The Collected Works of John Reed
Rosenstone, Robert A.
THE COLLECTED WORKS OF JOHN REED Introduction by Robert A. Rosenstone The Modern Library /937 pages / $20 reviewed by STEPHEN SCHWARTZ A n icon of the radical left, once rative emerges without...
...which are actually quite affecting...
...The anti-Bolshevik dissent of Emma Goldman and other of Reed's contemporaries was included even in Reds, making Hollywood, paradoxically enough, truer to fact than the Modern Library...
...Hie was unwilling to undertake the arduous journey...
...The best judgment on John Reed remains that delivered by an authentic revolutionary who never bowed to Leninism, the anarchist Alexander Berkman...
...The book's idiom recalls a long- when he turned his pen to the eastern lost time when American radicalism and front in The War in Eastern Europe...
...Croatia, Bosnia, even Slovenia, all were inhabited by "Serbian peoples," destined, according to Reed, to be united in "an empire fifteen millions strong .. . which will liberate the energies of the fighting, administrative [sic] people of the kingdom of Serbia, penned in their narrow mountain valleys, to the exploitation of the rich plains country, and the powerful life of ships at sea...
...Robinson was an artist of real talent who today is unjustifiably neglected...
...It is a triumph more of poli- he obvious flaw in Reed's own tics than of literature...
...It is still a riveting read, which is precisely the problem...
...and like a good Party soldier Jack obeyed...
...Antonov-Ovseyenko, D.B...
...Also unmentioned is Boardman Robinson, illustrator of the radical organ The Masses, and creator of an artistic accompaniment to Reed's East European reportage more attractive in some ways than Reed's own writing...
...Nowhere does Rosenstone see fit to discuss Reed's lover, Louise Bryant...
...He was valuable to Moscow as an example of submission...
...tory tone that has once again become familiar...
...Reed displayed a Breughelian talent for This collection is an attempt to bring him social detail, picking out for example a back into vogue with the three books color-bearer in Villa's ranks, who, asked Reed published in his lifetime: Insurgent the goal of the revolutionary war, says, Mexico (1914), The War in Eastern "Why, it is good, fighting...
...Having first devoured it as a teenager, I well remember the excitement it conveyed, in its moment-by-moment account of the inexorable drive of Lenin and his Bolsheviks to power...
...THE COLLECTED WORKS OF JOHN REED Introduction by Robert A. Rosenstone The Modern Library /937 pages / $20 reviewed by STEPHEN SCHWARTZ A n icon of the radical left, once rative emerges without great social or played weirdly on screen by political insight, but filled with a love of Warren Beatty in Reds, John landscape and of masculine adventure...
...When Remarkably enough, Reed proves an Reed crosses the border southward, and early and extreme partisan of Serbian joins a tropa, or party of soldiers, a nar- ultranationalism, in its most absurd and violent forms...
...Karakhan, later a distinguished Soviet diplomat, was murdered by Stalin in the purges, like virtually all the other Bolshevik leaders mentioned in this book (with the obvious exceptions Lenin and Stalin, the latter of, whom plays almost no role...
...tricks when not shooting unarmed pris- This approach served him poorly oners...
...Indeed, for many years the chief importance of Ten Days for Communist studies—both inside the former Soviet Union and abroad—resided in its pre-Stalinist record of the actions of Trotsky, Grigory Zinoviev, Lev Kamenev, V.A...
...approach to Mexico remains its Reed was born in Portland, Oregon, overt sentimentality...
...Reed writes romantically even of quenting poetry salons...
...Ten Days was taken up by the Communists not for any "American" qualities but because he surrendered completely The American Spectator July 1995 67 to the propagandist spirit...
...The next chapter begins grimly: 66 The American Spectator July 1995 In the relations of a weak Government and rebellious people there comes a time when every act of the authorities exasperates the masses, and every refusal to act excites their contempt...
...the frontier seemed to go together...
...The companion of Emma Goldman, Berkman was imprisoned in America for many years for an act of pro-labor terrorism, and deported to Russia in 1919...
...That Rosenstone declares' Ten Days Reed's "most American" book speaks for itself, and badly...
...After graduat- he insisted he was a correspondent, not a ing from Harvard, he entered the soldier, but his passionate advocacy Bohemian life of Greenwich Village, would be viewed with deep suspicion writing mainly for magazines, while fre- today...
...His Ten Days That Shook the World appeared with a preface by Lenin—who praised Reed's account as "truthful...
...I stand at the brink, supporting Louise Bryant who has entirely abandoned herself to her grief...
...Ten Days is one of a number of books (others include Brecht's plays and poems, and Malraux's Man's Fate) that destroyed generations of young intellectuals—morally in the West, physically under Soviet and fascist dictatorships—by leading them to the most extreme, nihilist forms of self-sacrifice in the name of Communism...
