Read "Ten Days that Shook the World" by John Reed online for free on Textopian. Full text with search, annotations, highlights, and AI-powered reading aids.
Thursday, November 8th. Day broke on a city in the wildest excitement and confusion, a whole nation heaving up in long hissing swells of storm. Superficially all was quiet; hundreds of thousands of people retired at a prudent hour, got up early, and went to work. In Petrograd the streetcars were running, the stores and restaurants open, theatres going, an exhibition of paintings advertised. All the complex routine of common life -- humdrum even in wartime -- proceeded as usual. Nothing is so astounding as the vitality of the social organism -- how it persists, feeding itself, clothing itself, amusing itself, in the face of the worst calamities.
The air was full of rumours about Kerensky, who was said to have raised the Front, and to be leading a great army against the capital. Volia Naroda published a prikaz launched by him at Pskov: