Ten Days That Shook the World by John Reed
I
My copy of Ten Days That Shook the World starts with an introduction by A. J. P. Taylor, a celebrated British historian and socialist. He explains that the British Communist Party rejected the introduction when he first wrote it-- it was published only after the Party's copyright expired. He goes on to say that John Reed wrote Ten Days in 1918 in New York based on notes from Petrograd during the revolution of October 1917 (November in the modern calendar); that Reed was a "passionate Socialist" and outspoken supporter of the Bolshevik revolutionaries; and that Reed invented many details based on what his Bolshevik sources told him. Barely three pages in, Taylor has already warned his readers not to trust most of the book they're about to read.
I'm grateful for his warning. Ten Days isn't a dishonest book, but the way Reed wrote it makes it unreliable at best and misleading at worst. What it really cries out for is context. Large parts of it didn't even make sense to me-- let alone win my trust-- on the first reading. So, following Taylor's example, I did more research. I read A People's Tragedy: The Russian Revolution 1891-1924, a one-volume history by Orlando Figes. Then I went back, read Ten Days again, and wrote this review.
In the end, I feel like I've read A People's Tragedy so you don't have to read Ten Days. This is still going to be a review of Ten Days, mostly, though I'll be relying on what I learned from reading A People's Tragedy. (Figes has blind spots and biases of his own-- roughly the ones you'd expect from a Western academic writing in 1995-- but I'm using him mostly as a source for the historical consensus. In some places I’ve also interpreted or simplified his conclusions.) What I realized while reading Ten Days for the second time is that Reed's work doesn't add much to what Figes presents. It's a masterpiece of long-form journalism or propaganda or both, depending on who you ask, but as a source of historical understanding it's unhelpful. The interesting part of reviewing it is asking what Reed thought the story was, how he came to see it that way, and whether his framing is a useful one.
II
Ten Days That Shook the World starts about a month before the days in question, which isn't nearly enough. To make sense of what's happening we have to go back to, say, the early 1900s when the Tsars were still firmly in power.
Let's be clear: Tsarist Russia in 1900 was a miserable place to live. People like to joke about the Soviet regime-- In Soviet Russia, party can always find YOU!-- because Soviet awfulness was funny. It was novel and ironic and not what anyone expected. Tsarist Russia wasn't novel or ironic. It was awful in exactly the ways everyone would expect, because it had barely changed for the last three hundred years. In a rapidly-modernizing world Russia was stuck under an honest-to-goodness feudal divine-right autocracy. Just imagine the punch-lines:
In Tsarist Russia, alcoholism and domestic abuse are fixtures of village life!
In Tsarist Russia, religious leaders are mostly enforcers and propagandists for the monarchy!
In Tsarist Russia, the outdated military gets trounced by tiny, barely-industrialized Japan!
In Tsarist Russia, a corrupt illiterate mystic can control national policy!
In Tsarist Russia, troops routinely fire indiscriminately on unarmed protesters!
Horrific, yes, but not so chuckle-inducing.
Here's something I hadn't realized before, though: unlike our usual picture of an oppressive government, the Tsarist state was weak. Its bureaucracy and communications and decision-making process weren't remotely up to governing the country that Russia was becoming. The traditional agents of the monarchy were the landed nobles, who were effective at managing big rural areas without a good communication network or an educated bureaucracy. Up until, say, the mid-19th century that's exactly what Russia was. But eventually Russia had to industrialize, because it turns out rival nations walk all over you if you don't. And industrialization created social pressures that the Tsars couldn't, or wouldn't, address.
Those pressures were tied to the growth of cities, which had an educated intellectual class and an industrial working class. The Tsars hadn't really had to deal with those classes before, and they did a terrible job now. At first they tried to ignore them, then they tried brutal repression, and finally-- in 1905-- they half-heartedly tried to liberalize by establishing a Duma (parliament), which in practice they ignored. The trouble, as Figes tells it, was that the last Tsar-- Nicholas II, who reigned from 1894 to 1917-- never really understood the seriousness of the situation. He'd bought into his own myth of divine right, and his instinct was to double down on autocracy when push came to shove [p. 275].
