John Reed as witness

John Reed (1915)

In our article titled Rosa Luxemburg as witness, published on 6 May 2025, we emphasised -drawing on Luxemburg’s 1918 pamphlet The Russian Revolution- that, prior to the Stalinist counter-revolution, Trotsky was widely recognised, both within the Soviet Union and internationally, as one of the two principal leaders of the October Revolution, alongside Lenin.

In this brief piece, we shall likewise adopt a similar approach, turning to the account offered in Ten Days That Shook the World by American socialist journalist and revolutionary Marxist John Reed (1887–1920), whose work provides an insider’s perspective on the October Revolution on the same theme.

In the brief foreword he wrote for the Russian edition of the book, Lenin affirms Reed’s eyewitness account of the October Revolution -which he himself had led- with the following words:

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 universal workers’ movement.

(N. Lenin, End of 1919) [*]

In his book The Life of Lenin, Louis Fischer notes that Lenin “had read John Reed’s book twice” before writing the foreword [**], which stands as further evidence of the high regard in which he held Reed’s testimony.

Lenin’s fervent endorsement affirmed -through the voice of the October Revolution’s highest authority- Reed’s brilliance in recording the events as they unfolded. Even today, Ten Days That Shook the World remains an essential work for anyone seeking to understand the October Revolution and the roles played by various Bolshevik leaders in the lead-up to it.

As noted above, in this article we reiterate the simple yet thought-provoking observation previously drawn from Luxemburg’s pamphlet, this time in relation to Reed’s book. In the Turkish translation of the work, published by Yordam Kitap:

Lenin is mentioned 81 times,
Trotsky 99 times,
Zinoviev 15 times,
Kamenev 34 times,
Bukharin 3 times, and
Stalin only twice -and that solely because his name appears in the list of People’s Commissars, established after the revolution, which Reed included in the book as a documentary appendix.

In other words, Reed’s masterpiece does not contain a single line referring to any active role played by Stalin in the revolution.

It is precisely for this reason that this work—so passionately endorsed by Lenin, who called for it to be translated into every language and printed in the millions—was soon denounced by Stalin after Lenin’s death, and would remain banned for decades in the Soviet Union under the Stalinist regime.

[*] John Reed, Ten Days That Shook the World, Penguin Books, 1977, p. 7.

[**] Louis Fischer, The Life of Lenin, Harper & Row, 1st ed., New York, 1964, p. 124.