft, even if Reed was himself constrained by the messianic idealism to which I earlier referred. (This last statement might provide some explanation as to Reed’s ultimate disillusionment while the Bolshevik party leadership further consolidated its power employing such anti-liberal measures as food requisition and police terror.)
Implicit – and quite often explicit – in Bolshevik pronouncements and practices is the wanton assurance that the ends, no matter how impolitic or profane, justify the means. This and nothing else, considering Reed’s background, can explain his uncritical recounting of the free speech debate which ultimately endorses “the suppression of the bourgeois press.” Somehow, through Reed’s canny retelling of it, Trotsky and Lenin’s specious arguments seem well reasoned. Trotsky’s argument proceeds as follows: “During civil war the right to use violence belongs only to the oppressed. The victory over our adversaries is not yet achieved, and the newspapers are arms in their hands. In these conditions, the closing of the newspapers is a legitimate measure of defence.” Reed dutifully notes the rabid dissent in the chamber, then continues quoting Trotsky: “The passing of the power into the hands of the Soviets will bring about a radical transformation of the essential conditions of existence, and this transformation will necessarily be evident in the press. The old regime must die; that must be understood once and for all.”
Then Lenin [Reed continues], calm, unemotional, his forehead wrinkled, as he spoke slowly, choosing his words; each sentence falling like a hammer blow. “The civil war is not yet finished; the enemy is still with us; consequently it is impossible to abolish the measures of repression against the Press. We Bolsheviki have always said that when we reached a position of power we
would close the bourgeois press. To tolerate the bourgeois press would mean to cease being a Socialist…. He who now talks about the ‘freedom of the Press’ goes backward, and halts our headlong course toward Socialism. We have thrown off the yoke of capitalism, just as the first revolution threw off the yoke of Tsarism. If the first revolution had the right to suppress the Monarchist papers, then we have the right to suppress the bourgeois press.
Reed interjects no personal preference on the matter; the assumption the reader must make is that Reed, in portraying this portion of the Council of People’s Commissars debate as part of the larger conquest of the people’s will over the entrenched interests of the moderate Socialist counter-revolutionaries and bourgeois liberalism, is endorsing the outcome (Lenin’s motion, to make the press the domain of the Soviet Government, was carried by a vote of 34 to 24). Moreover, this is the same Lenin who inspired Reed earlier to comment, reverently: “There was something quiet and powerful in all this, which stirred the souls of men. It was understandable why people believed when Lenin spoke.” Presumably, Reed invests the same “quiet, powerful” authority in Lenin’s suppression of the bourgeois press speech. Bertram D. Wolfe implicates Reed further: “For some reason,” he notes, “the speech as reported by Reed differs considerably from the version of it to be found in Lenin’s Works. Reed’s version is more coherent and less menacing than the original.”
Elsewhere, Reed conveys the party line in more explicit terms. Offering the disputable premise that the Bolsheviki “were not merely self-seeking,” Reed proceeds to relate this fantasy, his central thesis: “[The Bolsheviki] took the crude, simple desires of the workers, soldiers, peasants, and from them built their immediate program. And so, while the the oborontsi Mensheviki and Socialist Revolutionaries involved themselves in compromise with the bourgeois, the Bolsheviki rapidly captured the masses.”
In advancing this thesis, Reed concocts a threadbare worker-soldier-peasant populist folklore that goes like this: “There, great masses of shabby soldiers, grimy workmen, peasants–poor men, bent and scarred in the brute struggle for existence.” Reed shrewdly pits this imagery against the more genteel imagery of the “journalists, students, [and] intellectuals” who are invariably “well fed, well-dressed”; adding, for good measure, “I did not see more than three proletarians among them all.”
Later, Reed’s bias becomes even more sentimental and flagrant: “So the great procession wound through the city. Two old peasants, bowed with toil, were walking hand in hand, their faces illuminated with child-like bliss. ‘Well,’ said one, ‘I’d like to see them take away our land again, now!”
Sometimes Reed goes beyond dubious logic and staunch, rhapsodic partisanship, and is simply incorrect. It is useful to return to Lenin’s assertion, posthumously reported, that the book was full of “legends and inaccuracies.” Reed’s assertion, concerning the July Days rising, “in July, it was the spontaneous rising of the unorganised proletariat which once more stormed the Tauride Palace, to demand that the Soviets take over the Government,” finds its refutation in Richard Pipes’ A Concise History of The Russian Revolution: “[The Bolsheviks] made certain, however, that any riots that broke out would not be spontaneous and unmanaged, as had been the case the previous February.” Elsewhere, Wolfe discredits Reed’s claim that “the corrupt reactionaries in control of the Tsar’s Court deliberately undertook to wreck Russia in order to make a separate peace with Germany.” Finally, Bertram D. Wolfe notes the patent inaccuracy of Reed’s statement relating the scene the night Lenin seized power: “Quiet the city lay, not a hold-up, not a robbery, not even a drunken fight.” “Yet this does not prevent him from quoting Trotsky on the all-embracing wave of drunkenness which followed the seizure of power,” Wolfe observes, adding,”Only one completely possessed by his dream could have written that sentence.”
Such inaccuracies demonstrate the shortcomings of Reed’s on-the-scene firsthand approach. In its review of Reed’s book, published in May 1919, the New Republic offers this persuasive analysis, supporting the notion of inherent limitations to his methods: “History in the first person has the defects of fiction in the first person. The narrative is broken into bits, and events and personalities are thrown out of proportion, because the observer is limited in fiction by the probabilities, and in history by the exigencies of transportation, armed guards, and all the other barriers to omnipresence.”
Such “exigencies,” of course, also add much to the drama of the narrative. Reed was an eyewitness to the capture of the Winter Palace, a bystander to the tempestuous floor debates of the Second Congress of Soviets, the Council of the People’s Commissars, and the Peasants Congress – redressing somewhat the historical imprecisions, the mawkish one-sidedness, and the inevitable defects deriving from the lingual, cultural and political barriers Reed’s reporting betrays. Going even further in redressing these problems “are the numerous proclamations, appeals, speeches, and newspaper articles both by Bolsheviks and their opponents with which the book fairly abounds.” These are perhaps the book’s most invaluable assets.
© 2001
Stephen Andrew Miles