The Collected Works

by John Reed, Robert A. Rosenstone (Introduction)

An American journalist provides eyewitness accounts of the Mexican Revolution and the campaigns of Pancho Villa, war in the Balkans, and the Russian Revolution of 1917, including portraits of the Bolshevik leaders.

Genres: History, Politics

937 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1995

About the author

Librarian Note: There is more than one author in the Goodreads database with this name.

American journalist John Silas Reed, a correspondent of World War I, recounted an experience in Petrograd during the revolution of October 1917 in Ten Days That Shook the World (1919) and, after returning to the United States, cofounded the Communist labor party in 1919; people buried his body in the Kremlin, the citadel, housing the offices of the Russian government and formerly those of the Soviet government, in Moscow.

This poet and Communist activist first gained prominence as a war correspondent during the Mexican revolution for Metropolitan magazine and during World War I for the magazine The Masses. People best know his coverage.

Reed supported the Soviet takeover of Russia and even briefly took up arms to join the Red guards in 1918. He expected a similar Communist revolution in the United States with the short-lived organization.

He died in Moscow of spotted typhus. At the time of his death, he perhaps soured on the Soviet leadership, but the Soviet Union gave him burial of a hero, one of only three Americans at the Kremlin wall necropolis.

Reviews

[J. · Rating 2 out of 5]

Winter was coming on--the terrible Russian winter. I heard businessmen speak of it so: "Winter was always Russia's best friend. Perhaps now it will rid us of Revolution."

Jack Reed was a reporter, adventurer, bohemian. And a quintessential New American. Never a conformist, he was willing to take the world as it came to him, gave due consideration to all comers, and was the very image of what 1910 thought of as The Modern Man. His exploits were conducted with minimal preparation but astounding amounts of nerve and abandon, pure willpower. In his Collected Works we have three non-fiction books: Reed's first journey into revolution and survival below the Rio Grande, called "Insurgent Mexico" … the picaresque adventures in the Balkans he called "The War In Eastern Europe" .. and the major opus, "Ten Days That Shook The World", which chronicles his extended involvement with the 1917 revolution in Russia.

South Of The Border
The first book presents an already-in-progress situation, with Reed more or less embedded with the rebels, soldiers of fortune and guns for hire that made up the resistance to the federales--soldiers and police-- who protected the status quo of the landowners and aristocrats, little changed from the Spanish regime onwards. This was the Mexico of 1913, ripe for change, no rules and no allegiances except what could be forged in the struggle; charismatic men like Orozco, Madero and Pancho Villa were the catalysts in a grand upheaval, directly across a thin borderline from El Paso Texas.

Reed saw his chance, and moved right into the middle of the conflict, inventing for himself the idea of participatory journalism in the process. To say he was embedded with Villa and his men was no exaggeration, and although not mentioned outright, it would have been wildly unlikely for Reed not to have taken up arms for his own day-to-day security in the circumstances.

What transpires in the weeks of the war was catnip to American audiences, the vision of a romantic Latin culture full of violence and color just across a river from the mainland US; giant army movements comprised of Mexicans of every stripe, surging across the desert badlands and treacherous mountains like the ragtag armies of Napoleon crossing the steppe. With every wave of combatants came the camp followers, the women, the children, the laundry and hospital trains tracking the battles and the encampments behind the lines. At night, the bonfires and the corridos, building the myths of the day's heroes.

The modern reader needs to remember that wild-west environs and blown-up train tracks were the thrillers of the day, featured in broadsheets and tabloids from San Francisco to New York; Jack Reed, jauntily reckless junior journalist, blundered through and wrote it all up as adventure, and on his return found that he had written his ticket for the future.

On The Doorstep Of The Mysterious East
In all ways the best of the three books in this collection, the "War In Eastern Europe" takes us not just to another legendarily exotic region, the Balkans, but it does so in the company of a considerably better writer than the one we were with in the bleak hinterlands of Chihuahua. Reed has been back to his Greenwich Village milieu in New York in the meantime, now toast of the town for his dashing reporting, and managed to step up to a new, accomplished level of descriptive prose for his next project. That his story from Mexico concerned a bottom-up revolución, redolent of class struggle everywhere, anywhere-- was not lost on the group of influential, often-celebrated writers, artists and publishers in his New York circle. His work would grow in maturity, and in strict qualitative terms; safe to say he wasn't aiming at the newsstands now, but at the bookstores & libraries.

Reed entered the theater of war through the back door, at the open city of Salonika, Greece. Sarajevo had happened, and the Empires had clashed by this moment in 1915; but it was the era before the Lusitania and the American entry into the war in Europe, though all parties knew it must happen. Thus there was a rapt audience in both the Us and the Uk for the news from Europe. In his by-now typical, haphazard way, Reed and an Illustrator made their way up through the Balkans, chasing the war but mainly observing the culture, the lay of the land. It was unfailingly picturesque.

