Idealistically, John Reed agreed with Lenin when he wrote Ten Days That Shook the World.   Reed was a socialist himself and was working for a socialist newspaper when he went to Russia to report on the revolution in 1917.  Despite his support of communism in principle, Reed also recorded many excesses of the government and was somewhat disillusioned by what he saw as the "unnecessary repression of individual liberties" (see Salem).  However his book was positive enough about both Lenin and Trotsky that Lenin actually wrote an introduction to the book in 1922.