analysis of the passionate year

“Ten Days That Shook the World” is a book by American journalist and socialist John Reed about the October Revolution in Russia in 1917, which Reed experienced firsthand. Reed followed many of the prominent Bolshevik leaders, especially Grigory Zinoviev and Karl Radek, closely during his time in Russia. John Reed died in 1920, shortly after the book was finished.
John Reed’s classic account of the Russian Revolution of November 1917 isn’t an attempt at large-scale dispassionate historical analysis, but an eyewitness account of the Bolsheviks’ rise to power. It is a mark of the respect in which Reed was held by the Bolsheviks that “Ten Days That Shook The World” was published with a short but very appreciative introduction by no less than Lenin, in which the Russian socialist leader says that he would like to see Reed’s book ``published in millions of copies and translated into all languages’’.
The book certainly captures the spirit of the days leading up to and following the revolution of November 7: it is based largely on notes that Reed personally took at the time, on hundreds of Russian newspapers that he collected, and is interspersed with quotes from proclamations, decrees and announcements recovered from the walls of Petrograd.
Despite the fact that Reed was firmly on the side of the Bolsheviks, though, it’s not a fake history such as those later put out by Stalin and his followers: Reed never stifles the voices of the opponents of the Bolsheviks, and there are plenty of quotes from publications and speeches from the Mensheviks and the Social Revolutionaries. Although Reed doesn’t hide his sympathies, readers are left to make up their own minds about the rights and wrongs of the case. The vast tasks faced by the new government. A passage from Reed’s notes on November 8 gives a flavour: ``Smolny was tenser than ever, if that were possible. The same running men in the dark corridors, squads of workers with rifles, leaders with bulging portfolios arguing, explaining, giving orders as they hurried anxiously along, surrounded by friends and lieutenants. Men literally out of themselves, living prodigies of sleeplessness and work—men unshaven, filthy, with burning eyes, who drove upon their fixed purpose full speed on engines of exaltation. So much they had to do, so much!” Take over the Government, organise the City, keep the garrison loyal, fight the Duma and the Committee for Salvation, keep out the Germans, prepare to do battle with Kerensky, inform the provinces what had happened, propagandise from Archangel to Vladivostok … Government and Municipal employees refusing to obey their Commissars, post and telegraph refusing them communication, railroads stonily ignoring their appeals for trains.
Third, that Lenin and Trotsky – both the undisputed leaders of the revolution in Reed’s narrative – had no dreams of constructing a totalitarian state or ``socialism in one country’’, but were fully aware of the fact that the revolution was a gamble whose success depended on the proletariat of Germany, France and Britain.
Despite recognising the immeasurable odds against the success of the Revolution, Reed’s book ends on an optimistic note on November 29, 1917, with the union of the Congress of Peasants and the Soviets of Workers’ and Soldiers’ Deputies. Reed’s book is worth reading and re-reading by all those who share his optimism and vision.