Ten Days that Shook the World

By John Reed

 Ten Days That Shook the World is an undisputed classic of political reportage. A stunning first-hand account overflowing with urgency and immediacy, Reed’s masterpiece lives and breathes the streets, meeting halls, posters and pamphlets of the revolution he witnessed. Like no other work, it places the reader shoulder to shoulder with the people’s militias, factory committees, propagandists and crowds which thronged St Petersburg’s squares to protest, celebrate, and strike. Rather than a coup orchestrated by a select few, the revolution here emerges in all its true energy, chaos, and creativity as a mass struggle from below for liberation, equality, and socialism.

A hundred years after its initial publication,  Ten Days That Shook the World remains an unparalleled account of one of the twentieth century’s most seminal events.

 

• Language: English
• Publisher: Haymarket Books
• Release date: Jun 18, 2019
• ISBN: 9781642590036

John Reed

John is a retired licensed clinical social worker who had a profound passion for helping children and adolescents overcome learning challenges, navigate social complexities, and conquer behavioral hurdles. Drawing from his own childhood issues and experiences, he dedicated his career to transforming the lives of kids who mirrored his own journey by demystifying and empowering them.

Book preview

TEN DAYS THAT SHOOK THE WORLD

With the greatest interest and with never slackening attention I read John Reed’s book, Ten Days that Shook the World. Unreservedly do I recommend it to the workers of the world. Here is a book which I should like to see published in millions of copies and translated into all languages. It gives a truthful and most vivid exposition of the events so significant to the comprehension of what really is the Proletarian Revolution and the Dictatorship of the Proletariat. These problems are widely discussed but before one can accept or reject these ideas, he must understand the full significance of his decision. John Reed’s book will undoubtedly help to clear this question, which is the fundamental problem of the universal workers’ movement.

NIKOLAI LENIN

(Vladimir Illitch Ulianov)

TEN DAYS

THAT SHOOK THE WORLD

JOHN REED

CENTENNIAL INTRODUCTION BY

DAVID LAIBMAN

ABOUT THE AUTHOR BY

JOHN HOWARD LAWSON

PREFACE BY

N. K. KRUPSKAYA

© 2019 International Publishers. First published in 1934.

Published in 2019 by

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ISBN: 978-1-64259-003-6

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication data is available.

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CONTENTS

PUBLISHER’S NOTE

Ten Days That Shook the World was first published in March 1919, and by July of that year it went into its fourth printing. Since then, it has gone through many editions and has been widely translated and published abroad.

The text of the present edition is reproduced from the first edition as published by Boni and Liveright, New York. Lenin’s Introduction, written at the end of 1919, is reproduced as it appeared in the Boni and Liveright edition of 1922, the first time it was published anywhere. The Preface by N. K. Krupskaya to the Russian edition of 1923 has been included.

Inaccuracies in the original text are corrected in the Editor’s Notes, at the back of the book, where explanatory comments are also to be found. Biographical Notes have been added.

Reed transliterated Russian names and terms into English in a manner that would convey what seemed to him the equivalent pronunciation. The current usage is given in the Biographical Notes.

A CENTENNIAL FOREWORD

by David Laibmana

When, in 1967, famed screenwriter (and Hollywood Ten defendant) John Howard Lawson wrote his Introduction for an earlier International Publishers edition of John Reed’s Ten Days that Shook the World, the half-century mark of the Russian Revolution could be celebrated in a vastly different way than is necessary today.

At mid-twentieth century, November 7, 1917, was a much more recent event. Moreover, in the wake of the Revolution the Soviet Union had become a major world power, and a system of socialist states had emerged. The defeat of fascism in World War II, resting in large part on the huge efforts and sacrifices of the working people of the USSR, had been accomplished. What we then called the third world was well on its way to national independence and social development. Finally, the Great Depression had spawned massive working-class and popular rebellions in the advanced capitalist world, giving rise to Social Democracy–inflected capitalisms in Western Europe and the New Deal in the United States.

In the half century that followed, however, as is well known, the imperialist ruling classes have steadily reversed this positive shift in the balance of political and social forces and regained the initiative. In country after country, right-wing agendas have prevailed: wealth and income inequality have become more pronounced, progressive social welfare systems and legislation have been gutted, trade union organization and membership reduced, free market, individualist, racist, and nationalist ideologies more firmly entrenched. Internationally, the phase commonly called neoliberalism has taken a firm hold, with its attendant polarization of income, wealth, and power among nations, and desecration of environmental protections, health and safety regulations, and social welfare generally in the name of free trade agreements.

