Commemorating the centenary of the 1917 Russian Revolutions, Slavica has performed a valuable service in re-publishing these works, by native-born Americans, of their first-hand impressions of the 1917 upheavals and their aftermath. The authors range from the granddaughter of a US President, to a pioneering sociology Professor, to a suffragist journalist, to a well-published writer, and a Congregationalist minister. All are white Protestants, descended from generations long living in the US. Their views on the revolution vary widely, although most applauded the overthrow of tsarism, and some became ardent Bolshevik supporters. John Reed's Ten Days That Shook the World, the most famous of this genre, is part of this series. But this review will survey the less well known of the Slavica reprints.

The books provide valuable contemporary insights into one of the central events of the twentieth century. In their backgrounds, the authors range from Professors to journalists to the equivalent of US royalty. Most are progressive. Edward Alsworth Ross, a Professor at the University of Wisconsin, was one of the founders of the field of sociology, author of many books including the standard text Principles of Sociology. Ross left Stanford University after clashing with Leland Stanford over union rights. He continued his academic career at the University of Wisconsin, where he continued his pioneering work. The writer and suffragist Louise Bryant left her dentist husband in Portland, Oregon, decamping with John Reed for a bohemian life that led both of them ultimately to revolutionary Petrograd. Ernest Poole was a much-published writer who had witnessed the 1905 Russian Revolution and could speak some Russian. Albert Rhys Williams was a minister and socialist. Princess Julia Cantacuzène Countess Spéransky née Grant is the one exception to the progressive perspective.

Generally supportive of the February Revolution, the authors differ widely in their assessment of the Bolsheviks. Bryant and Williams are the most favorable; Poole and Ross are more neutral and Cantacuzène most hostile. Each memoir includes vivid vignettes demonstrating the importance of eyewitness observation of world-changing events like the 1917 Russian Revolutions. Edward Ross's interview of Lev Trotskii is one example. In December, just over a month after the Bolshevik Revolution, Ross met with Trotskii at the Smolnii Institute in Petrograd. Brimming with idealism, Trotskii laid out Bolshevik plans for industry. The revolutionary leader claimed that the victors sought “control, rather than ownership [italics in text],” emphasizing that: “We are not ready yet to take over all industry,” (95) and sketching out plans to limit profits to 5 or 6 percent and aiming to “see to it that the factory is run not from the point of view of private profit but from the point of view of the social welfare democratically conceived.” (95) Questioned about how to prevent capital flight when profits would be greater in other countries, Trotskii emphasized his belief in the inevitability of revolutions in other capitalist countries. As for other socialist models, such as the communalism and autonomy advocated by the anarchist Prince Kropotkin, Trotskii rejoined that the Prince's ideas were out of date: “Kropotkin has in mind the Russia of sixty years ago, the Russia of his youth” (96).

Cantacuzène, granddaughter of the general most credited with the Union victory in the US Civil War, pens a Gone With the Wind type narrative about her life as the wife of a Ukrainian nobleman in the village of Bouromka, in one of the most fertile black earth areas of the Russian Empire. Living in a mansion perched on a hill, she tells a story of happy peasants and benevolent landowners. She writes of “generations of good relations between the château and village, such as I have seen in nearly every Russian household I have entered during twenty years” (7). In 1916, the height of the Great War, in her area “the peasants had grown rich … never had our peoples seemed so gay, so prosperous, and so full of energy” (17). A year later, the supposedly contented peasants burned the château to the ground and Cantacuzène and her family were forced to flee. Joining the White forces seeking to overthrow the Bolsheviks, Grant never returned to Bouromka. Her explanation for the peasants’ transformation? “Sloth and dirt and drink” (47), and outside agitators like Lev Trotskii, who she calls a “German agent” (60), who led the undeveloped people astray.

By contrast, Ernest Poole, who spent weeks tramping through the Russian countryside with his friend from 1905 revolutionary days, the small landowner and large presence Juvenale Ivanovich Tarasov, provides a more nuanced view of the peasantry, one that makes clear the desperate conditions of so many in the Russian Empire. Dependent on translation, Poole found in Tarasov a wonderful interpreter and a uniquely Russian type, whose value was “that he belonged to no party at all. He belonged to Russia.” Poole's impression of the Russian countryside emphasizes its poverty. In his vivid writing, he describes the “long straggling rows of log huts and hovels” he sees by the riverbank in a mill town (51). He is the only one of the authors to describe the large number of mostly male migrant workers, “of the armies of labor that roamed about from one big job to another, on railroads, bridges, dams, canals; and of the traveling blacksmiths and tailors and shoemakers who made a semi-hobo class. I stopped to look back on the firelight and the small black figures of men and boys” (53).

