John Reed was a famous American journalist who personally witnessed the seizure of the Winter Palace. He became one of the founders of the Communist Labor Party of the United States and was honored with a burial near the walls of the Moscow Kremlin next to Inessa Armand. A Harvard graduate, an embittered war correspondent and an anti-militarist socialist, Reed arrived in Petrograd in the midst of the turning-point events of 1917. He became an eyewitness to the October Revolution and, in his documentary book, seized “a clot of history” with vivid, vivid descriptions of the scenes he saw. “Ten Days That Shook the World” was praised by V. I. Lenin, who wrote in the preface that “he would like to see it spread in millions of copies and translated into all languages.” From 1930 to 1957 the book was not reissued in the USSR because, according to Stalin, the role of Trotsky in the revolution was greatly exaggerated in it. John Reed’s book is evidence of a person who romanticized the Russian Revolution and communism—but also an invaluable historical document, a monument to a fateful era.