October Revolution

The October Revolution was the seizure of power in Russia by the Bolshevik party in 1917. On 25 October 1917 by the old Russian calendar (7 November by the calendar used in most of the world), armed Bolshevik supporters took control of Petrograd, the capital, and overthrew the Provisional Government that had ruled since the fall of the tsar earlier that year.

Why “October” if it happened in November? Russia still used the Julian calendar, which by then was 13 days behind the Gregorian calendar used in Western Europe. The new Soviet government switched to the Gregorian calendar in February 1918, so the anniversary of the “October” Revolution was celebrated every year on 7 November.

The revolution brought to power the world’s first government that called itself socialist and aimed at communism, a society without private ownership of land and factories. It led to a devastating civil war, the creation of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) in 1922, and a political system that shaped world history until the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991.

In 1914 Russia entered the First World War against Germany and Austria-Hungary. The war went badly. By 1917 millions of Russian soldiers had been killed, wounded or captured. Railways could not carry enough food and fuel to the cities, prices rose steeply, and people stood in long queues for bread in the freezing winter.

In February 1917 (March by the Western calendar), strikes and bread protests in Petrograd turned into a revolution when soldiers refused to shoot at the crowds and joined them. Tsar Nicholas II abdicated, ending more than three hundred years of rule by the Romanov dynasty. This was the February Revolution.

After February, two bodies claimed authority. The Provisional Government, formed by members of the old parliament, promised to hold free elections for a Constituent Assembly that would decide Russia’s future. At the same time, the Petrograd Soviet of Workers’ and Soldiers’ Deputies, and hundreds of other soviets across the country, spoke for workers and soldiers. This situation was called “dual power”.

It is important to remember that the Russian Empire was not only Russian. Fewer than half its people were ethnic Russians; the rest included Ukrainians, Poles, Finns, Jews, Georgians, Armenians, Tatars, Kazakhs and many others. The collapse of the tsarist state in 1917 also opened the way for national movements, from Finland and Ukraine to the Caucasus and Central Asia, which demanded autonomy or independence. The revolution of 1917 was therefore many revolutions at once: of workers in the cities, of peasants in the countryside, of soldiers at the front and of nations at the edges of the empire.

The Provisional Government decided to continue the war, partly to keep faith with its allies Britain and France, and it postponed land reform and elections. As the months went on, soldiers deserted, peasants began seizing landowners’ estates themselves, and workers took control of factories. The government, led from July by the socialist lawyer Alexander Kerensky, grew weaker.

In April 1917 Vladimir Lenin, leader of the Bolshevik faction of the Russian Social Democrats, returned from exile in Switzerland, travelling through Germany in a train arranged with the German authorities, who hoped he would weaken Russia’s war effort. At Petrograd’s Finland Station he called for no support for the Provisional Government and “all power to the soviets”. His programme, the April Theses, was summed up in the slogan “Peace, land and bread”.

In July, armed demonstrations in Petrograd (the July Days) were put down; the government accused the Bolsheviks of being German agents, arrested some leaders, and Lenin went into hiding in Finland. But in late August the army’s commander, General Lavr Kornilov, appeared to move troops against the capital. Kerensky turned to the soviets for help, and armed workers, including Bolshevik Red Guards, stopped him. After this, the Bolsheviks won majorities in the Petrograd and Moscow soviets, and in September Leon Trotsky became chairman of the Petrograd Soviet.

On 10 October Lenin, secretly back in Petrograd, persuaded the Bolshevik Central Committee to vote, by ten votes to two, for an armed uprising. The two opponents, Lev Kamenev and Grigory Zinoviev, even made their disagreement public. The Petrograd Soviet had set up a Military Revolutionary Committee, dominated by Bolsheviks and led in practice by Trotsky, which won the loyalty of most of the city’s garrison. The uprising was timed to coincide with the Second All-Russian Congress of Soviets.

On 24 October Kerensky tried to close Bolshevik newspapers and raise the bridges over the Neva. The Military Revolutionary Committee answered by sending soldiers, sailors and Red Guards to take the bridges, railway stations, telegraph office, telephone exchange and power stations. Most of this happened with little shooting; many government troops simply stayed away. On the morning of 25 October Lenin announced that the Provisional Government had been deposed, though it was still meeting in the Winter Palace.

