Comrade Rhys

Albert Rhys Williams used his cover as a journalist to, as one observer put it, go “through the Bolshevik Revolution in a dress suit.” Inspired by brief friendships with Lenin and John Reed, Williams spent the next forty-five years defending socialism and the Soviet Union.

William Benton Whisenhunt draws on the largely untapped archive of Williams’s papers to provide a first-ever biography of the dedicated radical writer. Williams spent nearly ten years living and traveling in the USSR, where he observed the Soviet system and reported on it with unusual nuance in numerous books, articles, and speeches. Whisenhunt follows Williams from his early life as a lumberyard worker and preacher through his participation in the Revolution and his long career as a radical writer. Able to see socialism as flawed, Williams’s nonetheless defended it as an alternative to capitalism with such vigor that correspondents often addressed him as Comrade Rhys.

Astute and richly detailed, Comrade Rhys reveals the life and work of an overlooked radical thinker.