I was at my local library, when i found a book by a historical figure that i had known about from a friend. (In this case it was John Reed) I was keenly aware that he was a socialist, which brought up the question. Is the book a reputable source on the russian revolution?
John Reed was a socialist, but above all he was a war correspondent. He went from covering miners' strikes in Colorado in 1914 to covering the Mexican Revolution, then the Eastern Front in World War I, and finally landing in Petrograd in time for the October Revolution.
Reed was enthusiastic about the Bolsheviks, and reading his account of the revolution, we need to be remember not only that point of view, but also his limitations in witnessing and understanding the October Revolution.
Via Neal Ascherson in the London Review of Books:
His Russian was almost nonexistent – ‘even sketchier than his Spanish’, commented the American socialist Bertram Wolfe – and although he eventually reached the stage of being able to make out more or less what a speech was about, his grasp of the language was never up to much.
It is important to remember that when reading Ten Days. The late A.J.P. Taylor, in his Introduction to the 1966 Penguin edition, called Reed a ‘great writer’ but warned that the book was not history; as in Insurgent Mexico, Reed was unreliable about the dates and order of events, offered second-hand accounts as firsthand, added imaginative detail and generally heightened the drama. Taylor called ‘much of it ... fiction’. Notoriously, Reed gives a thrilling account of Lenin’s appearance at a closed Bolshevik meeting in Smolny on 3 November, allegedly communicated to him outside the door by Volodarsky as the meeting went on. No such meeting took place, and it is not easy to find another one in those days which would fit Reed’s account.
The takeaway from all of that is that Reed does a great job in describing the "feel" of what it was like to be in Petrograd during the Revolution, in addition to getting some prime interview time with Trotsky (also a journalist, by the way) and Lenin, but he is not necessarily providing an accurate, blow-by-blow description of the events. Reed had a limited command of Russian, and was often getting much of his information second-hand, which he then worked into a thrilling narrative.
I believe it is. He was there when the revolution struck so he has a first hand account of what happened and will be a good source in that sense. But yes since he was a socialist you might want to take everything with a grain of salt cause he’ll most likely cover everything thru a strictly socialist viewpoint