In the evening of 25 October the cruiser Aurora fired a blank shot as a signal, and guns from the Peter and Paul Fortress fired on the palace, mostly missing. The palace was defended by military cadets, some Cossacks and a women’s battalion, many of whom drifted away during the evening. In the early hours of 26 October the attackers entered and arrested the ministers. Kerensky had already left the city by car to seek troops at the front. Casualties in the capital were very small.

The dramatic “storming of the Winter Palace”, with crowds charging the gates, is largely an image created later, especially by a mass re-enactment staged in 1920 and by Sergei Eisenstein’s film October (1928).

The Second All-Russian Congress of Soviets opened late on 25 October. Bolsheviks were the largest group, with their allies the Left Socialist Revolutionaries. The moderate socialist parties, Mensheviks and Right Socialist Revolutionaries, denounced the seizure of power as a conspiracy and walked out. Trotsky famously told them to go to “the dustbin of history”. Their departure left the Bolsheviks and their allies in control.

On 26 October the Congress approved a new government, the Council of People’s Commissars (Sovnarkom), with Lenin as chairman, Trotsky as commissar for foreign affairs and Joseph Stalin as commissar for nationalities. It passed two famous decrees drafted by Lenin. The Decree on Peace called on all warring countries to begin immediate negotiations for a “just, democratic peace” without annexations or indemnities. The Decree on Land abolished private ownership of landed estates and handed land over to peasant committees, largely accepting what peasants were already doing.

Other decrees followed quickly: workers’ control in factories, the nationalisation of banks, the separation of church and state, the abolition of legal estates and titles, a declaration of the right of the peoples of Russia to self-determination, civil marriage and easier divorce. Alexandra Kollontai, commissar for social welfare, was among the first women in the world to hold a government ministry.

Outside Petrograd the takeover was not so easy. In Moscow about a week of heavy fighting between Red Guards and officer cadets, with artillery used in the city centre, cost hundreds of lives before the Bolsheviks won in early November. Kerensky’s attempt to return with Cossack troops was defeated near Petrograd at Pulkovo. In many provincial towns soviets took power; elsewhere, local authorities and national movements resisted.

Elections to the long-promised Constituent Assembly took place in November 1917. They were the freest elections in Russia’s history up to that time. The Socialist Revolutionaries, the party of the peasants, won the most seats; the Bolsheviks won about a quarter of the vote, mainly in the cities and the army. When the Assembly met in January 1918 and refused to accept Soviet power, the Bolsheviks dissolved it after a single session, and troops fired on a demonstration in its support.

In December 1917 the government created the Cheka, an Extraordinary Commission to fight “counter-revolution and sabotage”, under Felix Dzerzhinsky. Opposition newspapers were closed, and the liberal Kadet party was outlawed. After March 1918 the Left Socialist Revolutionaries, who had briefly joined the government, left it in protest over the peace treaty with Germany. By mid-1918 Russia was effectively a one-party state.

To get out of the world war, the Soviet government signed the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk with Germany and its allies in March 1918, giving up huge territories including Ukraine, the Baltic lands and Finland. The same month the capital moved to Moscow. In July 1918 the former tsar and his family were shot by Bolsheviks in Yekaterinburg.

From 1918 a many-sided civil war raged between the Red Army, organised by Trotsky, and a range of opponents: the “Whites” led by former tsarist generals, socialist rivals, peasant armies, national independence movements and foreign intervention forces. Both sides committed terror against civilians. Together with epidemics and the famine of 1921–22, the civil war period caused the deaths of many millions of people; estimates vary widely, often from about seven to twelve million.

The Bolsheviks won, and in December 1922 they founded the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. The new state promised equality, literacy, health care and the emancipation of women and national minorities, and made real advances in some of these. It also built a one-party dictatorship that, especially under Stalin from the late 1920s, carried out forced collectivisation, mass famine and the Great Terror.

The revolution inspired and frightened the world. In 1919 the Bolsheviks founded the Communist International (Comintern) to promote revolution abroad. Communist parties appeared in Europe, Asia, Latin America and Africa. For many anti-colonial activists, Lenin’s promises of national self-determination and his attacks on imperialism offered an alternative to the liberal ideas of the United States president Woodrow Wilson.

