It does not pretend to be anything but a detailed account of the November[note 1] Revolution, when the Bolsheviki, at the head of the workers and soldiers, seized the state power of Russia and placed it in the hands of the Soviets.

[2] The Masses was thereby forced by the United States federal government to cease publication during the autumn of 1917 after the staff refused to change the magazine's policy against World War I.

His trunk of notes and materials about the revolution (which included Russian handbills, newspapers, and written speeches) were seized by custom officials, who interrogated him for four hours over his activities in Russia during the previous eight months.

Michael Gold, an eyewitness to Reed's arrival to Manhattan, recalls how "a swarm of Department of Justice men stripped him, went over every inch of his clothes and baggage, and put him through the usual inquisition.

"[4] Back home during mid-summer 1918, Reed, worried that "his vivid impressions on the revolution would fade,"[5] fought to regain his papers from the possession of the government, which long refused to return them.

Not so many feats can be found in American literature to surpass what he did there in those two or three weeks in that little room with those piled-up papers in a half-known tongue, piled clear up to the ceiling, and a small dog-eared dictionary, and a memory, and a determination to get it right, and a gorgeous imagination to paint it when he got it.

"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" and would be "remembered when all others are forgotten."

Kennan considered it as "a reflection of blazing honesty and a purity of idealism that did unintended credit to the American society that produced him, the merits of which he himself understood so poorly.

[9][10] Project director Mitchell Stephens explains the judges' decision: Perhaps the most controversial work on our list is the seventh, John Reed's book, "Ten Days That Shook the World", reporting on the October revolution in Russia in 1917.

[12] The book portrays Trotsky (at that time commander of the Red Army) as co-director of the revolution with Vladimir Lenin and mentions Stalin only twice, one of those occasions being in a recitation of names.

Russian writer Anatoly Rybakov elaborates on the Stalinist USSR's ban of Ten Days That Shook The World: "The main task was to build a mighty socialist state.

It does not pretend to be anything but a detailed account of the November[note 2] Revolution, when the Bolsheviki, at the head of the workers and soldiers, seized the state power of Russia and placed it in the hands of the Soviets.

Furthermore, Lenin agreed to write an introduction that first appeared in the 1922 edition published by Boni & Liveright (New York):[7][16] With the greatest interest and with never slackening attention I read John Reed's book, Ten Days that Shook the World.

End of 1919In his preface to Animal Farm titled "Freedom of the Press" (1945),[17] George Orwell claimed that the British Communist Party published a version which omitted Lenin's introduction and mention of Trotsky: At the death of John Reed, the author of Ten Days that Shook the World — a first-hand account of the early days of the Russian Revolution — the copyright of the book passed into the hands of the British Communist Party, to whom I believe Reed had bequeathed it.

[19] "Десять днів, що сколихнули світ" was a 1970 Ukrainian opera Ten Days That Shook the World [cs] by Mark Karminskyi [uk].

The main characters (played by James Cagney and Sylvia Sidney) plan on spending ten days together, causing one to utter the phrase.