Ten Days That Shook the World

‘Revolution… is a sickness. Sooner or later the foreign powers must intervene here – as one would intervene to cure a sick child and teach it how to walk.’ Ten Days That Shook the World is John Reed's eyewitness account of the Russian Revolution. A contemporary journalist writing in the first flush of revolutionary enthusiasm, he gives a gripping record of the events in Petrograd in November 1917, when Lenin and the Bolsheviks finally seized power. Containing verbatim reports both of speeches by leaders and the chance comments of bystanders, set against an idealized backcloth of the proletariat, soldiers, sailors, and peasants uniting to throw off oppression, Reed's account is the product of passionate involvement and remains an unsurpassed classic of reporting. ‘From its opening page, Ten Days has a tempo and a voice that sets it apart, in an era when reportage as a genre was still in its infancy.’ – Robert McCrum, The Guardian