By Avtonom Nepomnyashchy

The Third All-Russian Congress of Soviets, at which
Chairman of the Council of People’s Commissars VI.
Lenin reported on the activities of the government,
took place on January 24, 1918, in the hall of the
Tauride Palace. Among the numerous speakers that
a the rostrum was the American journalist, John

John Reed delivered the first phrase in Russian:
‘Comrades, I came here to give my vow to the great
Russian revolution.” Then he shifted to English. He

spoke about the deep gratification and the greathopes .

evoked in him by the awareness that the victory of the
proletariat in one of the most powerful countries in the
world, Russia, was no dream but a reality, that the
October uprising showed the entire strength and in-
vincibility of the revolution, which will not be broken

no matter what coercion its enemies use. The last :

words he also uttered in Russian: “I promise you to
tell the American proletariat everything that is taking
place in revolutionary Russia.”

That wasn’t John Reed’s first visit to Petrograd.
One dark night in 1915 he crossed the Prut together
with the artist, Bordman Robinson, on a big flat boat
half filled with water and found himself in Russia.
They had plenty of adventures, some of which were at
the risk of their lives, on their way to Petrograd. Reed
was met at the American Embassy most coldly and
told to get out as soon as possible and by the shortest
route. In July of the same year Reed and Robinson left
Russia. ;

The bourgeois revolution, which overthrew the
czar, took place in Russia in February 1917. Reed,
together with his wife Louise Bryant, arrived in Pet-
rograd at the beginning of September. A small com-
munity of Americans appeared there: Reed and his
wife, journalists Albert Rhys Williams and Bessie
Beattie, and Colonel Raymond Robins, representa-
tive of the American Red Cross in Russia.

John Reed became tremendously active. He could
be seen in Smolny, the headquarters of the revolution,
then in the citadel of the counterrevolution—the
Winter Palace, where the Provisional Government
had established itself. He took part in the meeting of
the Obukhov factory workers, and then visited the
“Russian Rockefeller,’’ oil magnate Lianozov, in his
luxurious mansion. At night Reed would be warming
his hands at a bonfire around which men of the Red
Guards were crowded, and the very next evening en-
tering the lit-up Alexandrinsky Theater sparkling
with gold, where trainees of the School of Pages stood
guard at the empty czarist box.

The American's press pass and personal charm
had an effect. Interviews were given to him both by
revolutionaries and counter-revolutionaries; he
found a common tongue with workers and soldiers,
and pedestrians on the street.

The country at this time was dragged into a bloody
world war; its economy was exhausted to the limit;
there was a shortage of food and fuel; the factories
were being shut down, and thousands of workers
found themselves thrown out on the street

a
# - @

Daily World file photo

Joni Reed at work

PACIFIC TRIBUNE—JAN. 15, 1982—Page 6

Reed did not conceal his liking for the Bolsheviks.
He understood quite well that only the Bolsheviks
could get the situation in hand and give the people
what they demanded. Reed clearly saw that the Pro-
visional Government, the old world, was doomed. The
American journalist openly called the Bolshevik
Party the only one in the country that had a clear
program. :

Reed found time to take a trip to the Riga Front
together with Williams and Boris Reinstein. There
their car was shelled by a long-range German gun.
The Americans saw with their own eyes the horrors of
the war which the Provisional Government intended
to wage ‘‘to the victorious end.”’

In the meanwhile events in Petrograd were reach-

ing aclimax. The Provisional Government attempted

to.get rid of the Petrograd proletarians through the
evacuation of the biggest plants, and to get the
revolutionary-inclined military units out of the capi-
tal. The workers and the Bolsheviks replied to that
with the organization of a Military Revolutionary
Committee and direct preparations for an uprising.

During that period Reed was under the utmost
strain and slept only three of four hours a day. From
early morning until late at night he rushed all over the
city, the pockets of his jacket crammed with
notebooks, leaflets and posters. He did his utmost to
record as precisely and thoroughly as possible the
extraordinary events of those days—events that were
destined to shake the world.

