As in all such times, the petty conventional life of the city went on, ignoring the Revolution as much as possible. The poets made verses–but not about the Revolution. The realistic painters painted scenes from medieval Russian history–anything but the Revolution. Young ladies from the provinces came up to the capital to learn French and cultivate their voices, and the gay young beautiful officers wore their gold-trimmed crimson bashliki and their elaborate Caucasian swords around the hotel lobbies. The ladies of the minor bureaucratic set took tea with each other in the afternoon, carrying each her little gold or silver or jewelled sugar-box, and half a loaf of bread in her muff, and wished that the Tsar were back, or that the Germans would come, or anything that would solve the servant problem–. The daughter of a friend of mine came home one afternoon in hysterics because the woman street-car conductor had called her “Comrade!”
All around them great Russia was in travail, bearing a new world. The servants one used to treat like animals and pay next to nothing, were getting independent. A pair of shoes cost more than a hundred rubles, and as wages averaged about thirty-five rubles a month the servants refused to stand in queue and wear out their shoes. But more than that. In the new Russia every man and woman could vote; there were working-class newspapers, saying new and startling things; there were the Soviets; and there were the Unions. The izvoshtchiki (cab-drivers) had a Union; they were also represented in the Petrograd Soviet. The waiters and hotel servants were organized, and refused tips. On the walls of restaurants they put up signs which read, “No tips taken here–” or, “Just because a man has to make his living waiting on table is no reason to insult him by offering him a tip!”

The aviation enthusiast spoke up, lying on his back and blowing expensive cigar smoke at the ceiling.
“Do you know what is needed? Only one thing–the same that did the trick for England. Casualties. At first it was impossible to interest the English masses in the war; they could not be made to see that it was their affair. But when the lists of the dead, wounded, mutilated, began to come back–and, by the way, England ought to be grateful for the German atrocities–then hatred of the Germans began to soak into the whole people from the families of the wounded and the dead. This social anger is patriotism–for war purposes.
‘If I had the job of popularizing this war, I would begin by sending three or four thousand American soldiers to certain death. That would wake the country up.’

It is safe to say that this is the same caliber of people as those who running America’s govt a century later.

I hate soldiers. I hate to see a man with a bayonet fixed on his rifle, who can order me off the street. I hate to belong to an organization that is proud of obeying a caste of superior beings, that is proud of killing free ideas, so that it may the more efficiently kill human beings in cold blood. They will tell you that a conscript army is Democratic, because everybody has to serve; but they won’t tell you that military service plants in your blood the germ of blind obedience, of blind irresponsibility, that it produces one class of Commanders in your state and your industries; and accustoms you to do what they tell you even in time of peace.

I’ve started reading this awesome book: “Shaking the World: Revolutionary Journalism by John Reed,” which I bought from Bookmarks. I want to quote some excerpts from preface, written by Paul Foot on 28 September 1998:

I write this on the day after marching to lobby the Labour Party conference in Blackpool and I am reading the newspapers. Blackpool was chock full of journalists. They crammed into the Winter Gardens, scavenging for gossip. Is Tony Blair falling out with Gordon Brown? What is Robin Cook going to say about electoral reform? At least 500 of the best journalists of our generation spent their day searching for and producing, exactly nothing.
Meanwhile the march of several thousand surged through the streets. These marchers had stories to tell: real stories, about hospitals starved of nursing care, about slashed firefighting capabilities, about impoverished old age pensioners and corrupt local authorities. Yet not a single of those conference journalists even considered spending a moment with the marchers. In the next morning’s papers, full of idiotic intrigue, the entire march had been obliterated.
No wonder the word ‘journalist’ has become almost a term of abuse in socialist circles. If this is the way journalists behave, surely they must be part of the capitalist conspiracy to exploit and humiliate working people? In truth, however, the word journalist describes only a person who writes about the contemporary world. Since the single most obvious fact about the contemporary world is that is ultimately divided into two classes, a journalist can write for one class or the other. Of course it is much easier and more profitable to write on behalf of the authorities. But the history of the century is lit up by journalists who wrote against the stream.
Perhaps the greatest of these was John Reed. He was born in 1887 into a privileged family and was taught to be a ‘writer’. He developed the necessarily elegant and sophisticated writing style. A glorious career in American journalism was cut short when he was sent to cover a strike by the Industrial Workers of the World at Paterson, New Jersey. What he saw in that strike–he was cast into prison almost by accident and left to rot–convinced him that there were two sides to every story and he eagerly ranged himself on the side of the exploited people everywhere.
The difference between Reed and the sort of journalists who clambered around the conference hall at Blackpool was marvelously illustrated during his coverage of the Mexican Civil War in 1913. When he arrived on the scene, the official O’Boozes covering the war were getting drunk and filling rubbish at Presidio, on the US side of Rio Grande. Reed swam the river and did not rest, until he came to the camps of the revolutionaries Zapata and Villa. He reported the war from the point of view of the starving people who were claiming the land for themselves. These reports made him famous, but his fame never for a moment deflected him from his political commitment. His language became less and less ornate, more and more direct.
When the Russian Revolution broke out in October 1917, Reed,who was reporting the world war in Europe, made a bee-line for it. The result is perhaps the greatest piece of journalism ever: Ten Days that shook the World. The book’s brilliance is not just its descriptive power, but its understanding and admiration for the swirling initiatives of the mass working class party which kept the revolution going.