William Foster wrote this after his fourteen week trip to Russia in the spring and summer if 1921 to participate in the founding conference of the Red International of Labor Unions (RILU or Profintern). A syndicalist who had come to national prominence in the 1919 Steel Strike, he went as a delegate of TUEL and returned to join the Communist Party at age 40, beginning a 40 year career as one of its leading members, and writing this book.

The Russian Revolution by William Z Foster. Labor Herald Library No. 2. Trade Union Education League, Chicago, 1921.

Contents: Introduction, History of the Revolution, The Soviet Government, The Red Army, The Russian Communist Party, The Dictatorship of the Proletariat, The Trade Unions, Labor Laws and Working Conditions, The Co-operatives, The Agricultural Revolution, Money, Prices, and Wages, Food, Clothing and Shelter, The Organization of Industry, What Ails Industry, The New Economic Program, The Press, Revolutionary Courts and Justice, Some Revolutionary Leaders, The III International Congress, The Red Trade Union International Congress, Bolshevik Railroading, A Munition Factory, A Bolshevik Festival, A Rest Room for Workers, Garment-Making Industries, A Bolshevik Variety Show, A Proletarian Outpouring. 155 pages.

The Labor Herald was the monthly publication of the Trade Union Educational League (TUEL), in immensely important link between the IWW of the 1910s and the CIO of the 1930s. It was begun by veteran labor organizer and Communist leader William Z. Foster in 1920 as an attempt to unite militants within various unions while continuing the industrial unionism tradition of the IWW, though it was opposed to “dual unionism” and favored the formation of a Labor Party. Although it would become financially supported by the Communist International and Communist Party of America, it remained autonomous, was a network and not a membership organization, and included many radicals outside the Communist Party. In 1924 Labor Herald was folded into Workers Monthly, an explicitly Party organ and in 1927 ‘Labor Unity’ became the organ of a now CP dominated TUEL. In 1929 and the turn towards Red Unions in the Third Period, TUEL was wound up and replaced by the Trade Union Unity League, a section of the Red International of Labor Unions (Profitern) and continued to publish Labor Unity until 1935. Labor Herald remains an important labor-orientated journal by revolutionaries in US left history and would be referenced by activists, along with TUEL, along after it’s heyday.

Link to PDF of full pamphlet: https://www.marxists.org/history/usa/pubs/tuel/02-%20The%20Russian%20Revolution%20-%20W%20Z%20Foster.pdf