A Cold Red Dawn for Russia (Ten Days That Shook The World - John Reed)

Name: Templar19

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Product:	Ten Days That Shook The World - John Reed
Date:	20/07/08 (187 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: A readable first-hand account of history in the making

Disadvantages: The book drags in a couple of places

I suppose I've got Warren Beatty to thank for my interest in this book. I first heard of 'Ten Days That Shook the World' after watching Beatty's cinematic labour of love, 'Reds', sometime in the early 80s and resolved to buy it and read it. I did the first soon after watching the film and twenty six years later I got round to doing the second. (What can I say...? I was busy.) So, was it worth the wait? Well, let's see. ....

John Reed was a radical American journalist who was present in the old Imperial Russian capital of Petrograd (previously Saint Petersburg, afterwards Leningrad and now Saint Petersburg again) on November 7th 1917 when the Bolsheviks, led by Lenin and Trotsky, overthrew the provisional government and nominally seized control of Russia in the name of the soviets (councils) of workers' and soldiers' deputies. Reed's book describes the few tumultuous weeks leading up to that coup d'etat and is considered the finest first-hand account of the Bolshevik revolution ever written. (November 7th was October 25th in the 'Old Style' Julian calendar used by Russia until 1918, hence the terms 'October Revolution' and 'Red October'.)

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In early 1917 Imperial Russia was being brought to its knees by war with Germany and Austria-Hungary. The masses were in ferment: soldiers, workers and peasants were becoming increasingly strident in their demands for peace, bread and land and the creaky old autocratic regime was fixated like a rabbit in the headlights. Old Russia was grinding to a halt. In March food riots, strikes and violent demonstrations broke out in Petrograd, forcing the authorities to put soldiers onto the streets to quell the violence, but the soldiers simply joined the rioters. Revolution had begun. Hapless Tsar Nicholas was persuaded by his ministers to resign and a provisional government was hastily set up to steer the sinking ship as best it could. Throughout the spring and summer numerous political parties, factions, demagogues and opportunists vied for power in the vacuum and by September the struggle was coming to a head. John Reed's book then takes over the story. ...

'Ten Days That Shook the World' is, as Reed himself writes, "a slice of intensified history - history as [he] saw it." Yet the book might better be described as an intensified drama, a fiction holding on to the coat tails of fact; because despite Reed's proximity to events much of his narrative was actually based on brief conversations, pamphlets and gossip. The book works, however, because Reed holds his prose together with an impressive selection of inspired phrases; he applies the practiced hand of a consummate journalist, making the banal seem exciting, the fatuous seem profound. Whatever our political beliefs we can't help but be swept along by the red tide of enthusiasm and naive sanctimony.

Apart from one brief visit to Moscow the narrative unfolds entirely within the confines of 'Red' Petrograd and the book has a curiously local feel to it despite the momentous events being described. Sweeping-themes aside, the crux of the story is actually how the members of the Bolshevik Party, an insignificant rump at the outbreak of revolution, quickly developed over the months to such an extent that they were, in November, able to seize power with the wholehearted backing of the (urban) masses (and Reed himself). On reading the book we slowly learn how that remarkable transformation came about. It's a tale of opportunism, good fortune and how some people can just read the runes a whole lot better than their opponents.

Three characters dominate the story: Leon Trotsky, Vladimir Lenin and Alexander Kerensky. The first two, in Reed's eyes, are the good guys, the saviours of Russia and the prophets of a new religion. The third, Kerensky, is the pantomime villain, the political adventurer standing in the way of democracy and freedom for the proletariat. Idealism is spelt here in this book with a very large capital 'I'. Our narrative essentially documents the struggles between these three men.

Trotsky and Lenin flit in and out of view but they are never less than key to the story. I found myself trying to get a handle on both men through Reed's narrative but it proved difficult. Reed interviews Trotsky at the Smolny Institute on the outskirts of the city (headquarters of the Petrograd Soviet, of which Trotsky was chairman) a few days before the Bolshevik takeover but all Trotsky does is deliver an hour-long lecture on the necessity of a second revolution and of how the Russian masses must be joined by their European colleagues if that revolution is to ultimately succeed. Yet we sense a steely resolve in the man. It is Trotsky who orders the Red Guards onto the streets, Trotsky who counters his enemies in the provisional government with blood-tinged threats, Trotsky who personally leads the rag-tag Red Army out to crush 'counter revolutionaries' in the civil war that inevitably results from the Bolshevik takeover. Was he a man with a big shiny axe to grind? Or was he simply an ideologue writ large?

That last question could well be asked about Lenin. He was certainly the driving force behind the Bolshevik push. Despite spending most of his time in hiding before the big day his promptings and urgings fly thickly through the Petrograd sky: "Insurrection!", "Peace, bread and land!", "All power to the soviets!". Lenin comes across as a man in a hurry. We are left to wonder what might have been going through the minds of Lenin and Trotsky after the fateful order had been given to put the grand plan into action. Were they dreaming of personal glory? Or were they perhaps fretting over the possibility that they might soon be breathing their last breaths with only a pock-marked wall to back them up?

