This book though adds another important factor: how people got so swept up in them. I try to be mindful of my anti-Soviet feelings because I grew up in the US where it became an artform mostly designed not to provide real analysis and objective(ish) history in the face of complication, but to serve a different political ideology. At the same time, pro-Soviet feelings can often mislead one from the abject horrors that the Soviet Union perpetrated. So this book provides that energy and spirit that fueled so much of 1917 in Russia. But it can’t be your only source on the information. For one, it’s flawed in its accuracy. There’s a lot of “this is the spirit” of what happened, more than this is what happened. For another, John Reed was a believer. He had a lot of access to be sure, which is great, but it colored his presentation. There’s a reason he was so honored in the early Soviet state.
But this book is also a really interesting model for what future revolutions might do. Americans often think that the American Revolution was the one that did it right (well, so long as you were a slave), and that the US Civil War is the way civil war would go (and will go in the next few years? Who knows?), but the Russian Revolution, the Spanish Civil War, the rise of Nazis, and the Chinese Revolution provide much more predictive examples of how a non-geographical, ideologically split revolution might look like.