The signal, and tragic, event in this sequence was, of course, the demise of the Soviet Union in 1989–91 and the expulsion of socialist forces from state power in most of the formerly socialist world. We are now at the centennial of Great October, but we are also at the quarter-century anniversary of the reversal (a mild word, to be sure) of that Revolution’s core achievement. Re-reading John Reed’s classic in the world of 2017, that new context simply must be faced. Readers will want to study John Howard Lawson’s Introduction for the background information to be found there about Reed and his partner, Louise Bryant, as well as to visit (or re-visit) the intense details of the events chronicled by Reed in and around Petrograd, Russia, in November 1917. But when Lawson concludes, Words of hope and brotherhood have become great movements. Socialism spreads; the people of Africa and Asia and Latin America throw off the yoke of imperialism. Reed’s book is a tract for our times, the epoch that began in 1917… we must, I think, demur. Clearly, at the hundredth anniversary mark, we know that we need to extract the meaning and inspiration to be found in Ten Days, and in the great events recounted in the book, in a way that recognizes the nonlinear nature of social transformation and the complexity of revolutionary legacies.

I don’t want to keep new readers from becoming immersed in the Revolution, in the pages that follow, or old readers from re-acquainting themselves with it! In this Introduction I hope to touch upon very briefly— certainly not to treat exhaustively—three issues that arose for me when re-reading Reed’s text after a half century: i) the sheer confusion and intricacy that accompany revolutionary periods on the ground; ii) the problem of insurrection—transcendence of formal electoral systems—and its implications for democracy; and, finally, iii) the core question: what did the Revolution accomplish, and is that accomplishment still relevant for our time?

I. REVOLUTIONS ARE MESSY AFFAIRS

Readers will want to move quickly into the gritty stories of John Reed’s encounters with both leaders and rank-and-file working people. But please don’t neglect to read, first, the Notes and Explanations section following the Preface. This section provides an extremely helpful guide to the enormous range of groups, organizations, and personalities that populate the events being recounted. However, even Reed’s listings are incomplete. You will have to come to grips with (among others) Cadets (liberals), Socialist Revolutionaries (SRs), Left SRs, Maximalists, Right Mensheviks, Left (Internationalist) Mensheviks, the Yedinstvo group of Plekhanov, and, of course, Bolsheviks (the Bolsheviki). There are the various Soviets (Councils) of Workers’, Soldiers’, and Peasants’ Deputies, the Military Revolutionary Committee (mainly Bolshevik, although at some moments other socialist groups had representation there), the old Tsarist Duma (defunct after March 1917), the Petrograd Duma or City Council (attached to Kerensky’s Provisional Government), the Zemstvos (county councils), trade unions, factory–shop committees, Fleet Committees, the Vikzhel (Railway Workers Trade Union Central Committee), and many more.

One important element emerges from Reed’s narrative: in a period in a country in which revolutionary consciousness has gripped large portions of the working population, everyone is a revolutionary. The bourgeoisie speaks in the name of the revolution. All manner of moderate and sensible socialists speak in the name of the revolution. Everyone, everything, all of the prikrazy (decrees), manifestos, pamphlets, etc., speak in the name of socialism, freedom, emancipation, peace, land, the interests of Russia, and so on. There is no end to the chorus of screeching voices, proclamations, calls to action. In countries (such as the United States at the time of this writing) in which capitalist class power is almost completely hegemonic and is able to keep the social and political discussion within the boundaries of its own ideology, it is hard to grasp the monstrous confusion of a political terrain on which everyone, from the liberal bourgeoisie to the Cossacks to all manner of left and socialist groups, claims to be revolutionary, the true representative of the narod—the laboring people.

Moreover, everyone has a complete and distinctive set of facts. The Bolsheviki destroyed the treasures of Mother Russia when they sacked the Winter Palace. Lenin, the German spy, absconded to Finland with millions of gold rubles. In the lingo of 2017, we can say that Donald Trump was not the first purveyor of alternative facts! What Masha Gessen and Zephyr Teachout recently observed about Trump (Trump is Dismantling the Idea of Truth, Boston Globe, May 11, 2017) applies to ruling-class spokespersons, either of the atypical proto-fascist variety such as The Donald, or when the class they represent is under extreme threat: they lie not to conceal any particular truth but simply to assert their power to do so, and thereby to control thought. Thus it was for the Nazis in Germany, and for the right wing in Chile in 1970–73: facts don’t exist objectively; they are fabricated to suit the purposes of the ruling powers. This was clearly also the case in 1917 Russia, as amply documented in Ten Days.

