If you'd like to read a different kind of battle fought by an American who was on the opposite side of the American soldiers sent to defeat the Bolsheviks, there was the fighter who didn't raise his sword but used his typewriter. His name was John Reed who wrote: TEN DAYS THAT SHOOK THE WORLD. One of the few books where you'll see the author's name larger than the title of the book.
John Reed was born in Portland, Oregon in the year 1887. He became a correspondent, first in the Mexican War of 1916, then a reporter in WWI which took him to Russia. He became "Red" John Reed who spread the socialist word. He died of typhus in 1920 and was buried in Red Square in the Heroes' Grave with a plaque on the Kremlin wall which commenorates his service to the Communist-Labour Party in Russia and in the USA, which was just forming at that time.
Some lines from his book:
p. 255-6
"It was on 18 November that the snow came. In the morning we woke to window-ledges heaped white, and snowflakes falling so whirling thick that it was impossible to see ten feet...."
"I sat...in a traktir -- a kind of lower-class inn- across the street from the gates of Smolny; a low-ceiling, loud place called 'Uncle Tom's Cabin', much frequeted by Red Guards. They crowded it now, packed close around the little tables with their dirty table-cloths and enormous china tepots, filling the place with foul cigarette smoke, while the harassed waiter ran about crying 'Seichass! Seichass! In a inute! Right away!"
"In one corner sat a man in the uniform of a captain, addressing the assembly, which interrupted him at every few words.
'You are no better than murderes! he cried. 'Shooting down your Russian brothers on the streets!'
'When did we do that?' asked a worker.
'Last Sunday you did it, when the yunkers--'
'Well, didn't they shoot us?' One man exhibited his arm in a sling. 'Haven't I got something to remember them by, the devils?'
The captin shouted at the top of his voice. 'You should remain neutral! You should remain neutral! Who are you to destroy the legal Governemnt? Who is Lenin? A German--'
'Who are you? A counter-revolutionist! A provocator!' they bellowed at him.
When he could make himself heard the captain stood up. 'All right!' said he. 'You call yourselves the people of Russia. But you're not the people of Russia. The peasants are the people of Russia. Wait until the peasants--'
'Yes,' they cried, 'wait until the peasants speak. We know what the peasasnts will say... Aren't they working-men like ourselves?'"
Reed tells us in his next paragraph p. 256:
"In the long run everything depended upon the peasants. While the peasants had been politically backward, still they had their own peculair idea, and they consituted more than eighty per cent of the people of Russia. The Bolsheviki had a comparatievly small following among the peasants; and a permenent dictatorship of Russia by the industrial workers was impossible... The traditional peasant party was the Socialist Revolutionary party; of all the parties now supporting the Soviet Government, the Left Socialist Revolutionaries were logical inheritors of the peasant leadership-- and the Left Socialist Revolutionaries, who were at the mercy of the organized city proletariat, desperately needed the back of the peasants..."
Like so many supporters of the Socialist Revolution, John Reed had no idea that the socialist Lenin would become a dictator who would be as cruel and as harsh as any Tsar before him and who would break almost all the promises given to the peasants of Russia.
AGRBear