Louise Bryant, like her husband John Reed, was pro-Bolshevik, and provides insight into the ordinary as well as the extraordinary of the Revolution. She pays attention to the women who emerged as leaders, from the Socialist Revolutionaries Catherine Breshkovskii and Maria Spiridonova, to the Provisional Government's Minister of Welfare Countess Sofia Panina, and the Bolshevik Minister of Welfare Alexandra Kollontai (spelled Kollontay in the Slavica translation). She devotes a chapter to the women's Death Battalion created by Maria Bochkareva. There are omissions as well. A suffragist, she pays no attention to the fact that Russian women won the vote before the Bolsheviks seized power. This was probably the Provisional Government's most lasting achievement.

Albert Rhys Williams, a Boston Congregationalist Minister, campaigner for Socialist Party candidate Eugene V. Debs, and participant in the 1912 Lawrence “Bread and Roses” textile strike, pens a vivid narrative of his time in revolutionary Russia, from early June, 1917 to July 11, 1918. Of the authors reviewed here, Williams is least dependent on interpreters, and traveled most widely through the vast country. Williams’ initial months are spent mostly in revolutionary Petrograd as control shifts from the Kerenskii-led Provisional Government to the Lenin-led Bolsheviks. The author is less interested in the leaders than the rank and file men, and is especially enamored by the Soviets: “Instinctively I sought out the rulers of the future, the men in the Soviets elected directly out of the trenches, factories, and farms” (13).

Traversing the land on a trans-Siberian railroad train filled with wealthy Russians fleeing the revolution, Williams provides a vivid eyewitness account of the struggles between Bolshevik and anti-Bolshevik forces for control. He documents the enthusiasm and energy of ordinary people responding to Bolshevik promises of giving land to the peasants and ending the war. In Cherm, a Siberian outpost of some of the worst excesses of the Tsarist prison regime, he finds hardened criminals rehabilitated, exulting that: “In the House of the Dead Revolution is Resurrection” (133). He recounts some narrow escapes, violent encounters, and blazing conflicts up and down the rail line, but especially in its eastern terminus in the port city of Vladivostok. He lingers on a description of the Vladivostok Soviet and its idealistic leaders, most of whom were murdered when the White forces took control. Williams’ vivid description of the short-lived but deadly counter-revolution from which he barely escaped alive is especially gripping.

Several of the authors bring with them or adopt the prejudices of the time in their observations. Julia Grant describes Jewish moneylenders in her area as largely gone by the outbreak of the Great War: “only one of the vampire village usurers remained … leaving the business … in the hands of our own Russians” (17). Reporting on the return of Siberian exiles, Edward Ross, considered a progressive, writes that the exiles’ “appearance boded ill for their native land. For the most part, they were of the lowest class of Russian Jews, dirty, sordid, repulsive, not genuine revolutionists at all, but ignorant self-seeking proletarians… . It seemed as if the Russian consuls—appointees of the old regime, be it noted—took a malicious pleasure in sending back persons certain to make trouble.” The editor notes that: “This passage does not represent anti-Semitism,” because Ross follows this with a positive description of another group of Jewish returnees (79). But why is such an editorial interjection necessary? Ross reflects several biases, stereotypes based on class and religion, in this chapter. As much as his characterizations echo the worst of negative stereotypes about Jews, his positive portrayals reflect a different stereotype, of the idealistic Jew of the intelligentsia devoted to social change. It would be more useful to point out that the attitudes reflected in Ross's comments were not uncommon in the US at that time, rather than to try to whitewash them.

Ross has strong opinions about Russian workers, comparing them unfavorably with those in the west. He uncritically conveys the opinion of “various Russian economists” about Bolshevik economic plans, again trading in stereotypes: “All agreed that the Russian workmen are too ignorant and short-sighted to submit themselves to the sound economic principles which may be held by their leaders. Conscious of being masters of the industrial properties, they will not submit themselves to indispensable discipline, they will not follow the counsel of technical men and they will ‘eat up the capital,’ so that before the factories have been long in their hands it will be impossible to keep them going” (98).

Ross also pays attention to women, who played key roles in the revolutionary process. He idealizes women as a group, especially those of the intelligentsia. In a separate chapter entitled “Russian Women and Their Outlook,” he observes: “Let one visit war-worn Russia if one would measure the moral superiority of women” (110). While men were often idle or drunk, women generally focused on their tasks, and kept the country functioning: “The behavior of the women has been altogether admirable” (111). Ross also notes and admires the equal relations between women and men of the intelligentsia, declaring: “The dogma of the inferiority of the female sex seems to have received its coup de grace in Russia in the course of the desperate and bloody struggle of a few thousand gallant and social-minded revolutionaries with the mightiest power on earth… . Together men and women were slaves, now together they are free” (120). At the same time, while lauding the equal relations of the sexes among the small educated class, he avows that the majority of Russian women remain oppressed by their men and have been untouched by the women's movement: “In rural Russia the women are regarded and treated as peasant women elsewhere are regarded and treated” (121). Yet he is hopeful. The war has upended notions among the female masses of their inferiority; Ross expects that the ideas of equality between the sexes of the “higher classes” will soon diffuse among the majority of the Russian population. Unlike Bryant, Ross's observations about Russian women include no individual portraits and no interviews such as the one he includes with Trotskii.

