The Triumph and Anguish of the Russian Revolution: Bessie Beatty's Forgotten Chronicle

Abstract

The article gives a long-overdue consideration to a gendered narrative that until recently has been among discourses often excluded from historical scrutiny in the process of understanding and interpreting the Russian Revolutions of 1917. It is dedicated to American journalist Bessie Beatty, one of a dozen foreign correspondents who arrived in Russia to report on the history unfolding in the crumbling empire. The piece is a homage to Beatty's legacy of an ardent suffragist and devoted pacifist, whose life was effervescent with places, individuals, adventures, and events that would reverberate throughout the 20th century and beyond. Whether covering miners' unrest in Nevada, castigating the system for profiting from prostitutes' deplorable plight in San Francisco, or trying to decipher the convoluted social turmoil in revolutionary Petrograd, she would always manifest compassion and humanism, revealing the lives of individuals, rather than drawing an impersonal and generalized picture of the masses. Most importantly, the author strives to prevent Beatty's work from oblivion and amplify her opposition to war, the heavy toll of which she first witnessed reporting from the Russian front a century ago, when she exposed pervasive human suffering, denounced the lust for blood, and lamented the total deprivation of human dignity. While it may not bring to naught an ever-growing anguish in the face of current precarious rivalries and never-ending gnawing strife, it may help to revive Beatty's hope that "the muddled old world" would be once remade "upon a basis of human freedom and safety".