In Egypt, too, the real story of unrest lay not in Hosni Mubarak’s presidential palace but in the mundane spaces where norms were shifting: in the tuk-tuks, previously confined to the informal settlements on the margins of the capital, which now honked their way defiantly into the city center; in the schoolchildren re-enacting battles against the security forces on their playground; in the low-level insurgencies waged in family dining rooms, college lecture halls and factory floors across the country.

Trotsky would later write of 1917 that the history of revolution is “first of all a history of the forcible entrance of the masses into the realm of rulership over their own destiny.” Reed understood this not as an academic treatise in which the masses remain faceless but as a practical reality, one that locates the essence of revolution as much in the erratic widening of individual imaginations as it does in the corridors of formal power or in the machinations of competing leaders.

Rereading “Ten Days That Shook the World” today, it is not the near-verbatim accounts of interminable, overlapping Soviet committee meetings that stand out, nor the alphabet soup of long-forgotten organizational acronyms that requires a 10-page glossary. It is not even the grand showpieces that Reed witnessed and relates in his work, like the raucous smoke-filled meetings at Lenin’s Smolny headquarters where insurrection was hatched, or the mammoth funeral processions for the martyrs of Moscow after the city was won. Rather it is the description of a well-to-do young woman’s hysterics after she is addressed as “comrade” by a streetcar conductor. It is the scene where an old workman pilots an auto-truck back toward the capital after the revolution is victorious, sweeping his arm across the urban haze: “ ‘Mine!’ he cried, his face all alight. ‘All mine now! My Petrograd!’ ” It is all the times when Reed trains his gaze on the irrefutably human micro-dramas that are inevitable, and epic, when history is sloping; the times when he homes in on the struggles that take place when every person, with their own varying level of investment in yesterday, tries, tentatively, to find a foothold in tomorrow.

Revolutions are by their nature make-do affairs with few maps to guide either participants or observers. When people are making and doing something radically transformative, and transforming themselves in the process, it’s impossible to interrogate what’s happening if you’re relying solely on the templates that came before. Reed appreciated this. Rather than fighting unknowability, he embraced it. He opens the main body of his book by recounting the bafflement of a visiting sociology professor who is informed that revolutionary sentiment is both rising and on the wane. “The professor was puzzled,” Reed notes, “but he need not have been; both observations were correct.”

Reed is not afraid to convey the contradictions of revolution — its tangle of the tumultuous and the prosaic, its clouds of misinformation and obscurity. He describes the trundling of armored vehicles in the streets, the voices in the darkness, the fear and reckless daring from which the new Russia was born. He captures, just as I tried to in Egypt, that curious feature of rapid political change whereby the furniture and accessories of the previous system remain dotted about the landscape, suddenly shorn of their power, both unaltered and simultaneously absurd. He probes the language of elites as they scrabble to keep up with events: One tycoon tells him that revolution is a sickness and that intervention is necessary to prevent it, just as “one would intervene to cure a sick child” — a foreshadowing of the infantilizing rhetoric adopted by successive Egyptian leaders. “The air was full of confused sound,” Reed reports, in a passage that could have been lifted straight out of Cairo during its own uprising. “The city stirred uneasily, wakeful.”

Across time, place and context, revolutions occur when a whiff of possibility appears, a broadening of horizons, tangible evidence that the status quo is not immutable. Wherever we are, we are all capable of picking up that scent. Of course, the full history of Russia’s revolution contains great shafts of darkness as well as light. In Egypt, too, albeit under very different circumstances, the utopianism of 2011 has given way to suffocation and violence, as a new iteration of military despots attempt to expunge collective memories of that brief moment when the ability to shape the world around oneself had fallen into collective hands. Far from invalidating the sort of reporting Reed helped pioneer, though, the fragility of such moments reinforces its worth. It is through the act of storytelling that revolution itself becomes possible.

“Ten Days That Shook the World” lives on, not because Reed got everything right (he didn’t) or because the revolution he covered was an uncomplicated success story (it was anything but), but because he understood the real force of revolutionary journalism: its potential to rouse all who engage with it — not least the reporters themselves.