Reed began the count of those days with Saturday,
October 21, 1917. Early that morning he set off for the
seething Smolny; the next day he wrote down that the
slogan of the Bolsheviks, ‘‘All power to the Soviets! ,”’
resounded in the barracks and workers’ sections.

Finally the decisive moment came. Reed, Wil-
liams, Louise Bryant and Bessie Beattie reached the
Palace Square at the very moment when the storming
of the Winter Palace, where the Ministers of the Pro-
visional Government took shelter, started. Reed ran
up the stairs of the Palace together with the stream of
men attacking it. The members of the Provisional
Government were arrested. Power passed into the
hands of the people.

Reed greeted the first hours of the birth of the
socialist state in the assembly hall of the Smolny dur-
ing the session of the Second All-Russian Congress of
Soviets of Workers’ and Soldiers’ Deputies. That is
where Soviet power was proclaimed and the first de-
crees, on peace and land, adopted.

It was there, in the evening of November 8, 1917,
that Reed saw Lenin for the first time. The American
journalist stood not far from him. Reed listened with
rapt attention as Lenin stated calmly and simply
that now was the time to launch the creation ot a
socialist order. Reed later wrote:

Suddenly, by common impulse, we found
ourselves on our feet, mumbling together into
the smooth lifting unison of the Internationale. A
grizzled old soldier was sobbing like a
child...The immense sound rolled through the
hall, burst windows and doors and soared into
the quiet sky.

Reed had no wish to remain an indifferent ob-
server of the events that took place in Petrograd.
Together with Williams he began to take part in the
work of the Bureau of International Revolutionary
Propaganda that had been set up under the People’s
Commissariat of Foreign Affairs. There he occupied
himself with translating the decrees of Soviet power
into English, took part in putting out the newspaper
Fakel (The Flame) in German, which was published
in half a million copies, and edited the illustrated
weekly newspaper Russkaya Revolutsia v Kraskakh
(The Russian Revolution in Color). These publica-
tions, together with leaflets and posters, were distri-
buted among the German troops.

When a counter-revolutionary attack -was ex-
pected 'on the day the Constituent Assembly was to be
convened, Reed stood guard with rifle in hand at the
building of the People’s Commissariat of Foreign Af-
fairs. :

At that time Jolin Reed again met Lenin several
times. Yelizaveta Drabkina, one of the oldest mem-
bers of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, who
had known the American journalist well and had often
talked with him, testified:

He was avidly asking about Lenin, wished to

John Reed (inset), U.S. Communist and journalist, took p

know as much as possible about his life, to read
everything he had written. But that was no easy
task: no biography of Lenin was published, and
the collection of his works did not begin to be
issued as yet. = as

He was pondering a lot over the way one
should write about Lenin. He said that his wish”
was not merely to tell about his meetings with
Lenin, but to create an image, precisely an
image of Lenin.

Lenin clearly took a liking to this energetic Amel!
can journalist. And when the head of the Soviet go!
ernment wrote his ‘‘Letter to American Workers’!
August 1918, the opinion was unanimous: John Re@!
would succeed in having America as a whole leat!
about this letter. At the end of October 1918 John Re
met engineer Pyotr Sletoy in a New York bar ant
received from the latter Lenin’s letter. | i

John Reed again arrived in Moscow in Novembé
1919 and immediately started work in the Cominter!
Though he was offered a good place in a hotel, bt
preferred to move in with a worker’s family on tht
outskirts. The American journalist worked in the sul’
botniki (voluntary work on free days without an)
compensation to fulfill some necessary public ‘job!
collecting metal scrap. Although he suffered from th!
cold and hadn’t enough to eat, his friends recognize
him by his boundless energy, cheerful spirit and soe!
ableness.

Reed met workers and told them about Americ®
He was accepted among plain folks as one of them
and was proud of that. He was touched to the veft
bottom of his heart by the speech of a young worker 4
a meeting who proposed the following resolution:

_ Tell our American brothers that we are lis- _