“Ten days that Shook the World (Penguin Twentieth-Century Classics) (John Reed)”:http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/redirect?tag=dougmillernet-20%26link_code=xm2%26camp=2025%26creative=165953%26path=http://www.amazon.com/gp/redirect.html%253fASIN=0140182934%2526tag=dougmillernet-20%2526lcode=xm2%2526cID=2025%2526ccmID=165953%2526location=/o/ASIN/0140182934%25253FSubscriptionId=02ZH6J1W0649DTNS6002
John Reed’s _Ten Days that Shook the World_ should be required reading for any student of 20th Century history. This is Reed’s first-hand account of the “October Revolution”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/October_Revolution in Russia that brought the “Bolsheviks”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bolshevik to power and set the stage for the eventual creation of the Soviet Union. Reed was a journalist and so his book reads very much like journalism and not very much like history written after the fact, something that makes it far more readable that a more dry history text might be.
Reed himself was a Socialist writing for an American Socialist newspaper and makes no pretensions to be otherwise. He is clearly on the side of not just the Socialists in general but the Bolsheviks in particular, and his reporting is slanted in their favor. Despite this, he manages to paint sometimes surprisingly sympathetic portraits of important people in opposition to the Revolution, and provides in-depth information on what all of the many factions involved in the Revolution were doing, regardless of their orientation toward the Bolsheviks.
What I found most striking, however, were the references to actions the Bolsheviks felt forced to take at the time of the revolution that seemed reasonable and justified, but that laid the ground work for Stalin’s eventual seizure of power and perversion of the aims of the Revolution. What becomes clear throughout the book is that the Bolsheviks were, after waiting decades for a revolution to overthrow the autocracy in Russia, impatient to see it through to what they felt was the logical conclusion as the spark of a world-wide Socialist Revolution. In an environment of many different, competing factions that had in many cases been infiltrated by the pro-Tsarist and pro-Capitalist counter-revolutionary forces, none of whom had much of a plan for what to do with Russia after the abdication of the Tsar in February, the Bolsheviks were among the few with a plan and sufficient motivation to _do something_. Unfortunately, they never managed to spark the world-wide revolution they desired, and they sowed the seeds of the eventual collapse of their own very democratic ethos into a Stalinist dictatorship more nightmarish than the autocracy they overthrew.
_Ten Days_ was written, I think, as a celebration of the revolutionary triumph of the Worker’s, Soldier’s and Peasant’s Soviets. Viewed through the lens of the intervening 89 years, the tale of a democratic revolution, so full of hope for people who had been abused and subjugated for centuries, becomes a prelude to a tragedy.
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