In East Asia its influence was profound. The Chinese Communist Party was founded in 1921 with Comintern help. Among Koreans, the Korean People’s Socialist Party (Hanin Sahoedang) was founded in 1918 in Khabarovsk in the Russian Far East, and socialist and communist ideas spread among independence activists after the March First Movement of 1919, adding a new current to the struggle against Japanese colonial rule. Japan, meanwhile, sent troops to Siberia (1918–22) as part of the Allied intervention and passed strict laws against communism.

In Western countries, fear of Bolshevism shaped politics for decades, from the “Red Scare” in the United States to the rise of anti-communist movements, including fascism, which presented itself as a bulwark against revolution.

In the Soviet Union the “Great October Socialist Revolution” was the founding myth of the state. Every 7 November, military parades filled Red Square. Official history presented the revolution as a mass uprising led by a united party under Lenin, and, from the 1930s, gave Stalin a prominent role he had not actually played, while erasing Trotsky and other leaders who had fallen from favour.

After the collapse of the USSR in 1991, Russian attitudes became more divided. In 2005 the 7 November holiday was replaced by a new National Unity Day on 4 November, commemorating the expulsion of Polish forces from Moscow in 1612. The centenary in 2017 was marked only modestly by the Russian state. In other former Soviet countries, such as Ukraine and the Baltic states, the revolution is often remembered mainly as the start of Soviet rule and repression.

Outside Russia, too, the revolution remains a symbol: for some, of hope for social justice betrayed; for others, of the dangers of utopian politics; for others still, of the achievements and costs of modernisation by force.

The interpretation of 1917 has been shaped by the Cold War. Soviet historiography treated October as the lawful outcome of class struggle, led by a party that expressed the will of the proletariat. Many Western historians of the mid-twentieth century, influenced by the “totalitarian” model, saw it instead as a coup d’état by a small, disciplined conspiracy that exploited chaos and then imposed dictatorship. Richard Pipes’s The Russian Revolution (1990) is the best-known later statement of this view.

From the 1960s and 1970s “revisionist” social historians studied workers, soldiers, sailors and peasants rather than leaders. Alexander Rabinowitch’s The Bolsheviks Come to Power (1976) showed that the Bolshevik party in Petrograd in 1917 was relatively open and responsive, and that its support among workers and soldiers was real by autumn 1917. Sheila Fitzpatrick’s The Russian Revolution (1982) placed October within a longer revolutionary process lasting until the 1930s. These historians did not deny the later dictatorship but argued that October had genuine popular backing in the cities, however much it lacked a national majority.

After the Soviet archives opened in the 1990s, historians gained access to party and police records. Works such as Orlando Figes’s A People’s Tragedy (1996) combined the social and political approaches, emphasising both popular radicalism and the violence and authoritarian choices of the Bolshevik leadership. Current research also looks beyond Petrograd, at the non-Russian peoples of the empire, at the countryside, and at the revolution as part of a wider crisis of empires during and after the First World War.

The revolution is recorded in a wide variety of sources: newspapers of every party, the minutes of the Bolshevik Central Committee and of the soviets, government decrees, and many eyewitness memoirs. The American journalist John Reed’s Ten Days That Shook the World (1919) is a vivid, sympathetic account written soon after the events. Nikolai Sukhanov, a Menshevik-leaning socialist, wrote detailed Notes on the Revolution, and Trotsky’s History of the Russian Revolution (1930–32) is both a major narrative and a partisan defence of his role.

All of these must be read critically. Memoirs were written with hindsight, often to justify their authors. Soviet publications of documents in the Stalin era were edited to fit the official story. Émigré memoirs by defeated opponents have their own biases. Historians compare these with archive records, statistics on elections and food supply, and local studies.

Key texts of the new regime, such as Lenin’s reports on peace and land to the Second Congress of Soviets, are available in translation, for example in the Lenin Internet Archive. Reading them alongside the Constituent Assembly election results and the petitions of workers and peasants helps show both what the Bolsheviks promised and what different groups in Russian society wanted.