This has a major implication for thinking about revolution, and is one of the enduring legacies of Reed’s book. To wit: the masses of workers, peasants, and soldiers, organized in the soviets and increasingly coming over to the side of the Bolsheviks through the summer and fall months of 1917, needed a guide, a lodestar, to orient them amidst the vast array of political entities that donned socialist and revolutionary costumes and sought their allegiance. The only, and ultimate, antidote to the various ideological poisons in circulation was practice. Reading through Ten Days, one gets a sense of the massive degree of organization among the rank-and-file: Reed spoke of revolutionary Russia as a nation of orators, but it was also a nation of organizers, of workplace committees, committees attached to various Soviets, Red Guards, residence committees. The highly organized base was a feature of the later Soviet economy, with perhaps both positive and negative aspects. In any event, in 1917 the massive structure of participatory bodies provided the practical experience necessary to implement the Biblical injunction: By their deeds ye shall know them. The decisive shift of allegiance in November (using here, as Reed does, the old Russian calendar) toward the Bolsheviks was not the result of superior arguments or clever propaganda; it was, more importantly, due to the fact that the Bolshevik personnel, unlike their competitors, were actively promoting the revolution from inside—that is, from among the ranks of the working strata, through their organizations.¹

There is a down side, however, to the successful Bolshevik emergence out of the morass of disinformation. Yet another means of this emergence was the elevation of certain individuals—Lenin, and, at the time in question, Trotzky—to the status of charismatic leaders, leaders who could be trusted, when trust in individual leaders was the only way allegiance and decisive revolutionary action could be attained. The extreme authoritarianism associated with the cult of personality around leaders (Joseph Stalin, in particular, in a later period) was, I will argue, the central reason for the Soviet demise, and thus a major element requiring explanation and interpretation. The ingredients for this interpretation have long been clear: the Bolsheviks faced a pressing need to mobilize the population for arduous tasks and to confront the anomie and uncertainty of uncharted paths of change, against a backdrop of centuries of extreme authoritarian rule, in both the Russian church and state. To this we may now add, however, the factor mentioned above: the need for a shortcut to political unity in circumstances of a thousand voices, most of them entirely unprincipled and predatory, and the need for charismatic and trusted leaders to cut through the confusion. I am not sure how this enlargement of thinking about the authoritarian deformation affects the analysis; these are thoughts-in-progress. But I do find these questions emerging and benefitting from study of John Reed’s classic.

The messiness of revolutionary change thus finds expression in the extreme ideological confusion and uncertainty so well depicted in Ten Days. But the book also provides graphic illustrations of the way in which ruling classes obstruct and prevent their overthrow by mobilizing support among diverse layers of the population. This support takes an ideological–political form, but it can also be embedded in customary procedures, tradition, long-established habit. The aforementioned Vikzhel (Railway Workers Union Central Committee) played a negative role due to its strategic control over the major means of transportation, allocating trains for some purposes and groups and not for others. As the Bolsheviks consolidated their political control and sought to begin the much more profound process of social transformation, they encountered resistance within diverse strata of the population. This resistance took many forms, anticipating the insights of Michel Foucault, who studied the diffusion of power through the ranks of society. So the Bolsheviks, learning that the telegraph operators would not send their cables and decrees, had to find alternative means to announce their rise to power and communicate with the Russian people and the rest of the world. Employees of the State Bank issued this proclamation: To the Attention of All Citizens. The State Bank is closed! Why? Because the violence exercised by the Bolsheviki against the State Bank has made it impossible for us to work…. Citizens! Save the people’s property from robbery, and us from violence, and we shall immediately resume work. (People’s property indeed!) Ten Days is a chronicle of the ways in which overthrow of the bourgeoisie goes far beyond a mere lopping off of its head; its tentacles reach throughout the social body, and its replacement requires minute combat within every workplace, every sector, every community, every cultural layer of the whole.

II. WHY THE INSURRECTION OF NOVEMBER 7?

If the Bolsheviks, after Lenin’s return to Petrograd in April, were building the base of ideological and organizational support for their program—land to the peasants, peace (without annexations or indemnities) in the international arena, and steps laying foundations for eventual socialist construction in industry—why not wait, as countless legions of Mensheviks and others were urging, for the planned Constituent Assembly? Why launch (what we have come to know as) the Revolution: the assault on the Winter Palace, which was the headquarters of the Provisional Government? Large sections of the political spectrum gave voice (as noted) to support for workers’ control, for the demands of the peasants, and for terminating the war; their underlying allegiance, however, was to the old regime, perhaps modernized a bit along parliamentary lines. These sections now had the excuse they needed to break with the Bolsheviks, and this sowed confusion and uncertainty among some sections of the underlying population. Why give them this weapon? Why not wait for the legitimation afforded by an unambiguous electoral majority, following established rules and procedures?

John Reed’s Ten Days does not attempt to address this issue systematically. He was, after all, a journalist, not a political theorist, and he did not have (as we do) the advantage of hindsight. There are, however, many useful clues and hints in the book that help us to approach this decisive question.

