John Reed

Ten Days that Shook the World

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American journalist John Reed’s classic eyewitness account of the October 1917 revolution in Russia.

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American journalist John Reed’s classic eyewitness account of the October 1917 revolution in Russia.

 

John Reed (1887-1920) was an American journalist and revolutionary socialist. Born in Portland, Oregon to a wealthy family, he attended Harvard University, where he distinguished himself as a writer.

Settling in Greenwich Village in 1911, Reed published in Poetry magazine and wrote for The Masses, which was edited at that time by the noted American radical Max Eastman. While covering a silk mill strike in New Jersey in 1913, Reed was arrested for the first time and spent four days in jail along with a number of European immigrant members of the International Workers of the World.

Later that year Reed went to Mexico to report on the revolution, where he traveled into the countryside seeking out Pancho Villa’s army. Reed rode with the group for a number of weeks, both participating in and writing on the Battle of Torreon. His articles on the Mexican Revolution brought him great acclaim as a war correspondent.

In 1914 Metropolitan Magazine sent him to the Western Front to cover the war in Europe, which had just erupted. The experience horrified him. On a subsequent trip to the Eastern Front, Reed was spied upon, and then arrested and held for several weeks on suspicion of espionage by the Russians.

Inspired by the February Revolution in 1917 that overthrew the Russian Tsar, Reed traveled to Petrograd in August of that year. His eyewitness account of the Bolshevik seizure of power in October 1917, Ten Days That Shook the World, made him the most famous chronicler of the Russian revolution.

A supporter of the Bolsheviks, he remained active in revolutionary politics in both Russia and the United States until his death, serving as a delegate to the Second Congress of the Communist International in 1920. He died in Russia of typhus later that same year and, as a tribute to his service to the revolution, was buried in the Kremlin Wall.

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