Lenin spent most of his life travelling and had to be careful about his security. As a result he left behind few traces of his movements. No diaries, no train tickets stored in his filing cabinet.
He made three journeys of importance in 1917. In April he crossed wartime Germany to Petrograd on a sealed train where he not only wrote out the rationale to oust Russia’s post-tsarist provisional government but also scribbled rules on when fellow passengers could use the carriage toilet. In July, when he fled from the government’s police to Finland, he wore a mask as a disguise. In Helsinki he hid in one of the police chief’s residences. After secretly returning to Petrograd in October, he donned a wig and wrapped a towel round his head before jumping on a tram to join fellow communists and cajole them into hastening their seizure of power. Truly the journeyman of revolution.
In his account of the “epic journeys” that lay behind three of the 20th century’s most significant revolutions, Simon Hall picks only the April journey for treatment. As with the other two leaders in the book – Mao Zedong and Fidel Castro – he follows the track of the accessible literature and avoids accounts that raise tricky questions. He regards Lenin as a strategist of genius. But was he? Throughout the long summer in Helsinki, Lenin had raged for an immediate insurrection. If the other leading Bolsheviks had followed his demands, they would have gone down to a heavy defeat. Lenin was exasperated by the delay. Luckily for his cause, action was put off until October and it was only then, when the time was ripe, that his repertoire of ranting and raving eased the Bolsheviks into power.
Hall is soft on all his three chosen leaders by alighting on episodes that reflect them in a good light. Crazily, he makes the case that none of them could possibly have known what the future held if they pressed forward with state communist objectives. But in Russia the Mensheviks and Socialist Revolutionaries throughout 1917 had told the Bolsheviks that if they tried to establish a proletarian dictatorship, a bloody civil war rather than a citizens’ utopia would result – and the dictatorship would have to be bloody in the extreme in order to survive. Hall, though, says that Lenin was proved “spectacularly right” about the practicability of a proletarian government. He gives no mind to the mountain of evidence of the repression of working-class political dissent which began in the weeks of the October Revolution, preferring the science fiction writer China Miéville as his guide to history.
Likewise the book overlooks the savagery that Mao meted out as punishment to dissenting or delinquent comrades on and after the Long March to northern China to escape annihilation by Chiang Kai-shek’s Kuomintang. His account of the People’s Liberation Army is hopelessly outdated. Nor is there any indication of the geopolitical factors that in 1949 led to the communist victory in the Chinese Civil War. It was only after Chiang’s National Army had exhausted its efforts against the Japanese occupiers that Mao’s Red Army could return in full force to the military struggle for supremacy and, using weaponry transferred to it by Stalin, complete its path to power in Beijing.
The book starts from the intriguing idea of focusing on journeys of Lenin, Mao and Castro before they were in government. Each journey is twinned with one made by a leading foreign reporter who wrote about each respective revolution – John Reed in Russia, Edgar Snow in China and Herbert Matthews in Cuba. None were communist sympathisers before they arrived in the country but each developed close relations with the uppermost level of the communist leadership. They loved adventure and, in the case of Reed and Snow, were undaunted by their flimsy grip of the national language. They were swept away by the thought that they were living and working in a time when history was turning on its axis.
Hall rightly emphasises that the revolutions were hungry for the world to know about them. In Russia, so-called Soviet power was precarious. Leading Bolsheviks were so beleaguered in 1917-18 that they kept their suitcases packed in case they had to run from a German invasion.
Reed’s Ten Days That Shook the World was a global bestseller and Lenin himself penned the introduction to the first edition. Lenin’s willingness to do this is no surprise because Reed wrote nothing about the terror, prisons or bloodthirsty threats to the enemies of Bolshevism. Reed was blithely innocent too about the diplomatic shimmying the Bolsheviks performed with the Western Allies before they succumbed to the notorious Brest-Litovsk Treaty with the Germans in March 1918, which saw Russia withdraw from the war. As Reed acknowledged, he was penning a partisan account. He even prepared a memorandum for the US State Department stating that only the Bolsheviks had any followers in Russia. Did he know enough about politics in Russia or about the party he was eulogising? Because his Russian was so poor he had to rely on interpreters supplied by the Bolsheviks – as Trotsky, a master linguist, condescendingly noted.
