Ten Days That Shook the World (1919) is a book by the 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 closely during his time in Russia. John Reed died in 1920, shortly after the book was finished, and he is one of the few Americans buried at the Kremlin Wall Necropolis in Moscow, a site normally reserved only for the most prominent Soviet leaders.

John Reed was on an assignment for The Masses, a magazine of socialist politics, when he was reporting the Russian Revolution. Although Reed states that he had “tried to see events with the eye of a conscientious reporter, interested in setting down the truth”[1] during the time of the event, he stated in the preface that “in the struggle my sympathies were not neutral”[1] (since the book leans towards the Bolsheviks and their viewpoints).

[note 1] Revolution, when the Bolsheviki, at the head of the workers and soldiers, seized the state power of Russia and placed it in the hands of the Soviets. This book is a slice of intensified history—history as I saw it. It does not pretend to be anything but a detailed account of the NovemberRevolution, when the Bolsheviki, at the head of the workers and soldiers, seized the state power of Russia and placed it in the hands of the Soviets. John Reed[1]

Before John Reed left for Russia, the Espionage Act was passed on June 15, 1917, which fined and imprisoned anyone who interfered with the recruiting of soldiers and prohibited the mailing of any newspaper or magazine that promoted such sentiments. The U. S. Post Office was also given leave to deny any mailing that fitted these standards from further postal delivery, and then to disqualify a magazine because it had missed a mailing (due to the ban) and hence was no longer considered a “regular publication.”[2] Because of this, The Masses was forced by the United States federal government to cease publication in the fall of 1917, after refusing to change the magazine’s policy against the war. The Liberator, founded by Max Eastman under his and his sister‘s private control, published Reed’s articles concerning the Russian Revolution instead. In an effort to ensure the magazine’s survival, Eastman compromised and tempered its views accordingly.[3]

Upon returning from Russia during April 1918 from Kristiania in Norway, after being barred from either traveling to the United States or returning to Russia since February 23 by the State Department, Reed’s trunk of notes and materials on the revolution—which included Russian handbills, newspapers, and speeches—were seized by custom officials, who interrogated him for four hours over his activities in Russia during the previous eight months. Michael Gold, an eyewitness to Reed’s arrival to Manhattan, recalls how “a swarm of Department of Justice men stripped him, went over every inch of his clothes and baggage, and put him through the usual inquisition. Reed had been sick with ptomaine on the boat. The inquisition had also been painful.”[4] Back home during mid-summer 1918, Reed, worried that “his vivid impressions on the revolution would fade,”[5] fought hard to regain his papers from the possession of the government, who refused to return them.

Reed would not receive his materials until seven months later in November. Max Eastman recalls a meeting with John Reed in the middle of Sheridan Square during the period of time when Reed isolated himself writing the book:

…he wrote Ten Days that Shook the World—wrote it in another ten days and ten nights or little more. He was gaunt, unshaven, greasy-skinned, a stark sleepless half-crazy look on his slightly potato-like face—had come down after a night’s work for a cup of coffee. “Max, don’t tell anybody where I am. I’m writing the Russian revolution in a book. I’ve got all the placards and papers up there in a little room and a Russian dictionary, and I’m working all day and all night. I haven’t shut my eyes for thirty-six hours. I’ll finish the whole thing in two weeks. And I’ve got a name for it too—Ten Days that Shook the World. Good-bye, I’ve got to go get some coffee. Don’t for God’s sake tell anybody where I am!” Do you wonder I emphasize his brains? Not so many feats can be found in American literature to surpass what he did there in those two or three weeks in that little room with those piled-up papers in a half-known tongue, piled clear up to the ceiling, and a small dog-eared dictionary, and a memory, and a determination to get it right, and a gorgeous imagination to paint it when he got it. But what I wanted to comment on now was the unqualified, concentrated joy in his mad eyes that morning. He was doing what he was made to do, writing a great book. And he had a name for it too—Ten Days that Shook the World![6]

Critical response

Ten Days That Shook the World has received mixed responses since its publication in 1919, resulting in a wide range of critical reviews from negative to positive. However, the book was overall positively received by critics at the time of its first publication, despite some critics’ vocal opposition to Reed’s political beliefs.[7]

George F. Kennan, an American diplomat and historian who has a strong bias against Bolshevism and is best known as “the father of containment,” praised the book: “Reed’s account of the events of that time rises above every other contemporary record for its literary power, its penetration, its command of detail” and would be “remembered when all others are forgotten.” Kennan saw it as “a reflection of blazing honesty and a purity of idealism that did unintended credit to the American society that produced him, the merits of which he himself understood so poorly.”[8] On March 1, 1999, The New York Times reported New York University’s “Top 100 Works of Journalism” list,[note 2] which placed Ten Days that Shook the World in seventh position.[9][10] Project director Mitchell Stephens explains the reasoning behind the judges’ decision:

Perhaps the most controversial work on our list is the seventh, John Reed’s book, “Ten Days That Shook the World,” reporting on the October revolution in Russia in 1917. Yes, as conservative critics have noted, Reed was a partisan. Yes, historians would do better. But this was probably the most consequential news story of the century, and Reed was there, and Reed could write. The magnitude of the event being reported on and the quality of the writing were other important standards in our considerations.[11]

But not all responses were positive. Joseph Stalin argued in 1924 that Reed was misleading in regards to Leon Trotsky.[12] The book portrays Trotsky (head of the Red Army) as a man who co-led the revolution with Lenin and mentions Stalin only twice—one of them being only in the recitation of a list of names, as both Lenin and Trotsky were internationally known, whereas the activities of other Bolshevik militants were virtually unknown.[13] Russian writer Anatoly Rybakov elaborates on Stalinist Soviet Union’s ban on Ten Days that Shook the World: “The main task was to build a mighty socialist state. For that, mighty power was needed. Stalin was at the head of that power, which mean that he stood at its source with Lenin. Together with Lenin he led the October Revolution. John Reed had presented the history of October differently. That wasn’t the John Reed we needed.”[14] After Stalin’s death, the book was allowed to recirculate.

Publication