What you end up with, by 1915 or so, is a Russia that still hasn't industrialized much, let alone come to grips with the social changes industrialization brings. The urban lower class lives in terrible conditions, including frequent food shortages. The urban upper class wants reform badly, but is constantly stymied by the Tsars. The cities are full of intellectual fads imported from the more industrialized parts of Europe, including, increasingly, Marxism. The Duma has given all of them a taste of politics, but the liberal institutions common in Western Europe haven't had a chance to develop. The Tsar and his cronies still have absolute power, and they refuse to engage with the urban classes, seeing them only as a threat to the monarchy. Their idea of a helpful response is to pick stupid fights with Japan (in 1904) and the Central Powers (in 1914) that are supposed to gin up patriotism, but only worsen Russia's economic and social problems.
Then there are the peasants.
The peasants are the elephant in the room in any discussion of Russian politics, even though they're usually not actually in the room. (Socialists from the lower classes tend to be ex-peasants who got out of their native village as soon as they could. Figes argues [p. 110] that they tended to "reject and even despise" peasant culture for ideological and class reasons.) They're 80% of Russia's population and mostly illiterate. They're also, by any reasonable standard, dirt poor. In fact even the dirt is kind of a question mark: serfdom only ended in 1861 and the nobility still owns a substantial fraction of the rural land.
Peasant society is, depending on how you squint at it, socialist, anarchist, traditionalist, or a mix of all three. (I recommend Bret Deveraux's blog series for a sense of what pre-modern farmers are likely to value and why.) Above all, though, it's a classic example of an "illegible" society: one that makes sense internally but is hard for centralized government to understand or extract from. Figes mentions a couple of occasions [p. 86, p. 136] when urban intellectual types have the bright idea of going "back to the peasants" for their political program. They usually wind up back in the cities within a year or two, whimpering in horror.
The awkward truth is that the peasants, a large majority of Russians, don't have a political program. Not in the sense of being internally divided, but in the sense of actively not giving a crap [Figes p. 581]. Their primary political stance is "leave us alone", which is understandable considering their situation and history. Their secondary political stance is "kick out the nobles and take their land", also understandable. Other than that, the only message that seems to mobilize them is nationalism leaning on religious and xenophobic appeals (which predictably led to anti-Semitic pogroms). In short, Russia's peasants aren't a major source of political leaders or ideas, but only of political power-- which in their context mostly means violence.
Everything comes to a head in February 1917. The war is going badly and that, combined with socialist resistance, has increasingly sapped Tsarist authority. The government can't effectively extract food from the peasants, transport and industry are breaking down [Figes p. 298], and the factory workers and soldiers increasingly answer to the Soviets (socialist workers' councils). Bread riots in Petrograd escalate into a general mutiny of the garrison, overthrowing the national government. The military persuades the much-despised Nicholas II to abdicate to restore order; Russians joyfully embrace freedom and the Duma negotiates the Soviets' support for a liberal-socialist coalition government, with democratic elections to follow in a few months.
Then Vladimir Lenin and John Reed show up.
III
Ten Days That Shook the World opens with Reed describing the political situation in Petrograd in September 1917. It's not pretty. The provisional government has been ineffectual under the liberal noble Lvov and then the right-wing socialist Kerensky. Elections haven't happened yet, the war is going badly, and reforms have stalled. To make matters worse, through a series of boneheaded political maneuvers Kerensky has raised suspicions that he's plotting a military coup. The Soviets that de facto control Petrograd still have no direct role in the government and are dominated by "moderate" socialist factions-- Reed never fails to include the scare-quotes-- that lack the political will to push the revolution further.
(Figes [p. 331] gives the hilarious explanation for the Soviets' inaction: many moderate socialists refused to take political power or enact social revolution at this point because it contradicted their Marxist doctrine! Marx's theories focused on industrialized, capitalist societies like England and Germany. Russian society was still mostly pre-industrial and nobody thought workers could build capital on their own. So the plan was to put bourgeois capitalists in power, wait for them to industrialize, then have a second revolution and take their stuff. The same situation also led to ironies like Marxists pushing industrialization against the old-fashioned, agrarian-minded Tsarists [p. 119].)
Enter the Bolsheviks. They're a radical Marxist party that's come to prominence since February by demanding immediate "Peace, Bread, Land" on behalf of the soldiers, workers, and peasants respectively. The provisional government is unwilling to grant these demands in the current situation and the moderate socialists who control the Soviets are unwilling to force the issue, so the Bolshevik call for the Soviets to take power picks up a lot of support among the soldiers and workers. (The peasants are, as usual, a somewhat different story. The Bolsheviks don't really represent them-- the radical and moderate Marxists among them have their own parties-- and they're already getting the land they want by taking it from the nobles in small local uprisings. In Reed's telling, the Bolsheviks come off as constantly anxious about the support of the peasant representatives.)
