Reporting Under Fire Read Online Free PDF Page A

men and horses lying on the pavements.—Rheta Childe Dorr
    During the first critical months of the Russian Revolution in 1917, three American women journeyed to Petrograd to see the revolution for themselves. Each arrived with her own outlook and set of expectations, and each went home with her own view of what revolution meant for Russia.
    Louise Bryant, 31, working for the Bell Syndicate and Philadelphia
Ledger,
accompanied her husband John Reed, a passionate communist and gifted writer who chronicled the Bolsheviks’ rise to power. Bessie Beatty, at 30 a crusader for social justice, had covered miners’ strikes in Nevada and written about the desolate lives of prostitutes in the
San Francisco Bulletin.
Americans knew Rheta Childe Dorr as the author of the syndicated column
As a Woman Sees It
for the
New York Daily Mail.
Nearly 50 and a veteran journalist, Rheta had made news herself as asuffragist when she challenged President Woodrow Wilson face-to-face during a White House meeting.
    The three crossed paths reporting not only on the Russian Revolution, where Russians warred among themselves, but also during Russia’s battles against Germany during the Great War. Americans wondered whether their Russian allies would keep their commitments as allies against Germany. With even more revolution brewing and so much at stake at home, would Russia’s new, moderate government pull out of the war?
    Newspapers all across the United States sent reporters to find out. Male correspondents were tasked with reporting on the war and Russian politics, the hard and fast news of emperors, governments, generals, battles, and casualties. Their dispatches were cabled home for immediate publication before the news grew stale.
    Matters were different for Louise Bryant, Bessie Beatty, and Rheta Dorr, the only three American women reporters who got to Petrograd and Moscow during World War I. Their job was to report on the “women’s angle” of war and revolution to draw women readers, but their stories often appeared weeks after they were written. Editors didn’t rush them into print in the same way they handled hard news filed by men. Bessie Beatty’s eyewitness account of the fall of the Winter Palace bore a December 1, 1917, dateline, but the
San Francisco Bulletin
didn’t print it until January 28, 1918. Her woman’s observations lacked the same standing as a man’s reporting.
    But reading their reports dropped Americans right into the drama in Petrograd. Louise, Bessie, and Rheta wrote in first person, almost as if they were creating memoirs. Their stories drew readers across time and space to that remote and strange Russia: Bessie and Louise sidestepping mobs as they fought in the streets; Rheta taking tea in a convent with a Romanov grandduchess turned mother superior (the Bolsheviks later murdered her); Bessie dancing the mazurka with a Russian officer in a small village.
    All three correspondents knew fear and understood the risks. Rheta lay in her hotel bed one night listening as a gang of Bolshevik sympathizers slaughtered an old general in the next room. Louise put herself in danger by going to Moscow to witness a Red Funeral, when the Bolshevik revolutionaries laid their dead to rest in red-stained coffins inside the Kremlin wall. Bessie, as she did her interviews all across Petrograd, witnessed scores of killings, sometimes of soldiers, others of innocent onlookers. She could have been one of them.
    Bessie was the first into Petrograd, arriving via a convoluted route from the East. The
Bulletin
had sent her on assignment to report from Japan and China, and Bessie had been on board four days when word arrived that the United States had entered World War I. Bessie switched her destination to Petrograd by heading north to Vladivostok, Russia, where she embarked on a 12-day train trip across Russia, riding from the Pacific Ocean to the Baltic Sea some 6,000 miles west. When the