John Reed (1887-1920) – writer and publicist, one of the founding members of the Communist Party of the USA. This book was first published in the United States in 1919 and in 1923 it came out in Russian in the USSR, where it was reprinted many times. All its printings in Russian, including the first edition, were prefaced by V.I. Lenin and Nadezhda Krupskaya. John Reed regarded Lenin as an extraordinary leader “with the power of explaining profound ideas in simple terms, of analyzing a concrete situation. And combined with shrewdness, the greatest intellectual audacity.” John Reed’s book was the first in world literature that conveyed to the world the truth about the victorious socialist revolution in Russia that set in a new era in the history of humankind.