John Reed quickly went from journalist to participant during the Russian Revolution. Almost immediately after the seizure of power, he went to work in the new Commissar of Foreign Affairs translating documents and decrees for the new Soviet power. Here Reed describes the atmosphere and workings of the Commissariat as it established itself and engaged in the Brest-Litovsk negotiations. Published immediately on his late April, 1918 return to New York for Max Eastman’s new Liberator magazine. Transcribed here for the first time.

‘Foreign Affairs’ by John Reed from The Liberator. Vol. 1 No. 4. June, 1918.

No. 6 Dvortsovya Ploshod, facing the Winter Palace, once the private entrance of His Imperial Majesty’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs, doubtless Sazanov and Baron Sturmer user to enter by this door, where a placard now reads:

“All employees and functionaries of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs are invited to return to work immediately. Those who refuse to obey will be dismissed and their pensions forfeited. LEON TROTSKY, People’s Commissar of Foreign Affairs.” Seal of the Central Executive Committee of the All-Russian Soviets of Workmen’s and Soldiers’ Deputies.

As you enter the old-time svetzars, in their formal blue uniforms with brass buttons and red collars, are there to take your coat, hat and rubbers; which they do with the same obsequiousness as erstwhile to Princes, Grand Dukes and Ambassadors. Now the visitors are for the most part common soldiers and workmen, who address the svetzars as “tovaritche-comrades,” and seem quite at home.

God knows what must be stirring in the svetzar’s minds! Ten months ago the rule of the Little Father must have seemed eternal. Then came the Kerensky government. Things did not change much; there was a new Minister, but the staff remained more or less intact. As one svetzar told me, the new ones were also gentlemen…And now the great upset, and a herd of uncouth, shockingly informal persons of the lower classes, who paw over the archives with shouts of sacrilegious mirth.

There was one old svetzar who had served his Emperor and his country in that place for thirty-eight years, having been appointed in the good old days at the request of Prince Golitzin…He said, “Thirteen years ago I stood at this door and watched the soldiers shoot down the people of Gapon in the snow. Now I take off the goloshes of the people of Gapon…” Another complained that automobiles did not fit those who ride in them nowadays…The svetzars must sell pamphlets containing the Secret Documents to the passing public–a function which they perform reluctantly. As a rule svetzars appear to have no political opinions.

Upstairs the dingy corridors are peopled with lounging red-collared couriers, whose duty it was and is to run errands for the heads of departments. The beaten path is now between Palace Square and Smolny Institute, the seat of power; and couriers’ business is with the proletariat which somehow must be obeyed…The reasons for the new state of things are not very clear to the couriers, but they are practical men with families, and jobs are few. Some of them are enterprising fellows, and in the hall upstairs have rigged up a table for the selling of revolutionary literature just as they do in Smolny; pamphlets by Lenin, Trotsky, a life of Bebel, a treatise by Spirodonova, “War and the Peasant Proletariat,” and “Songs of the Revolution.” One is ambitious and calls everybody “comrade.”

When the Bolsheviks seized the power, the administrative and clerical force of all the ministries went on strike. Now the tchinovniks are crawling back. One meets them from time to time–dapper youths wearing immaculate frock coats and a dazed expression. An unheard-of outrage of the new regime is the requirement that tchinovnicks must actually work. You can conceive the situation by imagining such an innovation among government clerks at Washington.

In the ante-room of the Minister’s cabinet is a variegated crowd of Secretaries of Embassy, foreigners trying to hurry up their passports, a consul or so. If you have a Socialist red card, present it to the nervous svetzar at the door, who doesn’t know who ought to enter and who not; you will be immediately given precedence. Within is Comrade Zalkind, a slight, quick man with an Italian face his grey hair much rumpled, dressed in an old drab half-military coat-and boots. He is Trotsky’s delegate in charge of the details of the Ministry–a former political exile, holder of university degrees, speaking four languages, always smiling and very revolutionary.

Across the table from him sits Tovaritch Markin, his executive a stern-faced, taciturn sailor. In the background a couple of soldiers lounge, pouring tea from a battered samovar. Those naked hooks on the wall once held portraits of Imperial Ministers. By some freak Gorchakov still hangs there, orders on his breast and jeweled cross at his throat. Underneath is pinned a cheap print of the face of Bebel, and on the opposite wall Karl Marx glares down from a postcard. Over Zalkind’s desk is a pretentious engraving of a painting of the world’s diplomats seated round a table, at the Congress of Pekin. An impious hand has pasted on the frame the legend, “Banda Contrabandistov”-Crew of Smugglers.

On the same floor to the right is the department of War Prisoners, very active just now. Comrade Doctor of Philosophy Mentsikovski, Commissar of the Bureau, is assailed by a horde of delegates from the prisoners’ organizations. Upstairs functions disjointedly the Bureau of the Press, with an army of translators, under the erratic direction of Comrade Radek, of Austria and other places–a violent young Jew.  Next door is the newly founded Department of International Propaganda, presided over by Boris Reinstein, American citizen and incorrigible mainstay of the Socialist Labor Party of the United States–an excessively mild-mannered little man who burns with a steady revolutionary ardor. Under him are formed committees of the various peoples–German, Hungarian, Roumanian, South- Slavic, English-speaking–engaged in propagating the ideas of the Russian Revolution abroad.