Reed, repeating Bolshevik claims, presents the political and economic situation by October as an urgent crisis. Figes [p. 470] is skeptical. A national Soviet Congress, due to meet shortly, was likely-- given the provisional government's failures-- to take power peacefully and on its own terms. Such a broad socialist coalition would probably exclude Lenin, the most prominent Bolshevik leader, who was uncompromising and openly authoritarian in both his intra-party politics and his vision for Russian government. Lenin convinced the Bolshevik leaders to plot a violent takeover instead. Reed accepts his justification for urgency-- fear of a violent crackdown by Kerensky-- but Figes argues that the real reason was Lenin's desire to seize control for the Bolsheviks alone, and for himself.
To their credit, the other socialist parties understand exactly what's going on and have a brilliant series of talking points to oppose it. All of them, even the Bolsheviks, live in fear of "counter-revolution", i.e. supporters of the old government taking up arms and turning the revolution into a large-scale civil war. So they accuse the Bolsheviks of being "provocators", traitors out to force a violent confrontation that will cause counter-revolution and give reactionaries an excuse to destroy what the February Revolution gained. As it turns out, the prediction of counter-revolution isn't far wrong. But it isn't enough to stop the uprising.
The coup itself turns out to be ridiculously easy. Most of the Petrograd garrison sides with the Bolsheviks, and Kerensky flees the city, leaving only a few thousand pro-government holdouts in the Winter Palace, who melt away after ten thousand or so Bolshevik supporters march up. The harder part is staying in control. There's fighting in the streets. Most of the old government bureaucracy has quit in disgust. Large contingents from both the provisional government and the Soviet Congress-- which has finally assembled-- are protesting the Bolsheviks' legitimacy and challenging their authority. Kerensky has shown up again and is moving toward the city with fresh troops, and elsewhere in Russia there's even more resistance to the new government.
But the Bolsheviks weather all of this, more or less. Kerensky's troops are no more reliable than the Moscow garrison, and his push collapses. The moderate socialists are all bark and no bite. A scorched-earth takeover of government functions, and a series of repressive measures by the Bolshevik militias, restores a semblance of order. With their control of the government more or less an established fact, Lenin and company are able to strong-arm the Soviet Congress and a later Peasants' Congress into legitimizing a Bolshevik-majority government. (Reed presents these as mainly achievements of rhetoric, political maneuvering, and decisiveness, but Figes says there was undemocratic foul play involved as well.) The Bolsheviks then proceed to set up a Soviet government and pass a bunch of decrees enacting their "Peace, Bread, Land" program, finally completing the Russian Revolution. The end.
Confused yet? Just be glad you didn't have to read Ten Days. Reed has a bad habit of mentioning people, parties, and other features of Russia's political landscape without introducing or explaining them adequately. He's also prone to quoting official proclamations at length just because he can, and it's easy to get lost in his blow-by-blow account of events. In his telling the whole story becomes a soup of different factions, councils, and committees with politicians scurrying among them at random. Actually that might be what it looked like to Reed; he never makes this clear, but his access to the socialist leaders was pretty limited. In that sense Ten Days is more of a primary source document, like a diary or newspaper, than a work of history.
In other senses, though, Reed is trying to be a secondary source, an interpreter of events-- and this is where his writing calls for some untangling. Here's a typical passage from the first chapter: "For months in Petrograd, and all over Russia, every street corner was a public tribune. In railway trains, street-cars, always the spurting up of impromptu debate, everywhere...." The ellipses are Reed's, not mine. After the scare-quotes they're his favorite weapon of punctuation. They make his descriptions feel impressionist, like he's inviting you to fill in further instances and details-- which he is. In fact a lot of these sweeping descriptions of his seem to be based on a few anecdotes. He ends up assuming, or generalizing, trends from not very much data at all.
Sometimes Reed shifts into the first person, and when he does it's a treat, because he's a good reporter, with a flair for vivid descriptions and a talent for getting into places he shouldn't be. He's at the Winter Palace a few hours before it falls, at the prison holding officials from the old government the next day, and at the front lines outside Petrograd when Kerensky is closing in. My favorite passage is the one where Reed tags along with a group leaving Petrograd and they're stopped by a couple of soldiers who support the Bolsheviks. The soldiers don't recognize Reed's pass from the socialist leadership, though, and they can't read, so they decide to shoot him on the spot. He only escapes by getting a local woman to read his pass to them. If the entire book were just these first-person sections it would be a lot more fun and interesting to read.
