Buried At The Kremlin Wall: The American 'Hero' Of Lenin’s Communists
John Reed, pictured here in the early 1900s, was born in Portland, Oregon, in 1887. He was brought up in what he described as “a lordly mansion modeled on a French chateau” with “tame deer among the trees.” But his family soon lost much of its wealth, and Reed struggled with the sudden descent from affluence.
Harvard University's Class Day Exercises in 1906, the same year John Reed enrolled in the prestigious school.
On his second attempt, Reed was admitted to Harvard University, where he was soon editing two campus newspapers. Reed was first introduced to radical left-wing politics through Harvard’s Socialist Club.
Reed relaxing with friends in the dunes of Provincetown, Massachusetts.
After finishing his Harvard studies, Reed moved to New York City’s Greenwich Village, a center of social dissent at the time, to begin a career as a freelance writer. He became increasingly radicalized by the belief that “workers produced all the wealth of the world, which went to those who did not earn it.” While his table-thumping politics began to turn away friends, his writing attracted some American magazine editors.
Pancho Villa, a military leader of the Mexican Revolution
Reed’s big break came when he was assigned to cover the Mexican Revolution in 1913. His vivid dispatches from months of hell-raising in the desert with Pancho Villa’s gunslinging horsemen made Reed’s name as a journalist.
Allied soldiers in France during World War I
Reed’s next international story would begin the unravelling of his reputation in the United States. While covering World War I from the German trenches in 1915, Reed and a colleague drunkenly fired a rifle in the direction of the opposing French lines. With the backdrop of uncountable thousands of dead young men rotting in the mud of France, the incident sparked disgust back at home.
In 1915, Reed began a relationship with journalist Louise Bryant, a feminist described by one U.S. official as “socialistic and full of ultra-modern ideas." Reed called Bryant “the first person I ever loved without reservation.” After a stormy romance, they married in 1916.
An undated police mugshot after one of Reed’s arrests in the United States
Soon Reed’s journalistic coverage of industrial disputes and social issues in America morphed into all-out political activism. He became a target of law enforcement at a time when left-wing radicals were viewed as a potential revolutionary threat to the country. By the beginning of 1917, after several arrests, a friend said the formerly fun-loving Reed was “beginning to assume some of the humorless and dogmatic qualities of the doctrinaire Marxist.”
Armed guards near the Bolshevik headquarters in St. Petersburg, Russia in the autumn of 1917
After Russia’s tsar was overthrown in early 1917, Reed sensed the situation in Russia was building toward another momentous upheaval. In August that year, Reed and Bryant set sail for St. Petersburg -- then called Petrograd -- to report on whatever was about to happen next.
Men manning a barricade in Petrograd in October 1917
As the 1917 October Revolution began, eventually bringing Vladimir Lenin and his communist Bolshevik Party to power, Reed wrote to a friend: “"We are in the middle of things and believe me it's thrilling. For color and terror and grandeur this makes Mexico look pale." Muggings and violent crime in the city when the American couple arrived had become so widespread that Reed said “you could hardly walk down the street.”
Vladimir Lenin after viewing a parade in Moscow in 1918
Lenin saw Reed’s enthusiasm for the Bolsheviks as a propaganda coup. Reed was granted access to Lenin during the chaotic days around the October revolution. He described the Bolshevik leader as "a short, stocky figure, with a big head set down in his shoulders, bald and bulging.... Dressed in shabby clothes, his trousers much too long for him. Unimpressive, to be the idol of a mob, loved and revered as perhaps few leaders in history have been."
Reed wearing a fur “ushanka” winter cap during one of his trips to Russia
In April 1918, when Reed and Bryant returned to the United States to write their accounts of the revolution in Russia, Reed was arrested for previously published anti-war articles.
His notes from Russia were confiscated. Eventually the papers were returned and he locked himself away in a Greenwich Village apartment with a Russian dictionary to write his most famous book. The account of what he saw in Russia was called Ten Days That Shook The World. A friend who bumped into Reed at the time described him as “gaunt, unshaven, greasy-skinned, a stark sleepless half-crazy look on his slightly potato-like face.”
The draft of a telegram Reed sent from Finland after being imprisoned on smuggling charges while en route to Russia.
In October 1919, facing charges of sedition after hearings in which Reed hinted at his support for a violent socialist revolution in America, Reed fled the United States with a forged passport and headed to Russia for the last time.
Arriving in Russia amid the political terror and obvious breakdown of the country, Reed’s once unshakable faith in revolutionary socialism faltered. His friend and fellow left-wing activist Emma Goldman, who had been deported by the United States to Russia, told Reed: "I must be crazy, Jack, or else I never understood the meaning of revolution. I certainly never believed that it would signify callous indifference to human life and suffering, or that it would have no other method of solving its problems than by wholesale slaughter."
Reed is seen in a white shirt (center left) during a communist political meeting in Baku.
Reed’s disillusionment with Lenin’s Bolsheviks accelerated in 1920 when he was sent to Baku, in Soviet Azerbaijan, to attend a multinational meeting of the Communist International. On the long train ride back to Moscow, Reed watched Comintern officials treating themselves “to an order of exotic foods, endless supplies of alcohol, and young prostitutes, some of whom may have been 14.”
Louise Bryant mourns next to Reed’s Coffin in the Trades Union hall in central Moscow.
When Louise Bryant met Reed in Moscow in September 1920 after making her own arduous journey to Russia, she found him “older and sadder” and “close to a breakdown.”
A friend described Reed as “old and exhausted... He was becoming more and more depressed by the suffering, disorganization, and inefficiency to be found everywhere."
Bryant believed Reed was "terribly afraid of having made a serious mistake in his interpretation of an historical event for which he would be held accountable before the judgment of history."
That autumn, Reed came down with typhus. He died with Bryant at his side on October 17, 1920, after several weeks of illness.
Reed’s coffin being interred at the base of the Kremlin walls
Reed’s funeral was attended by revolutionaries Nikolai Bukharin and Aleksandra Kollontai, among others. “There were speeches in English, French, German, and Russian. It took a very long time, and a mixture of rain and snow was falling,” a witness wrote. “Although the poor widow [Bryant] fainted, her friends did not take her away. It was extremely painful to see this white-faced, unconscious woman lying back on the supporting arm of a Foreign Office official, more interested in the speeches than in the human agony."
American communists lay flowers at the plaque marking Reed’s burial place next to the Kremlin in 1981. In the background is Lenin’s mausoleum.
The 1981 Hollywood film Reds, which won three Academy awards, was based on Reed’s life. In 1999, Reed’s book was named one of the most important works of journalism by New York University. The judges wrote: “Perhaps the most controversial work on our list is the seventh, John Reed’s book, Ten Days That Shook the World, reporting on the October revolution in Russia in 1917. Yes, as conservative critics have noted, Reed was a partisan. Yes, historians would do better. But this was probably the most consequential news story of the century, and Reed was there, and Reed could write.”