A similar fate has been shared by Isaac Marcosson’s The Rebirth of Russia, published soon after he left Petrograd, as well as his other journalism on the subject. Marcosson returned to Russia in 1924, shortly after the death of Lenin, to see the extent to which ‘the iron hand of Bolshevism had strangled freedom’. He found the country in an alarming state of ‘dilapidation’ and its beautiful, historic churches ‘converted into stables’. It was a chilling experience and he was glad to bid farewell ‘to espionage, tapped telephones, opened mail, incessant smells, and the oppression that attends constant surveillance’. On his return he wrote an excoriating indictment of the Soviet Union in a series of twelve articles for the Saturday Evening Post entitled ‘After Lenin – What?’ The Soviets promptly banned the newspaper, and Marcosson, from Russia.16
The most notable journalists – aside from British newspaperman Arthur Ransome, who went on to enjoy a celebrated career as a writer – remain the ‘Four Who Saw the Sunrise’, as Bessie Beatty alluded to herself and her companions John Reed, Louise Bryant and Albert Rhys Williams in the dedication to her 1918 book The Red Heart of Russia. Beatty returned home to a successful career in journalism and for many years hosted a popular New York radio show, before dying in 1947. Rhys Williams remained a committed communist activist and, unlike many of his anti-Bolshevik fellow journalists, was welcomed back to the Soviet Union on many occasions between 1922 and 1959; he died in 1962. His unrepentant support for the new Bolshevik Russia was in stark contrast to the utter dismay of Harold Williams, who had shown such passionate support for the ideals of February, only to see everything he hoped for stripped away and destroyed in the early months of 1918. ‘If you lived here you would feel in every bone of your body, in every fibre of your spirit, the bitterness of it,’ he wrote in the Daily Chronicle of 28 January 1918:
I cannot tell you all the brutalities, the fierce excesses, that are ravaging Russia from end to end and more ruthlessly than any invading army. Horrors pall on us – robbery, plunder and the cruellest forms of murder are grown a part of the very atmosphere we live in. It is worse than Tsarism … The Bolsheviks do not profess to encourage any illusions as to their real nature. They treat the bourgeoisie of all countries with equal contempt; they glory in all violence directed against the ruling classes, they despise laws and decencies that they consider effete, they trample on the arts and refinements of life. It is nothing to them if in the throes of the great upheaval the world relapses into barbarism.17
Although the American quartet of fellow socialists all produced memoirs of their own, more optimistic experience of Russia in revolution, it is John Reed’s account, Ten Days that Shook the World, published in 1919, that eclipsed them all, further aggrandised by Warren Beatty’s 1981 Hollywood film Reds. History has since criticised the four friends for playing into the hands of the Bolshevik propaganda machine as Lenin’s ‘useful idiots’ – a term frequently applied to fellow travellers of the revolution. The brash and charismatic Reed lived fast and hard, pushing his health in the face of chronic kidney disease, and paid the inevitable price. He died young, of spotted typhus, in Moscow, after being persuaded back to Russia in 1920 to attend a congress in Baku. He was accorded a hero’s burial in the Kremlin Wall, and Eisenstein’s later film October was renamed after the title of his book, but Stalin was none too happy with Reed’s account and ordered the bowdlerisation of the Russian translation, to diminish Trotsky’s role and accentuate his own.
Reed’s widow Louise Bryant, who made it to Russia just in time to sit by her husband’s deathbed, continued with a sporadic career in journalism and remarried in 1923, but her drinking and ill health led to her early death in 1936. Her third husband, diplomat William Bullitt, laid a wreath on Reed’s grave on a visit to the Soviet Union in 1932, but when the plaque commemorating Reed at the Wall was sought out by visitors in the early 1960s, it was discovered that it had been quietly removed and his ashes reburied in a new, collective site behind the Lenin Mausoleum, reserved for ‘fallen heroes’ of the revolution.
As for the intrepid duo of Florence Harper and Donald Thompson, it is greatly regretted that nothing is known of Harper’s subsequent career after leaving Petrograd, aside from a handful of articles about her time in Russia that she published soon afterwards, including one for the Daily Mail in which she vividly described her own and Thompson’s ‘mad chase’ following the story of the ‘B-V (Bolshi-Viki)’.18 Back in the USA, she featured in an interview with the Boston Sunday Globe in June 1918, in which she talked of her good fortune in coming through the February Revolution ‘without a scratch’:
I have been in Petrograd during the Bolsheviki uprisings, sometimes out all night. I have been in street riots in Moscow, I nursed at the front, got trench fever, and trench foot, crossed the North Sea, sailing on a transport that four submarines chased, and am still alive and well. My friends say that they will have to tell off a firing squad for me on Judgment Day.19
Beyond this, Florence Harper simply disappears from view, and from the record.
Despite vowing he would never enter a war zone again, Donald Thompson was back in Russia the following summer – trailing the US intervention forces in Siberia. Like many others, he optimistically hoped that the Allied Intervention would bring about a counter-revolution and the end of Bolshevik tyranny, but after several months filming in Russia and watching the disarray in the Allied forces, he returned home disappointed. Nevertheless he became something of a celebrity in the USA when he released his five-reel silent film The German Curse in Russia in January 1918* – a virulently anti-German, anti-Bolshevik propaganda exercise in support of the US press campaign to discredit the new Russian government – which was well received in the American trade press. Thompson continued to work as an independent film-maker during the 1920s and 1930s; he died in Los Angeles in 1947.
In 1918 Harper and Thompson both brought out extremely vivid memoirs of their time in Petrograd; Thompson also published a valuable book of his photographs. It is a matter of considerable regret, not to mention a loss to history and scholarship therefore, that Thompson’s original photographic negatives do not appear to have survived; there is no archival paper trail for him, or for Harper, like so many other of those groundbreaking journalists.* Three of Thompson’s films survive in whole or in part,† but, at the time of writing, no prints of The German Curse in Russia – shot partly in Petrograd during the revolution, and which was distributed by Pathé – seem to have survived, although the author has ascertained that the film was later cannibalised and some of the footage re-used in Hermann Axelbank’s 1937 documentary film From Tsar to Lenin.‡
As for the most unlikely heroes of this tale – the young, green college graduates of the National City Bank of New York – there is little known about any of them, except Leighton Rogers.§ Having made the decision to leave, Rogers had considerable difficulty getting out of Russia to enlist for the US army. The Russians refused to give him a exit visa and eventually the British helped get him, by subterfuge, onto a freight train that was travelling out of the city to the port of Murmansk. For the next long and terrifying fourteen days Rogers endured a hair-raising journey to the Russian coast, barely surviving the bone-chilling cold and hunger; it was only the store of canned food that he had brought with him in a knapsack that kept him going.20 Arriving in London on April Fool’s Day 1918, he enlisted for the American Expeditionary Forces and served in army intelligence in England and France during 1918–19. In 1924 he published Wine of Fury, a fascinating novel based on his Petrograd experiences, and later worked in aeronautics. Sadly, his account of his time in Russia, ‘Czar, Revolution, Bolsheviks’, based on his diaries, was never published, but the typescript is preserved in the Library of Congress. Rogers never married and lived quietly with his sister Edith until his death in Greenwich, Connecticut in 1962.21