We can begin by noting that the composition of the nominally representative bodies—the Petrograd Soviet, the Central Executive Committee of the All-Russian Soviet (the TsEK, or Tsay-ee-kah, as Reed renders it), not to speak of the Provisional Government, which had never in fact achieved any sort of electoral legitimacy—did not reflect the true mood of the underlying population. The actual temper of the masses of Russian working people was not represented accurately in the numerical strengths of the various factions. This may be because (I am tempted to write precisely because!) the expressed positions of these factions did not correspond to their real interests and intentions. Lenin, in the months preceding November, had won the Bolsheviks over to the view that, owing to the actual ground-level organization and participation of their members, the Bolshevik party had a unique sense of the evolving consciousness of the people, and of their progressive distancing from the stalemate that would result from adherence to the formal rules and procedures of the Provisional Government. As for the Soviets, the Bolsheviks did accept their minority status there in the spring months. In fact, their demand for All Power to the Soviets meant, in that period, acceptance of the electoral supremacy of the moderate socialists: Mensheviks, SRs. This stance contributed to the legitimacy of the Bolshevik position in the fall, when the other socialist forces had all but melted away, despite Bolshevik efforts to include them. By November, All Power to the Soviets had acquired a new content: essentially, Bolshevik control of the Soviets, since they were by then the only group organized on the ground, in a manner necessary to assert practical control. To empower the Soviets meant to activate them, and the Bolsheviks were the only force with the cadre and mass base able to do that.

Moreover, if the rising revolutionary consciousness among the workers, soldiers and peasants were not acted upon, it would dissipate. The resulting retreat would provide a space in which the old ruling classes could consolidate and reassert their power. Finally, the progress of the war provided a dynamic context in which the demand for peace, and for a peace treaty, would lose credibility unless decisive action was taken. Again, to continue the military slaughter while waiting for the Constituent Assembly—which might not even have taken place had the Provisional Government not been overthrown—would have caused the revolutionary energy building up in the Soldiers’ Soviets to dissipate.

In short: the Bolsheviks came to the judgment that delay and further debate would cause the revolutionary opportunity to be squandered. In the conditions prevailing in Russia, in which formal democracy was less than a year old and socio-economic backwardness provided counterrevolution with large reserve areas in which to fester and grow, formal democracy became the enemy of genuine democracy—which meant immediate implementation of the widely held demands for peace, land distribution to the peasants, and the beginnings of worker control of industry and economic planning.²

That is, basically, it. Could the Bolsheviks have known with certainty that their analysis was correct? Hardly. Can we then say that it was just cynical politics—they saw an opportunity and took it? Again, I believe we must answer this in the negative. The scientific foundation, and ultimate justification, for the storming of the Winter Palace, and for the decisive turn of Russian and world history that eventuated, rests upon the practical connection between the revolutionary consciousness of the Bolshevik rank-and-file and their unique degree of organization and participatory capacity. This capacity, in fact, may be the most decisive gift of those ten days in October (November) to the theory and practice of revolution going forward from then, and from now. Its presence or absence is central to the success or failure of revolutionary mobilizations, whatever the extent to which these include electoral forms.

This point can be made with respect to an event that took place three-and-one-half years later, in 1921: the March Action in Germany. At that time, the Communist Party of Germany (VKPD) staged an insurrection of its own, to overthrow the Weimar government. This action might be seen as a continuation of Bolshevik policy; indeed, the Bolshevik leadership, Lenin included, emphasized the importance of revolution in other capitalist countries, especially in Europe, to guarantee the ultimate success of the Russian Revolution.³ In the event, the March Action was a huge failure. The VKPD had a comparatively small membership of less than half a million, and its attempted coup resulted in 150 party members killed and thousands imprisoned. The Third Congress of the Communist International,⁴ held later that year, condemned the Action as irresponsible and asserted the importance of winning over the masses as a precondition to taking power. Some question arises as to why this criticism of the VKPD leadership was not properly extended also to certain Moscow-based representatives of the Comintern, who had supported the coup. But for our reconsideration of 1917 and Ten Days, the point should be clear: we exonerate the Bolsheviks in 1917 and condemn the VKPD in 1921 because the former succeeded, while the latter failed!

In any case, the detailed account in Ten Days continues to provide much food for thought, about the relationship between electoral and extra-electoral arenas of struggle, about the objective conditions for revolution, and about the long-term effects of abrogating established, formal mechanisms for transfer of power.

