[Marxism] Fw: John Reed

["Graham M." <gkmilner@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

----- Original Message ----- 
From: Graham M. 
To: socialist alliance 
Sent: Thursday, September 02, 2004 1:00 AM
Subject: John Reed


Dear Comrades,
                       John Reed (1887-1920) will be best known to modern 
audiences as the character played by Warren Beatty in the Hollywood film Reds, 
released in 1981.   Beatty directed this film himself, and the film serves to 
demonstrate that sometimes Hollywood gets it right.   The politics of Reds is 
mostly spot on, and the central focus in it on the relationship between Reed 
and his partner Louise Bryant (played by Diane Keaton) does not at all detract 
from the usefulness of the film as a tool for understanding historically the US 
left around the time of World War One, and the 1917 Russian Revolution.   The 
Soviets made a good feature film, probably in response to Reds, entitled Ten 
Days that Shook the World (not to be confused with Sergei Eisenstein's earlier, 
silent classic) in the early 1980s.

   'Ten Days that Shook the World' is of course the title of Reed's famous 
eye-witness account of the events in Russia in 1917.   This book is an 
unsurpassed presentation of the most momentous revolutionary event of the 20th 
century - the October Revolution that brought to power the Russian workers and 
peasants, under the leadership of Lenin's Bolshevik party.   Before he covered 
the events in Russia in 1917, Reed had already established himself as the most 
sought-after journalist in the USA, after making his name with his eye-witness 
reportage of the Mexican Revolution, which began in 1910.    Reed came from an 
upper-middle-class family background, and was educated at Harvard.   He became 
a socialist while at university, and threw himself into the fight of organised 
labour in the USA for a better world, taking part in struggles both as reporter 
and protagonist.

   Reed's writing style is arresting, and this style found its natural subject 
in the Russian Revolution.   Reed's descriptions, in his book Ten Days that 
Shook the World, of the mass meetings and rallies, demonstrations and strikes; 
of the deliberations of the soviets (workers' and soldiers' councils), and of 
the meetings and parleys of the revolutionary committees and their leaders 
(many of which Reed attended personally) together present a dramatic picture of 
a whole nation and society in turmoil, and also of the tremendous atmosphere of 
revolutionary hope and optimism that animated the Russian people.   The film 
Reds brings out this atmosphere very well.

   A.J.P. Taylor's introduction to the more recent Penguin editions of Ten Days 
emphasises that Reed's book brings out the true relative importance of the 
different revolutionary leaders at the time of the 1917 Revolution in Russia.   
Lenin and Trotsky stand out as the two central leaders, while Stalin does not 
figure in Reed's narrative.   The British Communist Party, which held the 
publishing rights in Britain to Ten Days in the early 1960s, refused to allow 
Penguin to bring out the book with Taylor's introduction, because Taylor had 
emphasised this point.   Only later Penguin editions, after the publishing 
rights of the CPGB over the book had expired, carry Taylor's introduction.

   Tamara Hovey's book John Reed: Witness to Revolution is an excellent 
biography of the American socialist.   Reed went on, after the Russian 
Revolution, to become a founder of the US Communist Party, and played a leading 
role in its earliest history.   Reed attended the second congress of the 
Communist International in 1920, as a US delegate.   He died of typhus shortly 
after being present at the Congress of the Peoples of the East in Baku in 1920.

   Louise Bryant, Reed's partner, was also a talented writer.   She wrote Six 
Red Months in Russia and Mirrors of Moscow - the latter book providing useful 
portraits of the Russian revolutionary leaders.

   Reds, shown on video, could be a useful educational tool for comrades who 
have not yet seen the film.   Perhaps branches could consider organising 
screenings.


                                                                        In 
solidarity,


                                                                                
        Graham Milner
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