Between them these various departments manage to publish newspapers in three languages–German (Die Fackel, afterwards called Volkerfriede); Hungarian (Nemzetkezi Szocialista); and Roumanian (Inainte). These papers are distributed along the enemy fronts, and to the war-prisoners who speak the various languages. Besides all this, the secret documents, the decrees of the Council of Peoples’ Commissars, and the pamphlets of Lenine and Trotsky are being translated, the articles written explaining the policies and achievements of Bolshevism, which are also thrown into various languages and published. Every week the “diplomatic couriers” of the People’s Commissars leave Smolny for the capitals of Europe, with trunk-loads of this material, bent on stirring up revolution.

Things are done, but why or how they are done is beyond me.

The different departments are organized in the most slipshod manner, overlapping in many places, more or less ignorant of each other’s activities, hampered by the sabotagers of the old regime, and crippled by the inherent Russian penchant for tea and discussion. Hundreds of people writing laboriously hundreds of documents by hand, which documents are thereupon carefully placed where nobody could possibly find them. The ancient and respectable ghost of the Bureaucracy still haunts the Foreign Office…

Late in the afternoon the vague sound of chorus singing once lured me down the fourth floor corridor, beyond the last bureau, to a landing on the back stairs, where I could look through glass doors into a rich little chapel. Two wide priests were bowing and gesturing before the altar, clad in gorgeous vestments of blue brocade, stiff with silver thread. Before a score of ikons framed in jewelled gold and silver, little tapers sent thin flames straight up in the incense- heavy air. On the right wall was an elaborate memorial portrait of some dead-and-gone Excellency–perhaps a former Imperial Minister of Foreign Affairs, certain a monarchist and a bourgeois–with a tiny swinging lamp burning in front of him.

It was a dark day, and the only light was the warm golden glow of many candles. The sweet soprano responses to the priest’s mellow bass came from an obscure corner beyond these, and for a long time I couldn’t make out the choir. I crept forward, and all of a sudden I saw a collection of those devilish small boys who run errands around the building, steal cigarette butts out of the cuspidors, appropriate pencils from desks, and use bad language. There they were, faces turned to heaven with a seraphic expression, crossing themselves frequently.

The only worshippers were four or five dignified old svetzars and couriers, and three scrub women; instead of high-born Excellencies. Perhaps nowhere was change more evident than in this corner of the old Russian world, forgotten there by the busy proletarians next door.

Two months ago, at No. 6 Dvortsovya Ploshod, I saw the new world born.

In a graceful white-and-gold room, floor littered with papers, documents stacked in corners, untidy desks with typewriters long abandoned there, twelve delegates of the German and Austrian war-prisoners came together on their own initiative, to plot revolution. There were three Hungarians–one a noble–two Croatians, two Poles, a Bohemian, a Ruthenian, and three Reichs-Deutscher; all International Socialists.

Seven were “intellectuals,” and the other five proletarians–farmers and industrial workers. The ministry was represented by a Russian workingman. It was interesting to note the difference between the Russian and these five; he was thoroughly at ease in that aristocratic room, and in his position–while the five war prisoners entered timidly, abashed and stood bowing respectfully to the company, shifting their big feet on the once-polished floor. Nor did they sit down until invited, and then stared solidly at the various speakers, without the faintest expression of comprehension or enthusiasm.

It was a strange-looking gathering, two of the delegates in well-tailored suits and fur coats, and all the rest in remnants of faded blue uniforms pieced out with rough odds and ends of Russian clothing. Originally few could understand each other’s language, but thanks to their three years’ residence here almost all now understood Russian. As I listened, there came to my mind the Grecianizing of the Roman world before the Christian era.

One of the Hungarians began to speak, sitting in his chair and looking at the ground in front of him–a young man with a delicate, aristocratic head and nose, and the mouth of a poet. He spoke very quietly, simply.

“In this time when the Russian workers and soldiers are giving their lives to make the whole world of workers free,” he said, “we foreign Socialists cannot sit quietly by and let them fight alone…We have had enough of war, that is true. But there are crises when no man no matter how tired he is, can refuse to fight. The peace terms of the Council of People’s Commissars are the peace terms for which all lovers of freedom can honorably die…If the governments of the Central Powers–if our Fatherlands–refuse to make peace with Russia on those terms, then we must fight our own peoples.”

Upon this there was debate, one of the Germans declaring that he could not take arms against his Fatherland, and a wizened Pole pedantically expressing the opinion that war was wrong under any conditions. Another German said he would not fight his countrymen, but he would go around the prison camps and preach the Socialist propaganda. The Hungarian noble reported that ten thousand prisoners in the Moscow district had met and passed resolutions endorsing the Bolsheviki peace terms, and formed a strong Socialist organization on internationalist lines. The five proletarians, being urged to speak, merely grumbled something shamefacedly and were silent.