Alexander Kerensky looms over the book like impending doom. He was the Minister-President, the head of the provisional government, bête noire of Bolsheviks everywhere and de facto leader of Russia during the revolution (but without any significant power at his disposal other than the power of oratory). Reed positively sneers at Kerensky throughout the book. Kerensky spent the revolutionary months welding unlikely coalitions together between right and left and railing against the Bolshevik "traitors", but Reed simply dismisses him as an apologist for the bourgeoisie, a man who has sacrificed his socialist principals at the alter of power. Yet despite this I couldn't help but warm to the man. I am no student of Russian history and no expert on Alexander Kerensky but there is no doubt he was a man in an impossible situation. He was damned whatever he did and, ultimately, destined to be one of history's more celebrated losers.

The key scenes in the book naturally take place on the day of insurrection, November 7th. Reed and some colleagues wander the Petrograd streets observing events. Curiously, in much of the city life is carrying on as normal. Armoured cars, red banners trailing, trundle hesitantly around, seemingly unsure of where to go and whom to fight; groups of soldiers, sailors and passers-by chat and argue; and shop lights still blaze, as do the lights of picture houses and theatres. In the late afternoon Reed's group manages to gain entry to the Winter Palace where they encounter the forces arrayed to oppose the expected onslaught by Red Guards. The soldiers Reed meets are 'Junkers', officer cadets, and a slightly comical bunch they appear. None of them seem particularly keen to fight and a significant number seem to be 'in repose' after having sampled the exquisite contents of the Tsar's wine cellars. Reed and his colleagues then decide (in somewhat bourgeois fashion) to go across the square to the Hotel France to have dinner. In Reed's own words: "We had tickets to the ballet at the Marinsky Theatre - all the theatres were open - but it was too exciting out of doors...!"

That evening Reed and colleagues find themselves taking part in the revolution's most iconic event: the storming of the Winter Palace by Red Guards. A few hundred of them tentatively make their way into the palace courtyard with Reed in the vanguard. Not a shot opposes them. They cautiously peer through the front door, and as all seems quiet they enter. The lead units are confronted by packing cases containing all manner of treasures and Imperial tit bits. The cases are ripped open: "One man went strutting around with a bronze clock perched on his shoulder; another found a plume of ostrich feathers, which he stuck in his hat." The looting is about to begin when one conscientious comrade shouts, "Stop! Don't take anything. This is the property of the people!" The Red Guards remember their revolutionary duty while the original comrade disappears along the endless palace corridors, his shouts sounding fainter and fainter: "Revolutionary discipline! Property of the people!" The Junkers had melted into the night and not a shot had been fired. The only opposition to the Red Guards had been a selection of snooty Imperial retainers, still bedecked in gold braid, who wandered around telling the unwashed hordes not to break anything!

And that last-mentioned event describes the beauty of John Reed's book. By describing the sights and sounds, absurdities and smells of revolution he somehow makes it more real for us than if he had simply dismissed the minutiae of the moment and dwelled on the 'important'. Drunken comrades wandering slightly awe-struck through the portals of Imperial power somehow seems a more pertinent revolutionary image than any number of speeches delivered by ideologues in ivory towers, however much the latter were the spur to the former. The stinking fog of head-splitting Russian tobacco smoke, the stench of unwashed humanity mingled with vodka fumes, the bone-jarring chill of autumnal mud on the Petrograd street... all these images Reed conjures to focus our understanding, and, by doing so, allow us to absorb the endless-but-necessary speechifying and bluster that give a point to the whole stirring, cataclysmic and patently-absurd events of the Bolshevik revolution.

'Ten Days That Shook the World' may well have been written ninety years ago but it has a modern breezy style that is pleasant to read. It is also as good a primer for the Russian revolution as will ever be necessary for the casual reader. John Reed was certainly a radical and a cheerleader for the Bolshevik cause but he admits that right from the start. He was, first and foremost, a journalist, one of America's best, and his journalism is what makes this book. We as readers can easily cope with his more partisan moments.

This book is also a testament to optimism and a memorial to its death. The soviet model, the big idea, was still serving its apprenticeship in 1920 when typhus took John Reed's life. He died before the model, his dream, was crushed under the weight of international contempt. The international revolution never happened; the soviets never did really have a say; and the cuckoo in Lenin's nest became all too apparent: human nature; people don't want to be ants. It would take Joseph Stalin to make the soviet system 'work', and only then after he rid himself of opponents on an industrial scale. John Reed never foresaw any of that, and that is why his book is such a delight to read (don't believe reviews that say this book is turgid; it is anything but). It is a tale of what might have been but, in the end, never was. It is a book about life itself.

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'Ten Days That Shook the World' by John Reed

Penguin Classics (26 April 2007)

368 pages

ISBN 978-0-141- 44212-9

Cheapest current online price is £6.59 (incl. P&P) at WH Smith

Summary: The Bolshevik revolution from someone who was there.