Ten Days That Shook the World by John Reed is a wonderful insight into the politicking that went on behind the scenes of the 1917 Revolution and the Bolshevik Revolution. It’s not dry, it’s a wonderful read and is quite short, but it shows how many regular people managed to seize power not only from the Tsardom but from liberal bourgeois “democracy”.

Maurice Meisner is a complicated and often biased against Marxism-Leninism writer, but “Mao’s China and After” gives a, I think, fair insight into how the CPC managed to create the PRC, going into detail about how they created their power bases etc. even after enormous setbacks like the large-scale politicide of communists and leftists in the cities. I haven’t read it yet but apparently “Fanshen” by William H. Hinton goes into pretty excruciating detail about what the CPC’s land reform programs looked like and how they managed to create state apparatuses to get them done. I hope these recommendations are helpful.

There are aspects of both of these revolutions that, because of the historical circumstances of the times and places they occured, cannot be easily replicated especially in the imperial core. The Bolsheviks had wide-ranging support among young, starving soldiers forced to participate in an imperialist war. The peasantry in China were repressed and oppressed beyond belief and China at the time was functionally a bunch of warlord microstates with a pseudo-fascist lame duck government led by the Kuomintang, and thus “China” as a political entity had not been established as hard-and-fast as say the United States is today and revolutionaries were able to capitalize on this instability and lack of governance in many areas to not necessarily “seize power” but “create power”, as it were. There are still many things to be learned from this history, however.

Some off the top of my head:

• Lenin - State and revolution
• Lenin - Left-wing Communism, an infantile disorder.
• 10 days that shook the world is the best for the birth of the USSR.
• Stalin - economic problems of the soviet union.
• Fidel - My Life

Most revolutionary leaders wrote about their experience of organizing their parties to capture state power, while they were in the middle of it. So check out marxists.org essays by Lenin, Stalin, Mao, Zhou Enlai, Deng Xiaoping, Zhu De, Ho Chi Minh, Fidel, Che, etc. Many of their best works are their short ones giving updates on what the immediate tasks of the party are.