Ten days that shook the world

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. Reed was hardly a disinterested observer, and his involvement in the Communist labor movement lends urgency and passion to his classic account. He vividly describes events in Petrograd in November 1917, when Vladimir Lenin and the Bolsheviks stormed the Winter Palace and seized the reins of power. Despite Reed's personal leanings, which he made no attempt to hide, the book garnered praise from luminaries across the political spectrum. George F. Kennan, the American diplomat, and father of the policy of Soviet containment, said that 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. It will be remembered when all others are forgotten." This first-person chronicle by John Reed, a legendary journalist who was present at the flash point of the Russian Revolution in 1917, provides an intense and informative eyewitness account of one of the greatest events of the twentieth century.