Ten Days That Shook the Worldis one of the all-time great book titles. But even after reading John Reed's famous account of the Russian revolution, you may find yourself wondering which days in particular he had in mind, writes Frank McNally
And this is not just because the period covered spans about two months. Despite its atmosphere of feverish excitement, much of the book is about nothing happening. There are endless meetings of innumerable committees, the effort to keep on top of which shakes the reader. But in the chronology preceding my edition, no event worth mentioning appears to have occurred between October 25th and November 6th, while the list ends on the day after the revolution: November 8th.
Then again, as A.J.P. Taylor notes in his introduction, the events of November 7th, 1917 barely shook Petrograd, never mind the world: "Most people in Petrograd did not even know that a revolution was taking place. The trams were running, the fashionable restaurants were crowded, the theatres were crowded and Chaliapin was singing at the Opera. The Red Guards kept away from the smart quarter or walked modestly in the gutter."
Reed himself woke "very late" on the 7th and read sketchy details of events overnight in the only newspaper he could find, bought second-hand from a soldier. Later, on a street corner, he bumped into a senior military man he knew - one of the moderate Mensheviks - and asked if the reports were true.
"The devil knows," replied the man, before offering one of the less accurate predictions of history: "Well, perhaps the Bolsheviki can seize the power, but they won't be able to hold it more than three days. They haven't the men to run a government. Perhaps it's a good thing to let them try - that will finish them."
In fact, the Bolsheviks had not quite taken power by then. What is usually referred to as the "storming" of the Winter Palace came a few hours later. But it was not much of a storm. A.J.P. Taylor again: "Red Guards filtered in through the kitchen entrance and took over the palace without a struggle. At 2.25 a.m. [on] 8 November, Antonov, a member of the military revolutionary committee, broke into the room where the provisional government was still sitting and shouted: 'In the name of the Military Revolutionary Committee I declare you all under arrest'. Such was the end of old Russia."
Much of the excitement in Reed's book emanates from the Smolny Institute, a former girls' school where the Petrograd Soviet was meeting in continuous session. "A centre of storm", Reed called it, with "delegates falling down asleep on the floor and rising again to take part in the debate [and] Trotsky, Kameniev, Volodarsky speaking six, eight, twelve hours a day".
But a lot of the book is informed speculation. Despite his declared sympathies with the revolutionaries, Reed was an outsider. Much of the time, as Taylor says, he had to sit in a hotel room, smoking as he typed his dispatches, and guess what was going on: "He would piece together fragments of conversations, add imaginative detail of what was likely to have happened and crown it all with a brilliant phrase". Reed was indeed a fine writer, with a poetic sensibility. The best parts of the book are when, in between the meetings, he writes about the life of the city around which he moved. Here he describes the electrifying effect of the arrival in Petrograd - on November 18th - of the winter's first snows: "The mud was gone; in a twinkling the gloomy city became white, dazzling. The droshki with their padded coachmen turned into sleighs, bounding along the uneven street at headlong speed, their drivers' beards stiff and frozen. . .
"In spite of revolution, all Russia plunging dizzily into the unknown and terrible future, joy swept the city with the coming of the snow. Everybody was smiling; people ran into the streets, holding out their arms to the soft, falling flakes, laughing. Hidden was all the greyness; only the gold and coloured spires and cupolas, with heightened barbaric splendour, gleamed through the white. . ."
In an even more poetic passage, he describes his epiphany during a mass burial of victims from the battle for Moscow: "I suddenly realised that 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, and for which it was a glory to die." But the future was every bit as "unknown and terrible" as he suggested, even for the writer himself. In a preface to the first edition, written on New Year's Day 1919, Reed says that this is "the first of several books" he planned. Nineteen months later, not yet 33, he died from typhus and was given a hero's grave under the Kremlin walls, the only American to be buried there.
As for the revolution, its co-authors Lenin and Trotsky initially foresaw only two possible outcomes. Either it would spread spontaneously to the rest of the continent, or the European powers would combine to crush it. Neither prediction proved correct.
Instead, Russia was allowed to embark on its doomed experiment alone. And the main architect of its communism would be neither Trotsky - Reed's hero - nor Lenin. It would be a man whose name, Djugashvili-Stalin, is mentioned only once in the book and who - had Reed not already died young - would surely have seen to him in due course.