28th September Albert Rhys Williams was a Welsh-American reporter and Soviet apologist , who was born in Greenwich, Ohio on September 28, 1883 to Welsh immigrant parents . He managed to combine fervent support for the Soviet Union and close contact with its leaders with a long and prosperous life. Williams studied at Marietta College in Ohio, then the Hartford Theological Seminary and finally on a fellowship to the University of Cambridge , where he met members of the British Labour Party and became very active in socialist politics and began to build a career as a journalist. Williams was in Petrograd in 1917, as correspondent for The New York Evening Post and was in attendance at the storming of the Winter Palace (pictured). He stayed in Russia until May 1918, attending the First, Second and Third Congresses of Soviets, meeting Vladimir Lenin several times, with whom he became friendly. He was an active participant with the Bolsheviks in the Civil War, and travelled to Vladivostok to cover foreign intervention in the Revolution. Back in America, he published leaflets explaining and praising the Bolshevik Revolution, and promoted them throughout the country. He published the first biography of Lenin in the USA in 1919, and continued to travel in the Soviet Union throughout the 1920s, publishing his most famous work, The Russian Land , in 1929. He had seemingly no awareness of the political persecutions being carried out in the Soviet Union, and remained to the end of his life an ardent supporter of the country. He made his final journey there in 1959, on the invitation of the Soviet government, and died in 1962. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Albert_Rhys_Williams#Footnotes
Posted on: Sat, 27 Sep 2014 23:10:01 +0000
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