Ten Days That Shook the World

Ten Days That Shook the World is a 1919 book on the October Revolution in Russia by American journalist and socialist activist John Reed. Written in just two to three weeks, the book draws from Reed’s fresh, intense experience in Russia during the revolution, which took place in 1917. Reed gives historical background on the Bolshevik political leaders, whom he studied closely while living in Russia. He died less than a year after the book was published, and was exalted by the Russian government, which gave him an honorary gravesite at the Kremlin Wall Necropolis. Intensely emotional and vivid, the book is almost fiction-like in its larger-than-life, though scrupulously researched and historically correct, retelling of the October Revolution.

Reed begins Ten Days That Shook the World shortly before the beginning of the revolution, which coincided with a government coup in which the Leninist Bolshevik party commandeered the Russian state. The takeover ousted the conservative czarist regime and inaugurated decades of worsening chaos in Russia. Reed chronicles the political and social causes for this abrupt shift in power and its bitter consequences. Though the October Revolution lasted for less than a year, Reed argues that the Russian state’s political collapse had been made inevitable years before.

The first strong signal was growing resentment towards Russia’s czar, Nicholas II. A flurry of revolts erupted in Petrograd, the place now called St. Petersburg, forcing him to abdicate the throne, which he had occupied since 1894. Much of the czar’s power then moved into the hands of a lawyer and revolutionary hero, Aleksandr Kerensky, who helped form the Russian Provisional Government. Kerensky would go on to become Minister of Justice and Minister of War, but ultimately fail to establish stable governance. His coalition soon fell apart, as it consisted of too many socioeconomically disparate groups with very different desires for the future of Russia.



In response to growing global instability, several regressive, even proto-fascist laws were passed around the world. Of these in the United States, the Espionage Act was passed, which in the summer of 1917 made it illegal to disseminate media with anti-war sentiments. The government endowed the U.S. Post Office with special powers to intercept mail at its own discretion. Reed’s main employer at the time, the publication The Masses, was accused of defying this policy and was shut down. In its stead, the newspaper The Liberator published Max Eastman’s writings on the revolution, but heavily edited his arguments to preserve itself.

Reed left Russia in April 1918, via Kristiania, Norway (the city now known as Oslo). He had just been served a ban on national entry from both Russia and the United States. When he finally returned to the United States, the State Department seized his suitcases, which contained thousands of pieces of Russian propaganda, speech drafts, and newspapers. The custom officials subjected him to an intense interrogation, which lasted hours and scrupulously covered the past eight months of his life. A man named Michael Gold witnessed Reed’s detainment at the airport and attests to the fact that he was treated poorly. Reed was still sick from alkaloid poisoning, and the stress of it combined with the interrogation made him sicker. That summer, he pressed the government to return his papers, but it refused. Late the following autumn, he finally reclaimed them while living in Sheridan Square. He then set feverishly to work recording his experiences in Russia, worried that they would soon fade.

An avowed socialist, Reed spoke highly of both Trotsky and Lenin. Despite his clear political biases, the work itself refrains from promoting the Bolshevik agenda. Ten Days That Shook the World is widely viewed as a rigorous and unbiased account of the October Revolution, and a masterpiece of journalism. One of the first modern dramatic works of personal journalism, it is celebrated today for the depth of insight it provides into Russian turmoil, despite being written before that turmoil was over.