These writers’ impressions of the Revolution and their gritty narratives are significant in portraying the day to day processes and phenomena which led to the Bolsheviks’ appeal and their far from inevitable triumph. But they are also important for the light they shed on the range of reactions to the 1917 events, and the effect of the Revolutions in molding the development of lasting policies and attitudes in the US.

The two women memoirists’ vastly different fates reflect the effects of supporting or opposing the Bolsheviks and other progressive initiatives in the post-1917 US. Louise Bryant returned to her homeland in February 1918 and soon was arrested and brutally imprisoned along with forty other women for her participation in a women's suffrage march protesting “Kaiser Wilson” and his failure to support women's right to vote. Soon after, she was called before a Senate committee investigating Bolshevism. Deeply disturbed by the Red Scare Palmer Raids directed by J. Edgar Hoover, Bryant wrote about their life-altering effects on her socialist friends. Returning to Russia, she was devastated by the 1920 death of her husband John Reed. But Bryant persevered, covering the early years of the Soviet government and interviewing Lenin, Kollontai and other Bolshevik leaders. The bi-sexual Bryant turned to the conventional in 1923 and married a US diplomat with whom she had a daughter. But conformity didn't work. Suffering from Dercum's disease, depression, and alcoholism, she died alone and penniless in Paris in 1936. Throughout her writing life, she dealt with the sexism that downplayed her work as a pale shadow of Reed's, and dismissed her as another pretty face.

Julia Grant and her royal husband divorced in 1934, but she kept his name and title along with her famous American lineage, restyling herself as Princess Julia Cantacuzene Grant. Avowedly anti-communist, she retained and enhanced her wealth in the US, re-joining the US elite, becoming a pillar of Republican Party anti-communism, lobbying against diplomatic recognition of the Soviet Union from her home in Washington, DC, entertaining Russian émigrés, and living to age 99.

All of the men supported leftist causes; they never joined the anti-communist chorus. Albert Rhys Williams remained favorable to the Soviet experiment to the end of his life and traveled several more times to the Soviet Union. For his outspoken defense of the communist government, Williams faced years of harassment in the US. Ernest Poole also exited Russia via the Trans-Siberian railroad, but unlike Williams, didn't incorporate this experience into his Russian memoir. Upon his return to his homeland, Poole moved on to other subjects, but he didn't lose his identification with the poor and oppressed. From his New Hampshire retreat he penned a steady stream of non-fiction and fiction works focused often on the economic struggles of people in the US, especially after he lost his family fortune in the Depression. Through his long professional career, Edward Ross advocated for academic freedom, women's rights, social reform, and recognition of the Soviet Union. An outspoken opponent of political conservatives, in the 1930s he was called before a Wisconsin state legislative committee for questioning as a suspected communist.

Each book in the series has an introduction providing short biographies of each of the authors, and an index. In addition, throughout the volumes, the editors have added generally helpful footnotes, which aid in contextualizing each account. Suggestions for further reading are provided as well. The continued invisibility of scholarship and writing on and by women is a serious flaw overall in our field. This series, by publishing two memoirs by women, certainly helps. Unfortunately the further reading recommendations perpetuate the failure to take women's scholarship seriously, and generally fail to include important works on the peasantry, radical women, women and gender, and women in the military, by such scholars as Barbara Evans Clements, Barbara Alpern Engel, Esther Kingston-Mann, Sharon Kowalsky, Adele Lindenmeyr, Melissa Kirschke Stockdale, Richard Stites, Laurie Stoff, Elizabeth Wood, and Christine Worobec, to name but a few.

All the books are generally well produced, although a copy editor needed to be more attentive to spacing between words and sentences. There are excellent photos. The Rhys Williams’ collection of pictures of demonstrations, as well as individual portraits, posters, and proclamations in Russian and English is the most comprehensive.

Overall, this series is a significant addition to source materials about the Russian Revolutions. From our present vantage point the enthusiasm for revolutionary transformation evinced by both Bryant and Williams may seem naive. But stepping back in time to read contemporary observations about the hopes and dreams unleashed by Russia's two 1917 revolutions provides an important perspective. Such eyewitness accounts will be very useful in courses on the 1917 revolutions, not only for their descriptions of events on the ground but also as a window into the domestic US currents that emerged as a result of the Russian Revolutions, and remain very timely today.