III. WHAT DID THE REVOLUTION ACCOMPLISH, AND DOES IT ENDURE?

Students in Russia today (in the year this is being written, 2017) are taught that the real revolution of one hundred years ago was the February (March) Revolution, forcing abdication of Tsar Nicholas II and establishing a parliamentary republic. The events of October (November) were a putsch, a coup leading to a dictatorship that kept Russia from assuming its true place among nations in the twentieth century.⁵

To their credit, many people in Russia do not believe any of this. I gave a talk at Plekhanov House in St. Petersburg, to a wonderful group of Marxist folks who are carrying on the tradition that they uphold, and where John Reed would have been most welcome. Vladimir Putin appears, in fact, to be caught in an impossible game of trying to promote a Russian nationalist resurgence while at the same time denying the great Russian internationalist contribution to the present-day world, one hundred years ago. But the question persists: was the Revolution that John Reed chronicled merely a great, utopian (and impossible) moment that was quickly overturned? Or was it a tragic occurrence that led to millions of deaths? Or, indeed, a wonderful liberating event that led in smooth and uninterrupted fashion to the progress of socialism and human development worldwide?

Our answer, I of course suggest, must be: none of the above.

A major element here is the aforementioned fall of the USSR. If the Russian Revolution resulted in a form of society that was itself later overturned, does that not negate any positive impact it may have had? Well, revolutions do tend to have their Thermidors. The French Revolution led to the restoration of the Monarchy—more than once. It also, famously, was a bourgeois revolution that was not led by a bourgeoisie and did not lead to establishment of capitalist relations of production—at least not directly or immediately. The American Revolution did provide a political framework (in its time, a radical one): the electoral republic, within which capitalism would (eventually) develop most decisively. It also, however, in breaking from England, cemented the power of a slaveholding oligarchy that in many ways retarded the progress of capitalism, and with that the challenge to capitalism in the form of a modern working class. In short, the revolutionary road is full of twists and turns.

What did emerge in the Soviet Union, as a result of the Bolshevik rising in 1917, was a form of early socialist society: that is to say, a society without a capitalist ruling class, with increasingly widespread participatory structures that had a clear lineage going back to 1917 (and indeed to 1905–7), and with a programmatic adherence to social planning, income and wealth equality, and to enrichment of human educational, cultural, and social opportunities and growth. To this we must add the Soviet nationalities policy: the elevation of formerly nomadic and non-literate peoples to modern political, social, and economic development. The ideology of equality and friendship among peoples became an integral part of the Soviet landscape and contributed immensely to anti-colonial movements and anti-racist struggles in later decades of the twentieth century throughout the world.

This early socialist path was, of course, bedeviled by the country’s past, and by the external realities facing it. In the former category: repressive and undeveloped political institutions and cultural attributes with roots going back centuries into the Tsarist era; technical backwardness; the historic legacy of a cruel and hierarchical religious system; and widespread illiteracy, superstition, and ignorance among large sections of the population. In the latter: hostile military intervention on the part of the capitalist powers; diplomatic and economic isolation, and, eventually, major military invasion; later, a crippling nuclear arms race. The socialist path of development still broke through, and built the Soviet Union up into the second world power in the post–World War II period.

While noting the great economic and social achievements spawned by 1917, we must also reckon with the reality of the accompanying deformation: the rise of the cult of the individual leader, and the hyper-politicization of intellectual, cultural, and social life that had roots in the revolutionary period but took firm hold in the 1930s. The struggle against this deformation forms a large part of the country’s story in its final decades. I believe that the accumulated unresolved tension surrounding this history—the truth and reconciliation process that did not proceed to a full conclusion in the early postwar decades when the patriotic commitment of the population was still strong—is what led to the ultimate demise of the USSR as a political entity.

Less well known, because this gets to the heart of the Revolution’s deepest and most enduring accomplishment, is the breakthrough from early socialism to a mature socialist system that took place from circa 1968 on. The key⁶ is the emergence of multi-level iterative planning—with both central and decentral elements—culminating in the perestroika movement under Mikhail Gorbachev in the 1980s. This movement, I believe, is the heart of the socialist project—the answer to TINA (There Is No Alternative), and to this vital question: are there socialist solutions to the economic problems of socialism? The answer to this question, brief but resounding, is yes! Modern mature socialism was not the cause of the crisis that led to the Soviet collapse; it was, potentially, the answer to that crisis, and to our own. This (if true, of course!) is truly mind-boggling: it means, for example, that when anyone talks about reform of socialism (as, for example, in Cuba today, or in the eclectic Chinese search for a socialist market economy, conceived as a middle or mixed path), the response can be: reform—in which direction? Toward capitalism or further away from capitalism?

The political power on which mature socialism rested came to an end, for the present, in Eastern Europe but especially in Russia, twenty-six years ago. Moreover, the Revolution that gave rise to those regimes has been temporarily derailed. This is an undeniable reality, and the continuing relevance of this book can only be affirmed on its basis.

