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 international labor movement.
N. Lenin.
End of 1919
Introduction to the Russian Edition
“Ten Days that Shook the World” was the title John Reed gave his remarkable book. It presents a wonderfully vivid and forceful description of the first days of the October Revolution. It is not a mere enumeration of facts, nor a collection of documents, but a succession of scenes from life, so typical that any participant in the revolution cannot but remember similar scenes he had witnessed himself. And these shots from life reflected with astonishing veracity the sentiments of the masses, the sentiments that determined every act of the Revolution.
One may wonder at first how such a book could have been written by a foreigner, an American, who did not know the language or the ways of the country. It would seem that he should have committed numerous blunders and missed many essentials.
Most foreigners write of Russia in quite a different way. They either fail altogether to understand the events they witness, or they snatch a few unconnected facts, not always typical, and use them to make sweeping generalisations. But, of course, very few foreigners were eye-witnesses of the Revolution.
The explanation is that John Reed was not an indifferent observer, but a passionate revolutionary, a Communist who understood the meaning of the events, the meaning of the great struggle. This understanding gave him that sharp insight, without which such a book could never have been written.
Russians write about the Revolution in a different manner: they either evaluate it as a whole or describe the episodes in which they took part. Reed’s book gives a broad picture of a truly popular mass revolution, and it will therefore have particular importance for the young people, for future generations, for those to whom the October Revolution will be past history. Reed’s book is, in its way, an epic.
John Reed associated his life with the Russian Revolution. Soviet Russia became dear to him. He died in Russia of typhus and was buried in Red Square, beneath the Kremlin wall. The man who described the funeral of the fallen heroes of the Revolution as well as John Reed did, deserves this great honour.
Nadezhda Krupskaya