Ten Days that Shook the World

"I like John Reed because he’s a journalist like myself, like yourself, and he was on hand to paint this fantastic, vivid picture of 1917. As you know, Warren Beatty turned it into that movie Reds in the 1980s that made revolution fun, sexy and exciting. John Reed debunks the great Soviet myth that October was a huge heroic struggle by the masses. He said: No, it wasn’t like that. The Winter Palace had been abandoned, we just walked in, went into the wine cellar, tried the wines, people started looting things, we wandered around looking for regiments of defending soldiers but nobody was there. He walks into the room where the provisional government had been sitting and there are all these bits of paper full of plans to save Russia , to save the government, and they are all screwed up and thrown in the bin. Reed took very much the Leninist view. He’s very much on Lenin’s side, and Lenin himself wrote in the preface: ‘I unreservedly recommend this book to the workers of the world.’ But when Stalin came to power he was furious that he is barely mentioned in the book, so he banned it and had all the copies burnt. He made a speech saying the book is full of ‘ Arabian Nights fairytales’. In a sense, February really was the great chance for Russia to reform itself. Had the provisional government been more adept and had more time – it was on the way to producing a Western-style democracy. They were committed to a constituent assembly which would produce a constitution and free and fair national elections. The Marxist Mensheviks thought it was fine because they thought we need this period of democracy to precede the socialist revolution. It was only Lenin who said: No, we’re not going to let them get on with it. We’re going to have an armed uprising now. February had been a popular revolt, a genuine uprising of the people, but October wasn’t. That was a putsch, a coup d’état at the top level so people were surprised."