10 Days, Snagglepuss, death

As I say, it seems that Reed saw the fact that Russia, the Soviet Union, was drifting toward tyranny. And it seems to have brought him much mental anguish.

Thus, he joins the list of those Who Did Not Know When To Die. If he'd perished just after his book was printed, he would have gone to his worker's paradise in perfect contentment.

And so revealed is the secret that Alexander knew but Napoleon didn't—timing. Everything depends on perceiving precisely the moment to …in the words of the immortal Snagglepuss… Exit, Stage Left.

more on Reed

Nothing that I've said is meant to suggest that John Reed's book doesn't have value. Indeed it does. It is an important historical document in that it records the events of the Revolution in a way that few other texts do.

And it catches brilliantly one of the key aspects of civil unrest, that is to say, its enormous confusion. Armored cars rush off to God knows where. Crowds appear from nowhere, riot about something, and are gone again. Armies march…but whose? Competing governments issue contradictory pronouncements and decrees.

And all this is true to life. True to revolutions.

Thus Reed's value. He is precise in his description of imprecision.

Ten Days That Shook The World

I am writing this very early in the morning. I've gotten up, leaving Martha in bed, and gone to read in the front room. It's something I do fairly often. My current book is John Reed's Ten Days That Shook The World—which, I am embarrassed to confess, I've never read before, and which (I think) I'll never read again.

It is a difficult book to read today, with all its hero worship and its enthusiasm. Reed, you see, was an American intellectual and an early visitor to Revolutionary Russia. And he was an eyewitness to the Bolshevik coup that put Lenin and his friends in power. (He'd die in the Soviet Union, eventually, and be buried in the Kremlin's Necropolis.)

But what is difficult about the book is that you know what he did not, i.e., that the great Soviet experiment would end horribly in the Gulag, in the artificial famine of Ukraine, in terror and war…with Stalin. Thus, to skim its pages is to become embarrassed for its author. Is it possible, one asks, that he could have so completely misinterpreted what he saw? That he could have been so willfully blind? Alas, of course, the answer is yes. He does not seem to notice the growing repression, the judicial murders, the suppression of other parties and other points of view…the slow drift toward first, dictatorship, and then, genuine totalitarianism.

Still, judge not lest, etc. There is evidence that Reed realized his error and, towards the end of his life, regretted the excesses of the Revolution he'd chronicled.

Second, if Reed misunderstood the nature of the Revolution around him, then he was not alone in that. Much of the world's intellectual class (if not its workers, who tend to be a hardheaded lot) bought into the Revolution, and defended it in print … occasionally in the streets…even as Stalin sent poets and filmmakers and tens of millions of others to die in Siberian winters.

Which is what disturbs me. I am, by some measures, myself an intellectual...in a small way, at least. And even if I weren't, I am a follower of greater intellectuals, a reader of their prose and a viewer of their independent productions. I listen to their wisdom and sign their petitions.

But what if…?

What if among their causes and their calls for action there are other hells? Unobserved? Awaiting birth? Midwived by those who most of all should stand guard against him?

That horned god, that hoofed fiend, that rough beast slouching toward Bethlehem.