Most of the time, though, Reed is writing in the third person-- and according to Taylor's introduction, this often means he's repeating the Bolshevik version of events and not being up-front about it. This isn't just mild bias either; he gets important facts wrong. The worst howler is when he describes a series of drunken riots caused by soldiers breaking into the Winter Palace's wine cellars, and adds with a straight face: "In all this was evident the hand of the counter-revolutionists, who distributed among the regiments plans showing the location of the stores of liquor." Figes [p. 495] cites hard documentary evidence for the opposite, obvious conclusion: that the actual instigators were members of the badly disciplined Bolshevik force that had just captured the place.
IV
Reed states the main thesis of Ten Days That Shook the World at the end of his second-to-last chapter. "Not by compromise with the propertied classes, or with the other political leaders; not by conciliating the old Government mechanism, did the Bolsheviki conquer the power. Nor by the organized violence of a small clique. If the masses all over Russia had not been ready for insurrection it must have failed. The only reason for Bolshevik success lay in their accomplishing the vast and simple desires of the most profound strata of the people." In other words, he sees his story as supporting two main claims. First: the Bolsheviks succeeded due to radicalism, not compromise. Second: they succeeded through popular support, not a military coup.
The scary thing is, there's a sense in which both claims are technically correct. Lenin's uncompromising radicalism was a critical part of the October Revolution, and it did hinge on the Bolshevik program satisfying... well, I would say the second-most-profound stratum of the people, since they didn't really represent the peasants. The problem is that in framing the issues this way, Reed is pushing an upside-down causal model of how the revolution happened.
When I first read about Bolshevik political tactics, I was so confused that it felt like I'd stepped into some kind of mirror universe. Against all political common sense they insisted on extreme positions, picked fights with close allies, and intentionally made crises worse. Even crazier, it seems to work for them. They're called the Bolsheviks ("Majority-ers") because they secured a majority in a party schism in 1903-- but only after allies of the opposing Menshevik majority staged a walk-out [Figes p. 384]. Reed, too, describes walk-outs from moderates paving the way for the Bolsheviks to secure power in 1917. Between those dates they were a minority, often a tiny one, in every political arena they entered; as late as 1915 they had fewer than 500 party members in Petrograd [Figes p. 297]. Yet they won!
How? I'm not sure of the exact explanation, but it all seems to come back to the weakness of Russian democratic values and institutions. First of all, that explains the frequency of walk-outs: walking out of a congress is basically a bet that your supporters have more loyalty to you than to the institution of the congress. Second, it speaks to the thinness of the middle classes-- the managers and intellectuals who might have stood up for democratic procedure; Figes [p. 520] describes this as simply "the tragedy of 1917". Finally, and related to the first two, one could describe the problem as a shortage of political legitimacy. The monarchy had soaked up all of it and staked it on a losing bet on pre-modernism. Once the Tsar abdicated, there wasn't enough of it left to sustain good-faith political actors, and not enough time to make more.
Reed focuses on a version of that third explanation. In his telling there are basically two kinds of political actors other than the Bolsheviks. First, there are socialists like the Mensheviks, whom he portrays, pretty accurately as far as I can tell, as idealists who dither ineffectively as events overtake them. (He describes a brilliant comic moment, on the night of the revolution, where they try to halt the Bolshevik forces with a nonviolent protest but end up losing their nerve and walking away.) Second, there's everyone to the right of the Mensheviks-- from monarchists to liberals to socialists like Kerensky. Reed casts them all as forces of reaction, either openly or secretly committed to undermining and rolling back the Revolution.
To some extent, even that description is true. The Kadet Party, a faction of upper-class liberals that was on the far left in 1905 [Figes p. 207], was on the far right by October 1917 and suspected of being secretly monarchist-- and in the Civil War it sided with the counter-revolutionaries. But its actual position hadn't changed much. What happened was an extreme political shift, and with it, polarization [Figes p. 457]. In part that was driven by popular dissatisfaction with the Tsar and, later, the provisional government; but it was also actively instigated by Lenin and the Bolsheviks with their ultimatums, their violent uprisings, and their "Peace, Bread, Land" slogans. Intentionally or not, they're following a strategy optimized for creating conflict-- because in a situation of conflict, compromise becomes unnecessary and even suspect, and radicals get empowered. Stop me if you've heard that one before.
