From eyewitness of the Bolshevik Revolution to founder of the Communist Labor Party of America: an American buried at the Kremlin Wall
At the mass funeral for revolutionary martyrs in Red Square, Reed suddenly understood: the devout Russian people no longer needed priests to pray them into heaven. On earth they were building a kingdom more bright than any heaven had to offer.
American journalist and communist. He witnessed the 1917 October Revolution and wrote Ten Days That Shook the World. He co-founded the Communist Labor Party of America and served on the Comintern Executive Committee. One of the very few Americans buried at the Kremlin Wall.
Career Timeline
- 1910Graduated Harvard, began journalism career in New York
- 1913Joined The Masses; first arrest covering Paterson silk strike
- 1913–1914War correspondent in Mexico — 4 months with Pancho Villa's army; published Insurgent Mexico
- 1917Witnessed the October Revolution in Petrograd; worked with the Bolshevik Foreign Commissariat
- 1919Published Ten Days That Shook the World; co-founded the Communist Labor Party of America
- 1919–1920Comintern Executive Committee member; U.S. delegate to 2nd Comintern Congress; attended Baku Congress of the Peoples of the East
Related historical events
Ten Days That Shook the World: Chronicle of a Revolution
In the spring of 1919, Reed shut himself in a small New York room and began to write with only a Russian dictionary and the handbills, newspapers, and notes he had gathered during the revolution. Max Eastman, his colleague at The Masses, recalled Reed at the time: "He was gaunt, unshaven, greasy-skinned, a stark sleepless half-crazy look on his slightly potato-like face." Reed told Eastman, "I haven't shut my eyes for thirty-six hours. I'll finish the whole thing in two weeks. And I've got a name for it too—Ten Days That Shook the World." The book that emerged became the most vivid firsthand account of the Bolshevik Revolution.
Upon reading it, Lenin himself wrote an introduction: "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." Lenin judged that it would help readers understand "what really is the Proletarian Revolution and the Dictatorship of the Proletariat." Yet because the book highlighted Trotsky's revolutionary role while barely mentioning Stalin, it was effectively banned in the USSR under Stalin and only reissued in 1957.
Ten Days That Shook the World transcended journalism to become a classic of revolutionary literature. Cold War diplomat George F. Kennan, no friend to communism, conceded that "Reed's account of the events of that time rises above every other contemporary record for its literary power, its penetration, its command of detail." In 1999, New York University ranked it seventh among the top 100 works of American journalism of the 20th century. It inspired Eisenstein's silent film October (1928) and Warren Beatty's Academy Award-winning Reds (1981).