The best bits of Reed’s story were always about the events he witnessed – not the spoken or written words but the visual scenes. But how he exaggerated! Hall fails to mention that more deaths of hired extras occurred in the making of Sergei Eisenstein’s film October about the seizure of the Winter Palace than in the event itself on 25 October 1917.
Edgar Snow, unlike John Reed, had the honesty to note that he was treated unusually well. This is to take nothing away from Snow’s courage in following the trail of the Long March in 1934-35. But Mao had ordered his subordinates to be guided by “security, secrecy, warmth and red carpet” in welcoming Snow northwards. Snow fell hook, line and sinker for Mao’s manipulative charm. Despite seeing himself as a journalist of independence and integrity, he submitted his drafts for Mao to edit – not even Reed stooped to this level of servility. Red Star Over China had influence on some sectors of US public opinion, but after the Second World War, Snow was treated as at best a fellow traveller. Whereas Reed died of typhus and was buried in the Kremlin Wall Necropolis, Snow took himself off to peace and security in Switzerland – and his journey there was a lot less hazardous than the one that brought him fame.
Herbert Matthews followed Reed and Snow in telling the world to take the revolutionaries seriously. He shared the itch for a scoop and in 1957 organised an arduous trip from east to west across Cuba to Castro’s guerrilla headquarters in the mountains. Castro appreciated the willingness of an American to record and believe his every word. At that time Castro was not a communist. However, Matthews continued to reject the evidence that Castro soon developed undeniable links with the “world communist movement” under Moscow’s tutelage. By then he was being feted as a favoured visitor to Havana. This caused a sharp dip in his popularity at home in the US, especially after the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962 when Nikita Khrushchev brought the world to the edge of a Third World War. Castro, it was later revealed, was utterly reckless about the global danger that arose. He wanted Khrushchev to bomb New York.
The book’s three revolutions are among the most consequential in modern history. The 1917 October Revolution led to the invention of a communist one-party state that threw down a challenge to the entire world order. After Lenin and the Bolsheviks survived the ensuing civil war, the global political right had to reorganise itself – and the rise of fascism was one of the consequences. By the end of the Second World War, two superpowers bestrode the globe. The Chinese Revolution of 1949, led by Mao Zedong, aligned itself at first with the Soviet Union but then shook off the reins and challenged the bipolar world order while insisting that its variant of communism was superior to any other. In 1959 Fidel Castro achieved the overthrow of Fulgencio Batista’s government in Cuba. When he subsequently adopted communist doctrines and structures, his island fortress became a threat to US security and an example to anti-imperialist movements in Africa.
Simon Hall tells us that his chosen six journeys “changed the world”. The trips made by the three revolutionary leaders unquestionably helped to build platforms for subsequent revolutions. But the case he makes for the trio of reporters is poorly presented. They had some impact on segments of international opinion but the accuracy of their reportage leaves a sour taste in the mouth when we think of the destitute and oppressed Russians, Chinese and Cubans who had to live with the consequences. For basic information on travelling to Russia, China and Cuba in the 20th century, the Baedeker travel books of the time still have a lot to recommend them.
Robert Service’s books include “Blood on the Snow: The Russian Revolution 1914-1924” (Picador)
Three Revolutions: Russia, China, Cuba and the Epic Journeys That Changed the World
Simon Hall
Faber & Faber, 464pp, £35
Purchasing a book may earn the NS a commission from Bookshop.org, who support independent bookshops
[See also: Angela Rayner’s forward march]
Content from our partners
Related
This article appears in the 09 Jul 2025 issue of the New Statesman, The Harbinger