Irish people can be as susceptible as anyone to the charms of a communist dictator.
Michael Collins and Éamon de Valera approved a $20,000 loan from Sinn Féin to Vladimir Lenin’s Bolsheviks. Young Bob Geldof distributed 100 copies of Mao Zedong’s Little Red Book around Blackrock College, while President Michael D Higgins paid a warm tribute to Fidel Castro when the “giant among global leaders” died in 2016.
As Simon Hall shows in his lively, insightful but disjointed study of how revolutions shaped the 20st century, however, Lenin, Mao and Fidel’s biggest overseas fans came from a more unexpected source. Three American journalists played key roles in presenting these tyrants to the West as principled, charismatic and a force for good.
Hall frames his episodic narrative around six gruelling journeys that led to either a coup or a scoop. In 1917 Lenin and around 30 other Russian dissidents took a train from Zurich across war-torn Germany to Petrograd’s Finland Station, where his fiery rhetoric inspired the world’s first Soviet republic.
That was a cakewalk compared with Mao’s Long March, the 6,000-mile retreat from Chinese nationalist forces in 1934-5 that cost more than 80,000 lives but still established him as the Communist Party’s toughest leader. Castro ended his exile in 1956 by sailing from Mexico to Cuba on what Hall calls “a creaking, leaking leisure yacht”, escaping into the Sierra Maestra mountains and plotting a guerrilla war.
The newspaper men profiled here are less familiar, but formidable characters in their own right. John Reed was a bohemian poet who watched Saint Petersburg’s Winter Palace being stormed and penned the Lenin-approved bestseller Ten Days that Shook the World. The goofy, part-Irish Edgar Snow spent three months living among Red Army troops and obediently wrote up Mao’s autobiography. Donnish veteran Herbert Matthews hiked through a dangerous wilderness to secure his star-struck interview with Castro, which caused a sensation when it appeared on the New York Times’s front page.
Three Revolutions works best on a storytelling level, full of colourful human details such as Lenin drawing up rules for who could use his carriage toilet. While Hall is clear-eyed about his despotic subjects, however, he goes a little too easy on the newshounds. Journalism may be the first draft of history, but sadly the copy these naive idealists delivered has turned out to need a radical rewrite.
