October Revolution

In two days of largely bloodless action in Petrograd, then Russia's capital, the Bolshevik party of Vladimir Lenin overthrew the Provisional Government and claimed power in the name of the soviets, the councils of workers and soldiers. The rising began on 25 October 1917 by the Julian calendar Russia then used, which was 7 November in the Western calendar, hence its name. It was the second and decisive upheaval of the wider Russian Revolution, and it led directly to civil war and the creation of the world's first communist state.

The February Revolution had brought down Tsar Nicholas II and installed a Provisional Government, led from July by Alexander Kerensky. It kept Russia in the First World War, and by autumn its authority was draining away. More than a million workers went on strike in September and October, peasants were seizing landlords' estates across most of the country, and garrison troops and Baltic Fleet sailors openly refused to obey the government.

Lenin, back from Swiss exile since April, demanded that the soviets take power and end the war. After mass protests in July, the government cracked down and he went into hiding. But in late August General Lavr Kornilov's failed march on Petrograd discredited the right and boosted the Bolsheviks, who had helped rally the city's defence. Within days they won majorities in the Petrograd and Moscow soviets. Party membership had grown from about 24,000 in February to some 200,000 by September.

On 10 October (23 October in the Western calendar), the Bolshevik Central Committee voted 10 to 2 that an armed uprising was due. The practical planning fell to the Military-Revolutionary Committee of the Petrograd Soviet, headed by Leon Trotsky, which won over or neutralised most of the city's garrison. Preparations were barely secret, and Kerensky knew of them.

Early on 24 October, government troops raided the printing works of the Bolshevik newspaper and the authorities ordered several papers closed. Pro-Bolshevik soldiers retook the press that morning, and in the afternoon Kerensky ordered most of the city's bridges raised, leading to scattered clashes. By evening the committee had seized the central telegraph office.

On 25 October Red Guards, soldiers and sailors, reinforced by a flotilla from the Baltic Fleet, occupied railway stations, bridges, power and communications centres with little resistance. Lenin issued a proclamation announcing that the Provisional Government had been overthrown, timed to present the opening Second Congress of Soviets with an accomplished fact.

Only the Winter Palace, where the cabinet sat, still held out. Its defenders, perhaps 3,000 cadets, Cossacks, officers and members of a women's battalion, steadily melted away during the evening. The cruiser Aurora fired a blank shot at 9.45 p.m., insurgents began entering the building, and by about 2 a.m. on 26 October the ministers had surrendered and were taken to the Peter and Paul Fortress. Later Soviet films and paintings turned this into a heroic storming, but in reality there was little fighting.

At the Congress, Mensheviks and moderate Socialist Revolutionaries walked out in protest at what they called an illegal seizure of power. The remaining delegates endorsed the transfer of power and on 26 October approved a new government, the Council of People's Commissars, chaired by Lenin, which issued decrees on peace and land. Resistance followed: Kerensky's Cossacks were beaten back near Petrograd, and the Bolsheviks took Moscow on 31 October after a week of street fighting with an estimated 700 casualties.

In elections to the Constituent Assembly in November, the Bolsheviks won 175 of 715 seats, behind the Socialist Revolutionaries. The Assembly met once, in January 1918, and was then dissolved.

Soviet tradition celebrated the "Great October Socialist Revolution" as a workers' triumph, and its anniversary became a state holiday. Many Western observers instead saw it as a coup that used the soviets only as long as they were useful. Either way, it set off the Russian Civil War.

Our 1914 map shows the Russian Empire before the revolution, and the 1920 map shows the territory held by the Bolsheviks as the civil war drew to a close.