But aren't the Bolsheviks just expressing a fundamental need and desire of the common people? Figes isn't so sure. He repeatedly argues that the peasants in particular didn't really have political consciousness on a national scale. Instead they had a "parochial" political philosophy, independent and traditionalist, which didn't necessarily align with the Bolsheviks'. What tipped them toward the Bolshevik side was exactly the polarization. During the Civil War peasants faced coercion from both the Bolshevik "Reds" and the opposing "Whites", but considered the Reds "the less bad of two bad options" [Figes p. 668] because on the whole they liked the revolution. After all, it had given them land.
Which brings us to Reed's claim of popular support. Retroactively, yes, the Bolsheviks had the support of the people-- but only because their brutal, violent, rigid, authoritarian movement succeeded in making itself the only viable alternative to the Tsarist social and economic system. If that's enough to call their rule democratic, it's hard to say when between 1917 and 1991 it stopped being democratic. The premise of elected government is that the party with an agenda the public prefers can win, right? And for all their ineffectiveness, it's fairly clear that the liberals and moderate socialists represented the preferences of the Russian people better than the Bolsheviks did.
Electoral-politics nerds already know the punchline here: Arrow's impossiblity theorem. Roughly, no matter how you set up an election, there's no way for the outcome to fairly reflect everyone's preferences. In that sense, there's no such thing as popular will; it's all a matter of framing. The October Revolution, though, takes that about ten steps further. It shows that in practice, even a really extreme and horrible framing can win out. All it takes is for the Tsar to insist stubbornly on one extreme, and then for the Bolsheviks to insist stubbornly on the other. If support for real democracy isn't strong enough to resist, polarization and political maneuvering will do the rest. In Soviet Russia, outcomes of elections decide YOU!
V
Alexander Solzhenitsyn, under the Soviet regime, wrote that the line between good and evil runs through every human heart. I'm tempted to conclude something similar about the line between left and right. Political will isn't an inherent thing; it's situational and inconsistent and hard to model. Partisan politics, though, can't help flattening it into a cartoon. Maybe we should think of every human heart as a Soviet Congress of its own: moderates trying their best to hold it together as extremists on both sides obstruct, threaten walkouts, and wait for their chance to grab power.
At any rate that's how I'd like to think of John Reed. He was a skilled journalist and an energetic writer and probably a decent person-- not a would-be totalitarian at any rate. He could have written a truly gripping and revealing book about the Russian Revolution if he hadn't been so busy trying to stay on the right side of history. But he, like the Russian people, got taken in and then strong-armed by the Bolsheviks' political framing; and like the Russian people, he didn't have the habits of fairness and deliberation he needed to resist it. The book he ended up writing was deceitful, even though Reed himself wasn't.
Reed thought the story of the October Revolution proved that Communism was a fundamental, inevitable, necessary social change. After reading Figes, I think it proves the opposite. Studying history-- especially Russian history, I guess-- can easily end in fatalism: the last part of War and Peace is basically Tolstoy insisting that Napoleon's 1812 invasion of Russia had to happen as it did regardless of what anyone decided. But the Bolshevik coup is a relatively clear case of contentious, history-making, yet very personal decisions that could easily have gone either way. If Kerensky (better yet, his predecessor Lvov) had shown a little more initiative, or Lenin a little less, the history of the 20th century might have looked very different.
There's a quotation from Margaret Mead that I know by heart thanks to seeing it so many times in high school: "Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has." I did doubt that when I first heard it. I still doubt it in general. But reading Reed and Figes has given me new appreciation for just how much a small, committed group of citizens can do to change the course of a major world power for generations, defying all apparent principles of democracy in the process. Indeed, one might argue it's the only thing that ever did.
One final note: I researched and wrote this review on and off between May 2020 and February 2021. Since you're probably wondering, I'll admit that, yes, studying the Russian Revolution during this particular period was quite the eye-opening experience. I'm reluctant to make direct comparisons, not because they aren't valid but because so many different ones are; by committing to one analogy I might be dismissing another, even better one. Also, I don't want to come off as alarmist: there are plenty of ways 2021 America is in much better shape than 1917 Russia was. But if I've learned anything from Ten Days That Shook the World and A People's Tragedy, it's not to take those benefits for granted.