John Reed: a century of the chronicler of the October Revolution

It was Vázquez Montalbán who said: "If the Englishman EH Carr has been the best writer far from the Bolshevik revolution, John Reed has been its best journalist."

Reed was an American journalist, writer, poet and activist, whose short life (32 years: from 1887 to October 19, 1920) was marked above all by two events that transformed history and in which he was present: he covered the revolution Mexican in 1911, accompanying Pancho Villa (who called him “el chatito”) in his forays into northern Mexico, and the result of his chronicles was one of his best books, México insurgente (reissued these days in Spain by the editorial Capitán Swing).

The second milestone that Reed witnessed was the Bolshevik revolution of 1917.

When the revolution breaks out in the city of Petrograd (later Leningrad, now Saint Petersburg), the journalist immerses himself in everyday life, interviews the protagonists of that uprising (two of them, one with Kerénsky, the leader of the provisional government against the that the Bolsheviks rose, and Trotsky, who together with Lenin led the taking of the Winter Palace, had worldwide relevance), and lives with them and with the rest of those who will later become People's Commissars (ministers) in the first Bolshevik Government .

Once he returned to New York and despite the fact that numerous notes and documents of what had happened were withheld from him, he wrote one of the seminal books of the Russian revolution and the history of journalism:

which appeared in 1919 Although two years earlier he arrived in Petrograd with the backpack of his leftist ideas (acquired in the world of unionism and American communism) and there he acquired an ideological closeness to the Bolshevik militants, Reed says: “In recounting the history of those great days I have endeavored to observe events with the eyes of a conscientious analyst, interested in establishing reality ”.

Great events and daily life, the voice of the leaders and the conversations in the barricades, the cafes, the buses… his workplace was the Smolny Institute, which “hummed like a gigantic beehive”.

In the Smolny he saw Lenin arrive, until then in hiding, and be received by Trotsky, head of the Military Revolutionary Committee, the man in charge of planning the uprising.

Trotsky gave his office on the second floor of the Smolny to a Lenin who arrived in disguise (old workman's clothes, glasses, and a wig that refused to stay in place; in addition, he had shaved off his characteristic reddish beard) to avoid the policeman.

Vladimir Antonov-Ovseyenko wrote: “You could have mistaken him for a school principal or an old bookseller.

She took off her wig (…) and then we recognized her eyes, which shone, as usual, with a spark of humor ”.

In

… Reed reflects his first impression: “He was a short, stocky man, with a large bald spot and a bulging head over a robust neck.

Fairly worn suit, pants a bit long for his size.

Nothing reminiscent of an idol of the crowds… ”.

The first edition of

(there is a very careful edition of 2017, coinciding with the centenary of the revolution, illustrated by Fernando Vicente, in Captain Swing) had two prologues that reveal the significance that the Bolshevik leaders gave to the book: the book itself Lenin and his wife Nadia Krupskaya.

The first says that "after reading John Reed's book with great interest and profound attention, I heartily recommend this work to workers throughout the world."

And the Krupskaya emphasizes that it seems strange at first glance that this book was written by a foreigner: “John Reed is inseparably linked to the Russian Revolution.

He loved Soviet Russia and felt close to it.

Struck by typhus, his body rests at the foot of the red wall of the Kremlin.

Whoever has described the funerals of the victims of the Revolution as did John Reed deserves such an honor.

Indeed, after writing his book in New York and suffering the permanent processes of division of the American left, Reed returned to Moscow and died of typhus.

He was recognized as a hero of the revolution and buried with other protagonists in the history of the USSR: Stalin, Krupskaya, Gagarin, Inessa Armand, Kalinin, Lunacharski, Clara Zetkin, Alexandra Kollontai ... next to Lenin's mausoleum.

In Reed's work the presence of the "Stalin universe" is very rare.

Stalin was not on the same level as the other leaders (especially Trotsky) until Lenin died in 1924. Only then, and manipulating history, did Stalin try to convince otherwise.

There is an anecdote that illustrates this well and that the historian Catherine Merridale describes in her book

(Criticism), which tells of the journey from Zurich to Petrograd of the architect of the revolution.

A small nucleus of comrades accompanied him on the sealed train that arrived at Finland Station.

Stalin was not among them.

One of the canonical paintings of the trip, painted in the purest realistic style decades later, reflects the moment when Lenin set foot in the then Russian capital, in April 1917. In the oil painting, he is seen descending from a carriage of third class, and a step above, looking directly at the viewer, is a brave Bolshevik with a cap and his recognizable black mustache.

It's Stalin!

As the characters of the names of those buried in the Kremlin wall are in Cyrillic, those who do not know that alphabet have difficulties to find the small tomb of John Reed, who is now celebrating the centenary of his death and of whom Trotsky, in his History of the Russian Revolution highlighted his "naive look."

I was 30 years old.