Photograph ©Mark Morosse of items in the Louise Bryant Papers at Yale University Library Manuscripts and Archives.

Less than three months before the Bolsheviks took Petrograd, Bryant and Reed sailed for Russia. Bryant took copious notes of her interviews with ordinary Russians as well as with national figures such as Kerensky, Trotsky, and Lenin. Pictured here is one of her notebooks, with a description of Lenin: “He looks like a little Irish ward politician or bartender.”

Bryant went home several months before Reed. The 32 articles she published in the Philadelphia Ledger soon after her January return were syndicated in more than a hundred papers in the United States and Canada. The articles, her lectures, and her book, Six Red Months in Russia—a tour de force of scene and detail—made Bryant herself, briefly, a national figure.