However, the foundations of a mature, progressive socialism, based on a modern democratic system of planning that transcends both top-down central planning and uncontrolled decentral (or market-based) enterprise activity, were laid down, mainly in the Soviet Union. These foundations are still the required starting point for serious challenges to the neoliberal capitalist status quo. The Revolution chronicled in John Reed’s classic account, then, has not been deprived of its historical importance. On the contrary: if this Revolution brought forth a vision, and an early reality, of a modern, complex economy and society run by its working people, through massively democratic procedures, ensuring cooperative engagement of the resources of Planet Earth toward the ends of human development and preservation of all life, and without a predatory, unprincipled capitalist ruling class imposing its own need for power and wealth between the Planet and its working inhabitants—then that reality/vision/Revolution will only gain in historical significance, as the world’s people return to the offensive.

Those people will then need to return to John Reed’s amazing account of the struggles and pain, the visions and triumphs, of their 1917 forebears who toppled a Tsarist monarchy, then stared down the country’s internal bourgeois elites, the international capitalist empire-builders and invaders, and all of the friendly professional problem-solvers, to start off on a long and still-unwinding road to a future worthy of them—and us. I conclude that we must still read Ten Days, and learn from it, because there is so much still to be done.

Brooklyn, New York

May, 2017

aI must acknowledge, gratefully, the help of Lars T. Lih, whose careful reading of a draft of this Introduction helped me to avoid numerous factual and conceptual errors. I am, of course, alone responsible for the views and interpretations put forward.

¹The growth in support for the Bolsheviks, of course, may be hard to prove definitively, if we stick entirely to the sort of numerical evidence coming from polls and electoral results. It does, however, receive support from the experiences recounted in Ten Days. See Section II, below.

²The phrase in the conditions prevailing in Russia is italicized above in order to stress that the lessons of Great October for revolutionary change in other, highly different, sets of conditions must be drawn carefully, with due regard for the historical specificity of those conditions.

³Whether or not this meant that the success or failure of the Russian Revolution depended entirely on the occurrence of similar transformations elsewhere is a debate that came later.

⁴See the account in John Riddell, ed., To the Masses: Proceedings of the Third Congress of the Communist International, 1921 (Haymarket Books, 2016).

⁵Information from personal contact by this writer with students in St. Petersburg and Moscow, during a visit to Russia in March 2017.

⁶A full account is not possible here. See my Passion and Patience: Society, History and Revolutionary Vision (International Publishers, 2015), chapters 8 and 9, and the sources cited therein.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

by John Howard Lawson

In re-reading and re-studying Ten Days That Shook the World, I find the book more rewarding than in the excitement of its first discovery. I feel a new and contemporary sense of its relevance. As a historical document, a work of art, it looms larger in the sixties than it did in the twenties.

There are two aspects of the book: it is a first-hand, documented account of the Bolshevik Revolution, with an awareness of political issues and an authenticity which make it a primary source of historical knowledge. It is also a personal testament, which gives the work an added dimension of conviction and emotional force.

The historical transcends the personal, so overwhelmingly that it may seem unnecessary to juxtapose the two elements. Yet history is not written by people with empty minds. Reed’s commitment enables him to understand the events, to interpret their meaning, to foresee their extension in time. The world was shaken, and the results affect our lives, and are hotly disputed, with words and with guns and the threat of nuclear war.

It is not possible to encompass fifty years in an introductory essay. I have seen enough of the shocks and surprises of history to be wary of facile generalizations which vulgarize Marxist theory. But the Bolshevik Revolution opened a new era, and the global role of socialism cannot be understood without reference to its origins. It is my purpose here to place Reed’s book in a contemporary perspective, to relate it to American and world problems in our time, and to stress its cultural value, its contribution to intellectual history.

I. EDUCATION OF AN AMERICAN

Reed was born on October 20, 1887, in Portland, Oregon, in a mansion modeled on a French chateau, with a private park around it. The first question that occurs to us is why an American with this background became a committed revolutionary.

His mother was a member of a rich Portland family. His father, who came from upstate New York, was a progressive businessman. The boy went to a fashionable school in Morristown, New Jersey, then to Harvard, where he graduated in 1910. Among his fellow-students were Walter Lippman, T. S. Eliot, Van Wyck Brooks, and Robert Edmond Jones. It was a period of radical ferment, and Reed was interested in the activities of the Socialist Club. He was curious about social issues, and increasingly impatient with conformism and convention.

After graduation and a few carefree months in Europe, he settled in New York’s Greenwich Village. Lincoln Steffens, an old friend of his father’s, helped him get a job on the American magazine, one of a group of periodicals which had won a mass circulation through sensational exposés of political or business corruption. In addition to his editorial tasks, Reed explored the by-ways of the city and wrote poems. When the avant-garde magazine Poetry began publication in Chicago, Reed was one of its first contributors, along with Eliot, Ezra Pound, Wallace Stevens, and Vachel Lindsay. Reed was also interested in The Masses, which had begun in 1911, and was reorganized under the editorship of Max Eastman in 1912. Reed was one of those who insisted that The Masses be iconoclastic, uncommitted to any creed or cause.