A declaration was then read, which pledged the delegates to fight for the Bolshevik peace-terms, if necessary against their own countrymen, and if the peace terms were rejected, to issue an appeal to the German and Austrian soldiers and workers, urging them to throw down their arms, to strike in the munitions factories, to cripple the war. On the vote only two men refused to indorse the declaration–the Pole and the second German. The first German had slipped away, to spread the alarm. It seems he was an officer and a Prussian.

Only then did the five proletarians open their mouths. They said that the news of this movement had already leaked out, and that the officer prisoners were going about threatening the soldier prisoners with dire punishment at home if they had anything to do with the affair…The fear of officers was evidently deeply grounded into those five simple soldiers. The Russian said thoughtfully, “Yes, comrades, we in Russian also used to be afraid of our officers. You’d better get rid of yours like we did ours.”

But the great thing was that the five soldiers had come, and now they would keep on coming. One said, “I understand. We will make revolution in Germany, and then there will be no more officers and no more punishment, but only our own country.”

Through the dark window I saw the round winter moon swing slowly up the great sky. The eleven men shook hands and smiled…

Trotsky himself rarely comes to the Foreign Offices, preferring the democratic clangor of Smolny Institute to the respectful quietude of Palace Square. On the top floor of that one-time seminary for aristocratic young ladies, the People’s Commissar for Foreign Affairs has two bare rooms, one where he and his wife sleep on rude cots, the other for an office. There he sits ten or twelve hours a day laboriously writing out by hand every document, and flying into fits of nervous rage.

The door of Trotzky’s office is unimpressive, bearing only a placard on which the number 67 is crudely scrawled in red ink, and underneath an enameled plaque, reminder of other times, which reads “Ladies Class.” Two Red Guards with bayonetted rifles sit on chairs on either side. Upon them beats a perfect typhoon of diplomatic representatives, army delegates, messengers, couriers, the curious. And also every cog in the fitful unwieldy machinery of Smolny who has a question to ask. “Trotsky knows,” they say, “you’d better ask Trotsky.”

Trotsky was at Brest-Litowsk with the peace delegation when he got news that the Roumanian authorities had arrested some Austrians on fraternizing bent and disarmed a whole division of Russian Bolshevik troops on the southwest front. He immediately telegraphed Smolny to arrest the Roumanian ambassador! Such a furor in Europe! The next day the entire diplomatic corps in Petrograd–some say nineteen plenipotentiaries, some thirty-nine-marched solemnly up to Smolny and protested, demanding the release of their Roumanian colleague. The Red Guards and soldiers on duty, and even Lenine, it is said, believed that the nations. of the world were sending their representatives en masse to recognize the Soviet government. As for Lenine himself, he was in high good humor. The diplomatic corps of Petrograd calling upon him! His Excellency of Roumania was released—and that same night an order was issued to arrest the King of Roumania, entitled to no diplomatic privileges!

Not the least irony of the situation is that the present People’s Commissar for Foreign Affairs of the Russian Republic is that same Leon Trotsky who was exiled from Russia, arrested in Germany, deported from France, kicked out of Spain, imprisoned by the British in Halifax, and jailed for a German spy by the Russian Revolutionary Government. He is the son of a rich Moscow merchant named Bronstein, but it is characteristic of his uncompromising revolutionary integrity that he refused to accept money from his family to return to Russia in revolution, and would only come when the workers of France, Russia and America contributed their hard-earned pennies to buy his ticket.

To look at he is slight, of middle height, always striding somewhere. Above his high forehead is a shock of wavy black hair, his eyes behind thick glasses are dark and almost violent, and his mouth wears a perpetual sardonic expression, although I have seen him smile very gaily. His whole face narrows down to a pointed chin, accentuated by a sharp black beard; and when he stands at the tribune of the Petrograd Soviet hissing defiance to the Imperialists of the world, he gives one the impression of a snake…

It has remained for Trotsky, true type of the revolution for which he is largely responsible, to deal a mortal blow to the business of international diplomacy, and to raise the class struggle to the plane of world politics.

The Liberator was published monthly from 1918, first established by Max Eastman and his sister Crystal Eastman continuing The Masses, was shut down by the US Government during World War One. Like The Masses, The Liberator contained some of the best radical journalism of its, or any, day. It combined political coverage with the arts, culture, and a commitment to revolutionary politics. Increasingly, The Liberator oriented to the Communist movement and by late 1922 was a de facto publication of the Party. In 1924, The Liberator merged with Labor Herald and Soviet Russia Pictorial into Workers Monthly. An essential magazine of the US left.

PDF of full issue: https://www.marxists.org/history/usa/culture/pubs/liberator/1918/04/v1n04-jun-1918-liberator.pdf