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From Socialist Appeal, Vol. 5 No. 1, 4 January 1941, p. 4.
Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for ETOL.
CAMBRIDGE, Mass. – William Z. (Zigzag) Foster, chairman of the Communist Party, spoke at a Memorial Anniversary meeting for John Reed, Harvard alumnus and American revolutionist, author of the great eyewitness chronicle of the Russian Revolution, Ten Days That Shook The World.
Following Foster’s eulogy of the great John Reed, several people took the floor for questions.
They inquired how the speaker could praise John Reed, and bask in his tradition, when John Reed’s book is banned in the Soviet Union and suppressed by the Stalinists everywhere, else.
Another question put to Foster was:
“Isn’t it also true that you wrote an extensive work in 1921, following a visit to the Soviet Union, entitled The Russian Revolution? And isn’t it also true that you went John Reed one better by failing to mention Stalin’s name even once, while writing a special commendatory biographical sketch of Trotsky?”
Foster answered briefly – the atmosphere was getting too warm to prolong the meeting. It was true, he opined, John Reed bad overestimated Trotsky, as had others (i.e. himself).
Foster “forgot” to add that Reed’s book bore an introduction written by Lenin – who also seemed to have shared Reed’s “errors.”
In 1937 the London News Chronicle sought permission from the Communist Party of Great Britain to reprint serially John Reed’s Ten Days That Shook the World. What happened was reported as follows in the London Evening Standard, Nov. 12, 1937:
“This contemporary account of the Bolshevist uprising was written by John Reed, the American Communist, who was a close personal friend of Lenin. When he died in 1921 he left the British copyright in his book to the Communist Party.
“When the News-Chronicle approached the copyright owners for permission to serialize the book it was gladly given. The Communists asked no fee, and made only one stipulation – that all reference to Trotsky should be eliminated from the text.
“Confronted with this modern version of Hamlet without the Prince of Denmark, the Liberal organ abandoned the project.”
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