CLASSIC DISPATCHES THE BATTALION OF DEATH
Bessie Beatty was born in Los Angeles in 1886 to Irish immigrants. While she was still a student at Occidental College, she landed a job with the Los Angeles Herald, and by 1907 she was a columnist for the San Francisco Bulletin. She also found time to write a political primer for women in California, who in 1911 had won the right to vote.
In 1917 Beatty persuaded Fremont Older, her editor at the Bulletin, to let her visit Russia with four journalists and political activists: Louise Bryant, Rheta Childe Dorr, John Reed, and Albert Rhys Williams. There she scored an interview with Leon Trotsky, a leader in Russia’s October Revolution; became one of the first civilians to enter the Winter Palace after the fall of Alexander Kerensky’s provisional government; and went inside the Peter and Paul Fortress to visit with prisoners, including the former ministers of the government. She also traveled to the trenches to interview Russian soldiers and spent a week with the 1st Russian Women’s Battalion of Death, an all-female combat unit. After returning home, she finished a book about her experiences, The Red Heart of Russia, which was published in 1918 (and from which the following story, about events in 1917, is adapted). “I had been alive at a great moment,” she wrote, “and knew it was great.”
“I had been alive at a great moment,” Beatty wrote, “and knew it was great.”
Beatty went on to become the editor of McCall’s magazine and, later, a freelance foreign correspondent for such magazines as Good Housekeeping, McClure’s, the New Republic, and Woman’s Home Journal Time
