ABSTRACT
To a growing number of American Left-Wingers events in Russia seemed closer than anything happening at home. Yet Russia was almost impossibly far away. The war and then the blockade made travel difficult and dangerous. Communications were cut down to a trickle. Anyone who could get to Russia and back in the first months of the Bolshevik revolution was assured of a sympathetic audience hungry for news from Russia—tales of suffering and heroism, glimpses of the new social order, an interview with V. I. Lenin himself. A whole generation of American Communist intellectuals was weaned on an offhand remark by Lincoln Steffens. As he put it, he was content to stay in hell—then Paris—even though he knew where heaven was — Moscow. Twenty-one years separated Steffens and Reed in age, and the younger man could start where the older one had left off.
