John Reed: The Journalist and the Revolution
A hundred years on from the Russian Revolution, exploring John Reed's 'Ten Days That Shook The World' on the banks of the Nile
-Published in the New York Times
-October 2017
-Shortlisted for the 2018 Orwell Prize for political journalism
At the house on the corner, past the cigarette kiosk and the laundry place and the twisted metal barricade assembled to shield passers-by from gunfire, I pitched in with a group of kids carrying rocks.
It was early February 2011. Egypt, where I had been working as a reporter for several years, was engulfed in revolution, and rubble was being ferried to the rooftop by protesters in an effort to defend Tahrir Square from a counterrevolutionary assault. Journalists are often told to stand separate from the events they are reporting on, to ensure their notebooks are tidy organs of record, carefully sealed off from the turmoil around them. The pages of mine were smeared with grime and dust, and some were splotched with tears.
The historian Howard Zinn once noted that “you can’t be neutral on a moving train,” and no train moves faster or tilts more fiercely than a nation consumed by popular rebellion. Exactly where and how reporters should plant their feet at such a moment is a question that must be asked anew by each correspondent, in every corner of the world, uprising after uprising. Many of us who have been forced to grapple with it — as I was that afternoon — have arrived at different answers. All of them are messy. And for the past century all of them, consciously or not, have been shaped to some degree by the work of John Reed, the legendary chronicler of Russia’s October Revolution in 1917.
Reed, a young American who arrived in Saint Petersburg with his wife, Louise Bryant, just as Russia’s fragile provisional government began to buckle and the city’s back streets were humming with whispers of strikes, mutinies and sedition, made no claims to impartiality in his coverage. “This was his revolution, not an obscure event in a foreign country,” the British historian A.J.P. Taylor later wrote. Reed’s book, “Ten Days That Shook the World,” explores the Communist insurgency not as a scientist might analyze slides through a microscope but rather as a lived experience, with all of a real life’s hopes and fears.
Far from being an invisible presence in his narrative, Reed is frequently the star of it: bluffing his way past guards, being threatened with assault by suspicious demonstrators, narrowly avoiding being shot by soldiers against a wall. At one point he finds himself participating in the distribution of leaflets announcing the fall of the ancien régime; a few (much mythologized) pages later, he pours through the gates of the Winter Palace in the company of triumphant revolutionaries. In the process, he imparts to his readers a sense of how the thrill of revolution coursed through not just his subjects’ veins but also his own. “It is still fashionable,” Reed remarks unapologetically, “to speak of the Bolshevik insurrection as an ‘adventure.’ Adventure it was, and one of the most marvelous mankind ever embarked upon.”
Reed’s belief that personal passion and political engagement on the part of a reporter are not antithetical to meaningful revolutionary journalism but rather lie at the very core of it was not the only feature of his work that resonated with me as I attempted to chart a very different national transformation — more than 2,000 miles away and more than nine decades later. Just as striking was the way his prose is littered with people and places that seem a long way from anywhere but are actually at the center of everything.
Barely 72 hours after the Bolsheviks had seized power, for example, and just as the civil war that would divide Russia for the next half decade began to crystallize, Reed devotes several paragraphs to an ill-tempered conversation between an uneducated member of the Red Guards and a supercilious counterrevolutionary student, which took place by the door of a provincial railway station.
The pair were arguing about the proletariat and the bourgeoisie; beyond them, rival armies and ideas were on the march. In any other context, the soldier would have deferred to the student, his class superior. But the old orthodoxy was crumbling, and Reed shows both men navigating the social terrain of something unknown, something new.
In Egypt, too, the real story of unrest lay not in Hosni Mubarak’s presidential palace but in the mundane spaces where norms were shifting: in the tuk-tuks, previously confined to the informal settlements on the margins of the capital, which now honked their way defiantly into the city center; in the schoolchildren re-enacting battles against the security forces on their playground; in the low-level insurgencies waged in family dining rooms, college lecture halls and factory floors across the country.
Trotsky would later write of 1917 that the history of revolution is “first of all a history of the forcible entrance of the masses into the realm of rulership over their own destiny.” Reed understood this not as an academic treatise in which the masses remain faceless but as a practical reality, one that locates the essence of revolution as much in the erratic widening of individual imaginations as it does in the corridors of formal power or in the machinations of competing leaders.
Rereading “Ten Days That Shook the World” today, it is not the near-verbatim accounts of interminable, overlapping Soviet committee meetings that stand out, nor the alphabet soup of long-forgotten organizational acronyms that requires a 10-page glossary. It is not even the grand showpieces that Reed witnessed and relates in his work, like the raucous smoke-filled meetings at Lenin’s Smolny headquarters where insurrection was hatched, or the mammoth funeral processions for the martyrs of Moscow after the city was won. Rather it is the description of a well-to-do young woman’s hysterics after she is addressed as “comrade” by a streetcar conductor. It is the scene where an old workman pilots an auto-truck back toward the capital after the revolution is victorious, sweeping his arm across the urban haze: “ ‘Mine!’ he cried, his face all alight. ‘All mine now! My Petrograd!’ ” It is all the times when Reed trains his gaze on the irrefutably human micro-dramas that are inevitable, and epic, when history is sloping; the times when he homes in on the struggles that take place when every person, with their own varying level of investment in yesterday, tries, tentatively, to find a foothold in tomorrow.
Revolutions are by their nature make-do affairs with few maps to guide either participants or observers. When people are making and doing something radically transformative, and transforming themselves in the process, it’s impossible to interrogate what’s happening if you’re relying solely on the templates that came before. Reed appreciated this. Rather than fighting unknowability, he embraced it. He opens the main body of his book by recounting the bafflement of a visiting sociology professor who is informed that revolutionary sentiment is both rising and on the wane. “The professor was puzzled,” Reed notes, “but he need not have been; both observations were correct.”
Reed is not afraid to convey the contradictions of revolution — its tangle of the tumultuous and the prosaic, its clouds of misinformation and obscurity. He describes the trundling of armored vehicles in the streets, the voices in the darkness, the fear and reckless daring from which the new Russia was born. He captures, just as I tried to in Egypt, that curious feature of rapid political change whereby the furniture and accessories of the previous system remain dotted about the landscape, suddenly shorn of their power, both unaltered and simultaneously absurd. He probes the language of elites as they scrabble to keep up with events: One tycoon tells him that revolution is a sickness and that intervention is necessary to prevent it, just as “one would intervene to cure a sick child” — a foreshadowing of the infantilizing rhetoric adopted by successive Egyptian leaders. “The air was full of confused sound,” Reed reports, in a passage that could have been lifted straight out of Cairo during its own uprising. “The city stirred uneasily, wakeful.”
Across time, place and context, revolutions occur when a whiff of possibility appears, a broadening of horizons, tangible evidence that the status quo is not immutable. Wherever we are, we are all capable of picking up that scent. Of course, the full history of Russia’s revolution contains great shafts of darkness as well as light. In Egypt, too, albeit under very different circumstances, the utopianism of 2011 has given way to suffocation and violence, as a new iteration of military despots attempt to expunge collective memories of that brief moment when the ability to shape the world around oneself had fallen into collective hands. Far from invalidating the sort of reporting Reed helped pioneer, though, the fragility of such moments reinforces its worth. It is through the act of storytelling that revolution itself becomes possible.
“Ten Days That Shook the World” lives on, not because Reed got everything right (he didn’t) or because the revolution he covered was an uncomplicated success story (it was anything but), but because he understood the real force of revolutionary journalism: its potential to rouse all who engage with it — not least the reporters themselves.