...He went This sentimentalism was not unique to Mexico, where a revolution was in full to Reed...
...This Leninist epic now appears to us with its seams and stitches obvious...
...As a journalist, he was a late swing...
...Reed is now hardly known as an author...
...with translations of corridos—popular Of the three volumes reprinted here, ballads on the great events of the time Insurgent Mexico reads best today...
...All the time, in 1887, to a rich family...
...But his weakened constitution could not withstand the hardships of Russian travel and its fatal infections...
...Some of it is repulsive to read today, as when Reed happily quotes the Bolshevik Lev Karakhan's description of the new regime: "A loose organization, sensitive to the popular will as expressed through the Soviets, allowing local forces full play . . . The initiative of the new society shall come from below...
...Further details are pending...
...Describing the funeral in October 1920 of the 33-year-old Reed, Berkman wrote in his book The Bolshevik Myth: A fresh grave along the Kremlin wall, opposite the Red Square, the honored resting place of the revolutionary martyrs...
...In writing about the war in Eastern Europe, he repeated uncritically many opinions that even then were considered disreputable...
...Dybenko—the heroes of October who went from the heights of revolutionary power to obscure and brutal ends within twenty years, names once acclaimed and then erased from history...
...Bankrolled by Moscow to the exemplar of the fin-de-siecle tradition of tune of a million rubles (according to vivid reporting filtered through a literary The Secret World of American sensitivity...
...But Zinoviev insisted...
...Most importantly, Rosenstone ignores all mention of Reed's ambiguous death...
...It would have been interesting to read some of Reed's labor journalism and related pieces written on the American scene, and the inexplicable failure to include that work here—probably a function of editorial laziness—belies the volume's claim to be a "collected works...
...Reed's comments on Stephen Schwartz is a reporter with the Serbian radicalism assumed a hallucinaSan Francisco Chronicle...
...You don't Europe (1916), and Ten Days That have to work in the mines...
...He was attuned, above all, to Communism), he would become a the poetry of his subjects...
...In October 1993, Moscow mayor Yuri Luzhkov called for removal of all the Communist corpses, Lenin's and Reed's included, from Red Square, and their reburial elsewhere...
...He was swept Pancho Villa's murders and other atrociinto radicalism when he reported on a ties in which—given his enthusiasm for strike led by the Industrial Workers of the revolutionary cause—Reed himself the World (the "Wobblies") in the silk can be considered an accomplice...
...mills of Paterson, New Jersey...
...But Reed adds his own doses of venom: Poles were "the ugliest race in the world," and there is much about Jews in Reed's Mexican and East European reportage that would not today be put in print...
...Finally, Robert A. Rosenstone, a mediocre liberal-leftist biographer of Reed, has written an introduction that is no more than a brief hagiography of Reed the Communist Saint...
...The Rumanians were "Italianized gypsies," a viewpoint lately resuscitated by no less a personage than Vladimir Zhirinovsky...
...It was published two years after the events it describes, and much of it was derived not from Reed's own observation but from newspapers...
...R eed turned his experience in the Bolshevik coup of October 1917 into a classic of "faction" avant la lettre...
...Reed was also notably given to ugly stereotypes, occasionally dipping into broad generalizations about Mexican morals...
...Lenin, in fact, has the sole blurb appearing on this edition's dust-jacket...
...Shook the World (1919), on which Reds was based...
...The Albanians, he claimed, were a people imported from the Caucasus (a Serb fantasy...
...But While it's clear he never fully mastered unlike the great majority of his counterSpanish, Reed described with relish the parts, Reed was exceptionally susceptiTexas-Mexico border, with stage cow- ble to political intoxication—indeed, his boys and sheriffs on one side, and, on the case was so severe that he may be conother, assorted Wild Bunch-style insur- sidered the outstanding specimen of the gents who broke into song and cut rodeo syndrome...
...Missing him in Petrograd, she proceeded to Moscow only to learn that Reed had been ordered to Baku to the Congress of Eastern Peoples...
...Worse, Rosenstone omits any doubts expressed about the Bolshevik revolution by other American radicals Reed encountered in Russia...
...Who, having read them, can easily forget Reed's bullet-like words?: In the rain, the bitter chill, the great throbbing city [Petrograd] under gray skies [was] rushing faster and faster toward—what...
...His writing on founder of this country' s pathetic the Mexican Revolution is interspersed Communist Party...
...Unlike Reed, Berkman set down what he saw and published it without redecoration...
...Riazanov, Aleksei Rykov, Alexander Shliapnikov, Nikolai Krylenko, F.M...
...T his edition has many flaws beyond those of Reed himself...
...She had hastened from America to meet Jack after a long separation...
Vol. 28 • July 1995 • No. 7