In the spring of 1913, Reed went to Paterson, New Jersey, to report a strike of silk workers led by the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW). He was arrested and spent four days in jail, where he met strikers, many being recent immigrants—Italians, Lithuanians, Poles, Jews. This was another step in Reed’s radical education. He was so moved by his contact with the imprisoned workers, so impressed by their courage and endurance and a kind of wisdom, that he became an impassioned partisan. Bill Haywood, the IWW leader, tells of introducing Reed at a meeting: Reed spoke and then taught the strikers a song, which was sung by 25,000 people.a

The strike inspired Reed to undertake a creative experiment in drama. He wrote and staged a pageant presented for a single night in the old Madison Square Garden in New York. The setting, designed by Robert Edmond Jones, was a massive replica of the Paterson mills. The first scene showed the mills in operation, workers going to their jobs through the audience. Twelve hundred strikers came from Paterson to enact their own experience: the strike is called, police attack the picket lines, a murdered striker is buried. Speeches at the funeral were repeated by the original speakers, Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, Carlo Tresca, and Bill Haywood.

The pageant is a major, and unhappily neglected, event in the history of the theater. The audience participation, the living newspaper technique, the working class point of view, foreshadow the work of Mayakovsky and Meyerhold in the Soviet Union and Brecht and Piscator in Germany, as well as the experiments of the New Playwrights Theatre in New York and the social drama of the thirties.

Reed was attracted to the theater, but his career was shaped by practical considerations. The one-day sensation in Madison Square Garden could not be duplicated, but the boldness and radical temper of his reports on the strike impressed the editors of Metropolitan, who asked him to cover the revolutionary outbreak in Mexico. He was also assigned to send reports from Mexico to the New York World. He travelled with Pancho Villa’s troops, became friendly with Villa, and wrote of the guerrilla soldiers, their miseries and laughter and desperate courage. He later recalled this as the most satisfactory period of his life.b It was a time of learning. From the comparatively simple issues of the Paterson strike, Reed moved to the tangled pattern of an agrarian revolution. His writings show that he had only a limited understanding of its larger meaning. He was emotionally drawn to the peasant soldiers, and began to recognize the depth and intensity of their struggle, and to suspect the economic and social factors which made it impossible for them to win a complete victory.

There was another lesson when Reed returned from Mexico in April, 1914, and went directly to Ludlow, Colorado, arriving ten days after mine guards and state militia burned a tent colony of families of striking miners. Machine guns had been turned on people running from burning tents; thirteen children and a pregnant woman were slaughtered in a cave where they had taken refuge. Reed interviewed survivors and checked their stories. He charged that the Rockefeller family, which controlled the mines, was responsible for the murders.

When World War I began, Reed saw it as an extension of the struggles he had witnessed. He called it The Traders’ War, and explained that German capitalists want more profits. English and French capitalists want it all.c Reed was sent by Metropolitan to cover the Western Front. Everything he saw confirmed his estimate of the war’s meaning. He was sickened by the wholesale killing, shocked by the lack of effective opposition. His articles gave a bleak picture of suffering. In 1915, he toured the Eastern Front, reporting the carnage in the Balkans, the plight of Jews in the cities of Tsarist Russia.

Returning to the United States in 1916, he found, the country moving toward involvement. He was bitterly opposed to American participation. He was outraged by the war propaganda, and dismayed that so many intellectuals were frightened into silence or active support of intervention. During these months, Reed was probably as close as he would ever come to the modern sickness of alienation. His radical views had begun to limit his journalistic career. He lived the disordered life of Greenwich Village, but he was troubled by his inactivity. Like his friends on The Masses, he began to identify himself more closely with the Socialist opposition to the war.

Psychological stress during this difficult period centered around his stormy love affair with Louise Bryant. She had been the wife of a Portland dentist, and planned to marry Reed when she obtained her divorce. They spent the summer of 1916 at Provincetown. It was the first season of the Provincetown Players, performing on an old wharf with the sea as a background. The productions included short plays both by Reed and by his future wife, and both acted in Eugene O’Neill’s sea plays, presented for the first time.