White distant walls, round towers, and a row of dazzling buildings edged the bay, and little by little a gray and yellow city grew from the barren landscape, climbing a steep hill wide-spread from the sea, a city of broad, irregular tiled roofs, round domes, spiked with a hundred minarets, encircled by the great crenellated wall that was built in the days of the Latin Kingdom--Salonika, the Eastern gate of war!

What gets reported is as much travelogue, in the best sense, as it is documentary, alongside the telling detail that tips the reader to the dissonance below the surface:

Offshore drifted to us the cries of Arabian porters, the shouts of the bazaar, strange minor chants of sailors from the coasts of Asia Minor and the Black Sea, as they hoisted their lateen sails on ships painted at the bows with eyes, whose shape was older than history; a muezzin calling the faithful to prayer; the braying of donkeys; pipes and drums playing squealing dance-music from some latticed house far up in the Turkish quarter. Swarms of rainbow-colored boats manned by swarthy, barefooted pirates jostled each other in a roar of shrill squabbling, two hundred yards away. A skiff, carrying a big Greek flag, brought the medical officer. He bounded up the ladder shouting: "No one ashore who wants to come back. The city is quarantined--plague--"

Everywhere Reed turns, the world is trembling with the enormity of the war on the European plain; the old hierarchies and allegiances are being overturned left and right, the turmoil is palpable. But the truth of the matter is that Reed and his pictorialist friend don't ever see much of the war itself. The battles are far too fraught and locked-in, this being the trench style warfare of the day. But the imagery he finds is no less rich for originating behind the lines and on the outer flanks:

Colonel Doshdovsky, the one-armed Russian commander of all the Turcomans, wore the cross of St. George, and the first and second class of the Order Of Vladimir--for he was a great hero--and his vicious Turcoman sword was covered with Persian verses inlaid with gold. With him we inspected the Turcoman camp... Many had taken off their long caftans, revealing the thin black undergarment, laced tight at the waist, that fell to their baggy red trousers. Others had doffed the great fur hats--and beneath was a brown head shaved bald except for a scalp-lock on the crown, covered by a little silk skull-cap. High saddles bossed with silver lay around, bundles of rich-colored cloths from Khiva and Bokhara and Samarkand, sleeping-rugs and praying-rugs whose weave and color are secrets of the dead. They wore twisted silver chains down their backs, wide sashes of brilliant silk, straight and curved daggers inlaid with precious metals, and swords in richly ornamented scabbards that perhaps Tamerlane had seen...

On the boundaries of the greatest mechanized war the world had ever seen, a million and one ethnic and cultural artifacts hovered and went extinct. Moving targets pass other moving targets in the night, with impenetrable logic and chaos all intertwined. Reed manages to report.

The Ten Days That Shook The World
Timing is everything, they say, and there never was more stunningly intuitive timing than that which took Reed to Petrograd in September of 1917. That he lived and recorded a peak moment of human history unfolding-- is undeniable. Somehow, though, the main pillar of the trilogy, the classic work that John Reed will always be known for--is a giant Glossary Of Terms, an ever-morphing Org Chart of the revolution of the Soviets.

Reed kept and constructed his account from notes of his own, but also from an admittedly enormous cache of newspapers, documents, handbills and speech transcriptions that he smuggled out afterwards. The book suffers with the weight of all this infinite minutiae, especially given that one evening's plan, proclamation or manifesto may be replaced, on the following morning, with a new order, decree, appeal or declaration. In the conditions of a mass revolution, the backdrop of rumors, distortions and outright lies-- leaves not much foundation for lasting reports. Everything in TDTSTW is perhaps valuable for the historian of social change mechanisms, but the Org-Chart lists and data clusters-- are arguably irrelevant to nearly any other reader. Vladimir Lenin does not appear, though present throughout, until over 2oo pages into the proceedings.

In the end, for narrative devices (which is to say not spreadsheet-datapoint arrays, but storytelling angle)-- Reed has only the one, and it is the relentless, rising tide of change. And one subject, really, but a monumental one: the inevitable arc of justice, that must somehow create an equalized society in the end.

To read that into TDTSTW, you must metabolize literally hundreds of pages of factoids and administrative fine points along the way. That mostly fall away, in the insanely euphoric and almost aphrodisiac bliss when the rush of humanity --and conscience--wins the day. Overcoming failed regimes and promises, swept away by the onslaught of History itself.
But take this reader's advice on this, and try the Movie.
____________________
["Reds" 1981]

[Tim Yehl · Rating 4 out of 5]

A gifted writer takes you into events and in front of the people whose influence would be felt throughout the 20th century and into the 21st as the actions and questions of Ukraine make appearances in Reed’s account of the Russian revolution. A timely read given current events made all the more vivid and authentic because Reed was a witness to it all; in Mexico, Eastern Europe, and finally Russia.

[My work is never done]

Excellent Book on all his works.