One of the eyewitnesses, John Reed, cabled the news back to the United States: “The rank and file of the Workmen’s, Soldiers’ and Peasants’ Councils are in control, with Lenin and Trotsky leading. Their program is to give the land to the peasants, to socialize natural resources and industry and for an armistice and democratic peace conference. . . . No one is with the Bolsheviki except the proletariat, but that is solidly with them. All the bourgeoisie and appendages are relentlessly hostile.”1

The first of the four friends to get their books out (in October 1918) were Louise Bryant and Bessie Beatty. After ten decades, the freshness of their astute observations and vibrant impressions continues to reward the reader.

The last of the books to appear (in 1921), Albert Rhys Williams’s Through the Russian Revolution, reaches for the interplay of cause and effect, of objective and subjective factors:

The “middle” book of the four—appearing on January 1919—was the one destined to become the classic eyewitness account, John Reed’s magnificent Ten Days That Shook the World. A fierce partisan of the Bolsheviks, he quickly joined the world Communist movement that the Bolsheviks established in the same year that his book was published. But no one of any political persuasion can disagree with the generalization that appears in the book’s preface: “No matter what one thinks of Bolshevism, it is undeniable that the Russian Revolution is one of the great events of human history, and the rise of the Bolsheviki a phenomenon of worldwide importance.”5

In more than one sense, these friends continue to reach out to us. Of course, they offer their own lived experience and eyewitness impressions of what happened in one of the great events in human history. But also, while they and all they knew have long since died, the patterns and dynamics and urgent issues of their own time have in multiple ways continued down through history, to our own time. The experience, ideas, and urgent questions they wrestle with continue to have resonance and relevance for many of us today, and this will most likely be the case for others tomorrow.

“Trotsky’s writing was absorbing, and the translator, Max Eastman . . . did him justice,” recalled Carl Marzani, one of many radicalizing intellectuals in the United States during the 1930s. “The details, from the revolutionary insider, were fascinating, but the volume excited me most as a sample of Marxist writing and methodology. Trotsky set the revolution within a historical context, and treated the Tsarist Empire as a whole, a society rich with contradictions.” High praise indeed from someone who would soon become a Communist Party organizer in the Age of Stalin. More recently, the decidedly non-Trotskyist scholar Ian Thatcher has chimed in: “Trotsky’s summary of the factors he had highlighted to account for 1917 still forms the research agenda. . . . Measured against The History of the Russian Revolution most ‘modern’ research does not seem so modern after all. . . . It is essential reading.” Chamberlin, a highly respected correspondent of the Christian Science Monitor with twelve years of journalistic experience in Soviet Russia, was evolving from radical supporter to conservative critic of the Soviet regime, but he sought to provide a balanced account that later scholars have viewed—in the recent words of Sheila Fitzpatrick—as “still the best general work on the Revolution and Civil War.” Both Trotsky’s and Chamberlin’s accounts drew from primary source materials and reminiscences of participants, and both were consistent with what John Reed, Louise Bryant, Albert Rhys Williams, and Bessie Beatty had reported years before.6

No less divergent from the early accounts of John Reed and his friends, and similarly inclined to stress the unity of Lenin and Stalin, were a proliferation of works from the late 1940s to the 1960s by Cold War anti-Communist scholars. A bitter ex-Communist working for the US Department of State, Bertram Wolfe, pioneered a distinctive development of the continuity thesis. “When Stalin died in 1953, Bolshevism was fifty years old. Its distinctive views on the significance of organization, of centralization and of the guardianship or dictatorship of a vanguard or elite date from Lenin’s programmatic writings of 1902,” Wolfe wrote. “His separate machine and his authoritarian control of it dates from . . . 1903.” In that half-century, Wolfe insisted, “Bolshevism had had only two authoritative leaders”: Lenin and Stalin. There were many who followed this lead. “Stalinism can and must be defined as a pattern of thought and action that flows directly from Leninism,” asserted Alfred G. Meyer. “Stalin’s way of looking at the contemporary world, his professed aims, the decisions he made at variance with one another, his conceptions of the tasks facing the communist state—these and many specific traits are entirely Leninist.” Robert V. Daniels, contrasting “the Trotskyists” with “Stalin and more direct followers of Lenin,” elaborated: “Leninism begat Stalinism in two decisive respects: it prepared a group of people ready to use force and authority to overcome any obstacles, and it trained them to accept any practical short-cut in the interest of immediate success and security of the movement.” W. W. Rostow agreed: “Lenin decided . . . to rule on the basis o...