On the cover of the Haymarket edition (2019) which I read, it has, “A dazzling first-hand account of the Russian Revolution.” John Reed was on-assignment for a socialist/communist newspaper, The Masses, in St. Petersburg when Lenin, Trotsky, and the Bolsheviks attempted an insurrection, for power of the All-Russian Congress of the Soviets. Reed was present and, most times, in the very midst of these developments, and it was most certainly a dazzling, if not romantic, account of the events from November 7th to the 18th of the year 1917.
What struck me most throughout the book was the attitude of camaraderie displayed by the author, while still objectively describing, in his judgment, the faults of the Bolsheviki. There were no wholesale judgements, as they remained acutely contextualized.
When recounting the storming of the Tsar’s Winter Palace, Reed details the tension among the workers and soldiers, as they finally grasped this symbol of the bourgeois and old regime. The riches in that palace could have served many peasants and their families for years to come, and yet when the Bolshevik leaders heard that ransacking was taking place, they paraded through the palace yelling, “Revolutionary discipline! These items belong to the People! Revolutionary discipline!”, and admonishing those who continued that they would face a tribunal for thieving, as the bourgeois did, from the people. It was an exhilarating example of self-determination among a people powered and virtually leaderless moment. The people took it upon themselves to lead, and admonish the selfishness that they were in attempt of revolutionizing.
On the contrary, most news of that night claimed that millions of rubles worth of items had been looted, with much violence and infighting. In reality, as Reed accounts, when cries of revolutionary discipline came ringing through the halls, nearly everyone dropped what they had presumed theirs in the heat of the revolutionary moment; they did this even though they had rationalized their thievery as self-appointed reparations. Further, anyone leaving was searched at the door for anything not belonging to them, no matter how little; and, no matter how big. Reed recounts a man walking the halls at one point with a standing clock over his shoulder, and when cries were heard he gingerly set it down where he stood, and went about other business.
Second what struck me were the procedures of the Bolshevik for instilling that sort of revolutionary discipline in both their physical and political insurrection. They detested reactionary-ism, where it led to wars and bad policy, and so they extolled political integrity. “No provocateurs!” And if one showed their hand as such, even a Bolsheviki, they would be thrown out. Misinformation was abound, and so they couldn’t do anything but have strict discipline against the provocation toward armed insurrection; Russian against Russian. The Bolsheviki were in fact the People in other terms, and the People did not want to kill each other, they wanted to retake their right of power from the bourgeoisie, for as Reed remarks on pages 305-6:
“Not by compromise with the propertied classes, or with the other political leaders; not by conciliating the old Government mechanism, did the Bolsheviki conquer power. Nor by the organized violence of a small clique. If the masses all over Russia had not been ready for insurrection it must have failed. The only reason for Bolshevik success lay in their accomplishing the vast and simple desires of the most profound strata of people, calling them to the work of tearing down and destroying the old, and afterward, in the smoke of falling ruins, cooperating with them to erect the framework of the new….”
Other calls to revolutionary self-control hit the same note of integrity as that night of storming the Winter Palace. As Reed narrates a proclamation from Lenin:
“‘Citizens! We [The Military Revolutionary Committee attached to the Petrograd Soviet of Workers’ and Soldiers’ Deputies] call upon you to maintain complete quiet and self-possession. The cause of order and Revolution is in strong hands.”
It is these proclamations, and the conversations that birthed them, that so shook the world. The Soviets of Soldiers’, Peasants’, and Workers’ Deputies joined together to pronounce, as Lenin said on the eve of revolution: “Here is the power! What are you going to do with it?”