Volume 29, Number 3 · March 4, 1982
A Bunch of Reds
By Elizabeth Hardwick
Reds
produced and directed by Warren Beatty, written by Warren Beatty, by Trevor Griffiths
Are you an American American? Lenin asked John Reed. The revolution would not be unmindful of the 'human interest' attaching to the spirited and sunny Bolshevik from the United States. Clearly Reed was something apart from Lenin's Russian and European experience bitterly acquired in prison and exile and recorded in his florid, vitriolic disputes in the old Iskra and elsewhere. John Reed was not a Pole, not an Italian anarchist, not a Jew, not a Menshevik, not a socialist revolutionary. In truth he was what he appeared to be, a charming enthusiast of the revolution, a genuine American with no jarring memories of Zimmerwald debates, of Kautsky polemics, of Rosa Luxemburg.
Review, 6374 words
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