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Socialist Review Index (1993–1996) | Socialist Review 177 Contents
From Socialist Review, No. 177, July/August 1994.
Copyright © Socialist Review.
Copied with thanks from the Socialist Review Archive.
Marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for ETOL.
War in Eastern Europe: Travels through the Balkans in 1915
John Reed
Phoenix £9.99
John Reed’s account of his travels through the countries of Eastern Europe in the midst of the First World War in 1915 makes fascinating reading – especially given the armed conflict in Bosnia.
Reed writes starkly about the horror of illness and death from typhus in the Serbian hospitals, and of the devastation in the towns and villages of Serbia. His travels take him to a Jewish ghetto in Russia (Galicia) where he describes the poverty and oppression suffered.
He visits Istanbul where he is taken to wine and dine amongst the wealthy of many countries whilst the local Turkish people are starving and not many miles away their compatriots are dying in the trenches of Gallipoli.
As John Reed himself said, ‘...Robinson and I have simply tried to give our impressions of human beings as we found them in the countries of Eastern Europe, from April to October, 1915.’ That is both the strength and unfortunately the weakness of this book.
It gives a valuable insight into the lives of Eastern Europeans during the war. It describes in great detail the complexity surrounding the history of the vast variety of different ethnic peoples and of their intermingling. He describes the different nationalist aspirations of these peoples.
However, it falls short of drawing the obvious conclusion that there can be no nationalist solution, though in 1915 there was little evidence of what that solution might be.
We get glimpses of John Reed’s class consciousness and sympathy for a people ‘ripe for revolution’ in Romania. Glimmerings of that solution appear in descriptions of the defeated and demoralised Russian soldiers and of attempts to organise opposition to the war in the army.
There is a revealing conversation with a Russian officer behind the Russian retreat in the Galician steppes.
‘“So the peasants think that by beating the Germans they will get rid of poverty and oppression?” ... Robinson and I both had the same thought: if the peasants were going to beat any one why didn’t they begin at home? Afterward we discovered that they were beginning at home.’
Two years later in 1917 that Russian officer would be very surprised and John Reed was able to experience at first hand the success of a workers’ revolution which he describes in Ten Days that Shook the World.
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