Reed was at a turning point. He had won some recognition as a storyteller, poet and dramatist, in addition to his journalistic fame. He had prospects of success in all these fields. There were emotional complications with Louise. O’Neill was in love with her, and the triangular situation, begun in the summer, continued even after Reed and Louise married in November. There is no intimate record of their feeling, and we cannot guess the emotional cost to all three of them. It must be considered as a factor in Reed’s personal development. There is no doubt of his deep attachment to Louise. The humiliating circumstances served to emphasize the absurdity of their social situation. The woman and the two men rebelled against bourgeois hypocrisy, but they had found no alternative way of life. O’Neill found tortured fulfillment in the theatre.

Reed’s decision to go to Russia cannot be seen as a rejection of art in favor of politics; this would be a gross over-simplication of his motives. His awareness of the revolutionary changes that were impending in Russia roused his mind and heart. When Louise chose to leave with him in August 1917, she understood and accepted his purpose, and saved their marriage. For Reed, his decision had deep roots in his American education, and it led to his becoming the great chronicler of the Revolution and the progenitor of the modern school of creative journalism.

II.

Reviews for Ten Days that Shook the World

[kcshankd · Rating: 1 out of 5 stars]

Disappointing. I know it is a contemporary account, but I was hoping for more... this is a disjointed, uneven effort that at times seems to be just copies of revolutionary broadsides. A reader is left with no idea who these people are, and no insight into why they are doing what they are doing - which is what I was after.

[smiley_13 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

Reed's reportage rings true but the verbatim transcript of revolutionary speeches and proclamations sounds hollow and cynical 90+ years on and after Stalinism. I also think Reed gives more credit to central party control during the revolution than it probably was. AJP Taylor's introduction to the Penguin 20th Century Classics edition is excellent. He may be right that Reed's account of the Russian Revolution is the best account of any revolution.

[boryshuk · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

Well, this book has a lot going for it from historical value. Keeping track of the multitude of political factions was a bit overwhelming, but to just pick up what you can and not dwell on the details it provided a pretty good overview of the events and the spirit of the time of the revolution. Only three stars because it is ultimately a dry read, and I can't rate it up there with amazing 5-star books that I've read. I would give it 5 stars from a historical significance perspective.

[schmerguls · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

867 Ten Days That Shook the World, by John Reed (read 7 Sep 1966) This is a famous book, but it is not really well-written. It jumps around a lot and is not a good account of the Bolshevik Revolution.

[antiquary_1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Interesting as a first-person account. Not as pro-Bolshevik as might be expected. For Reed, the Bolshevik coaltion with the LeftSocial Revolutionaries was the climax of the revolution

[maryk205-1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

This book is definitely worth the read as it provides a unique view of events written as they were happening by a witness. Though the whole book feels like one very, very long newspaper article it is interesting to get a peak into a particular time and place guided by someone who does not yet have the power of hindsight to inform the text. That being said it is important for anyone reading this book to be aware of the fact that while Reed was in Russia and a witness to the Bolshevik revolution, this book is neither an insider account nor a neutral account of events. Reed obviously supports the Bolshevik cause and makes very little attempt to understand the other side. Reed is also a foreigner, on the outside looking in. He only communicates with Russians in French. For all the power to the people jargon thrown about, it is clear that Reed can only communicate with the intellectual elite; as a result it feels as if whole groups of people were left out of the dialogue. Despite its flaws, "Ten Days That Shook the World" is at various points and in varying degrees emotional, tedious, irritating, infuriating and enlightening. I expect nothing less from a book about a revolution.

[mbmackay · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

Story of the Bolshevik revolution in 1917 by a partisan observer.Read in samoa Mar 2003

[eyejaybee · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

John Reed's story of the Russian Revolution has become established as possibly the finest account of any revolution, anywhere, and the Penguin Classics edition has the additional allure of two separate introductions: a brief preface written by Lenin himself, and a more analytical essay by the feted historian, A J P Taylor. Interestingly, as Reed had bequeathed the royalties from the book to the government of the Soviet Union, Taylor was not allowed to append his comments until after the copyright had expired.Reed was both a renowned poet and an experienced journalist, and was also known for the strength of his Socialist views. His account is not, therefore, an impartial account crafted for the later delectation of a neutral reader. He wanted the revolution to succeed, and like Lenin and the other 'professional' revolutionaries who made their way back from exile, felt that the earlier risings that had led to the abdication of the Tsar and the establishment of the Provisional Government under Kerensky, were merely the opening acts. His account has an immediacy that reads almost like a film script, reflecting his journalistic skills, and his proximity to the actions he recounts. He also published his book within a couple of years of the Revolution, providing one of the earliest coherent accounts available in the West. Taylor suggests that, in some instances, Reed may have massaged the facts, or at least allowed a certain latitude with regard to timings. He does not, however, challenge the validity of Reed's overall portrayal of the events. One hundred years on, the clarity and excitement of Reed's story remain impressive.

[borg6mx5 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

The deifinitive, first hand account of the Bolshevik Revolution.