Ukrainians Honor John Reed With Renamed Street, Museum

The Soviet Union is heaping new honors on John Reed '10, author of "Ten Days That Shook the World," a famous eyewitness account of the Bolshevik revolution.

The Ukranian town of Novoselitsa, which Reed visited as a correspondent during World War I, recently opened the John Reed Museum and named a street after the author, the Soviet news agency Tass reported yesterday.

A member of the Harvard Lampoon, the Hasty Pudding Club and the Harvard Socialists during his undergraduate years, Reed covered the overthrow of the Czarist government for Metropolitan Magazine.

"Ten Days That Shook the World," a highly sympathetic treatment of the revolution, attracted glowing praise from Lenin, who wrote in a preface to the book's first edition in 1923, "Unreservedly I recommend it to the workers of the world...a truthful and most vivid exposition of the events so significant...to the Dictatorship of the Proletariat."

Richard Pipes, Baird Professor of History, said yesterday "Ten Days That Shook the World" is "a highly romantic account without much relationship to reality." The Soviet government uses Reed today as a "good name, a foreigner, just about the only one at the time sympathetic to the Bolshevik cause," Pipes added.

Reed became popular at Harvard after his death from typhus in 1920, and John Reed Societies sprang up here and throughout the country during the 1930s, Pipes said.

Although Stalin's regime banned the work in the Soviet Union because it treated Lenin and Trotsky as heroes and mentioned Stalin only once, Reed remained popular in the U.S., he added.

Pro-Communist clubs which "didn't want to call themselves Communist, called themselves John Reed Clubs," Pipes said.

Although Reed's obituary in the Class of 1910's Alumni Record called his work "propaganda, not art," a portrait of the author still hangs in the Adams House dining room, and Houghton Library maintains an archive of his papers.