Who were the true leaders of the October Revolution?

Albert Rhys Williams as witness

Albert Rhys Williams

American journalist Albert Rhys Williams (1883-1962) is among the most distinctive first-hand witnesses to the October Revolution. A North American trade unionist, journalist, and Protestant clergyman, Williams was also a close friend of John Reed and one of the few Western journalists who had the opportunity to meet Lenin and speak with him frequently.

Between 1900 and 1904, while studying at Marietta University in Ohio, Williams not only ran the university newspaper but also set about organising retail workers. From 1904 to 1907, whilst a student at the Hartford Theological Seminary, he wrote columns for the Hartford Evening Post addressing workers’ problems. After graduating and receiving his preaching licence, he spent the summer of 1907 working at the Presbyterian Church on Spring Street in New York, where he met Norman Thomas, who would later become the Socialist Party of America’s presidential candidate.

He then studied on a scholarship at the University of Cambridge and the University of Marburg (1907-1909). During this period, he established contacts within Labour Party circles in Britain and engaged directly with socialist ideas and the workers’ movement. Upon returning to the United States, he worked on the 1908 presidential campaign of the socialist Eugene Debs.

Between 1908 and 1914, Williams served as the minister of the Maverick Congregational Church in East Boston. He turned his pulpit into a platform for urging action to improve social conditions and supported the striking workers of the 1912 Lawrence Textile Strike by collecting donations from his congregation. In 1914, on the eve of the First World War, he took a leave of absence from his post and travelled to Europe, where he worked as a correspondent for Outlook magazine.

In 1917, in the midst of the war, the October Revolution broke out. It marked a major turning point in Williams’s life. Commissioned by the New York Post, he travelled to Petrograd to observe the revolution first-hand. That summer, he travelled across Russia, speaking with peasants, workers, soldiers and intellectuals, and taking the pulse of the revolution. When he returned to Petrograd in the autumn, he was reunited with John Reed and Louise Bryant. Together, they lived through the October Revolution, a defining moment in modern history. The acquaintance Williams formed with Lenin during this period left a lasting impression on him; he described Lenin as “the most civilised and humane person I have ever known.”

Born of these exceptional experiences, Through the Russian Revolution was published in 1921. [*] Unlike the countless studies on the revolution written in later years, Williams’s book is a first-hand account produced in the immediate aftermath of the events, while their imprint was still vivid. The reader feels as though they are walking the streets of Petrograd alongside him; throughout the book, one senses the revolution’s noise, hope, tension and turmoil.

This is precisely why the work is regarded as a “classic”. Williams depicts every detail of the revolution in strikingly vivid prose -from the debates at Smolny to the demonstrations in the streets, from his conversations with revolutionary leaders to the mood of ordinary people. He portrays Lenin and Trotsky, the two foremost leaders of the October Revolution, without glorifying them, eschewing clichés and presenting them in their genuine, human dimensions. His observations on Trotsky in particular offer a clear and honest perspective, long before the distortions manufactured during the Stalinist era.

Tariq Ali, in a selection he compiled for The Guardian on the centenary of the October Revolution, lists Williams’s book as one of the ten best works written on the revolution and explains his choice as follows:

Williams was already in Petrograd when Reed arrived and acted as a calming tutor to his wilder and more activist colleague. His book is in some ways a more solid work, helped by several conversations with Lenin and other Bolsheviks, as well as their opponents.

Unfortunately, Through the Russian Revolution has still not been translated into Turkish. It is undoubtedly a great loss that such a powerful first-hand account -one that conveys, with sharp and perceptive observations, how the October Revolution was lived, felt, and experienced in people’s minds and emotions- has yet to reach readers in Turkey.

Dedication page of the book

As in all the articles in our series, “Who were the true leaders of the October Revolution?”, we end this brief piece with a breakdown of how many times each Bolshevik leader is mentioned in the book:

In his book, Williams mentions:

• Lenin 25 times,

• Trotsky 23 times,

• Zinoviev 3 times,

• Kamenev 2 times.

Stalin, however, is not mentioned in the book at all.

[*] Albert Rhys Williams, Through the Russian Revolution, Boni and Liverright, New York, 1921.