Russian Revolution · CHAPTER 6 ·
October Revolution
Chapter 6 of The Russian Revolution, 1855–1924: “October”
On the night of 24–25 October 1917 Trotsky’s Military Revolutionary Committee occupied Petrograd’s bridges, telegraph and stations, and the Winter Palace fell with little fighting. The Bolsheviks presented the seizure as soviet power, issued decrees on peace and land, and dispersed the Constituent Assembly in January 1918.
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The map above is the world of Russia, November 1917 — October.
Every state on the map that year: The world in 1918 · Europe in 1918.
Part of IB History: The Russian Revolution →
SHORT EXPLANATION
On the night of 24–25 October, Trotsky’s Military Revolutionary Committee occupied Petrograd’s bridges, telegraph, stations, banks and power plants. These were the means by which a government communicated and moved. The Winter Palace, the Provisional Government’s seat, fell with little fighting: few were willing to die for a government whose promises had lost their appeal. A disciplined party had seized the machinery of a hollowed-out state. Acting on the eve of the Congress of Soviets, it presented the change as the soviets’ assumption of power.
Decrees on peace and land answered deep popular demands and gave the new government real legitimacy. The election to the Constituent Assembly, arranged before October, offered a different measure of support. The Bolsheviks lost; the peasant-based Socialist-Revolutionaries won the largest share. When the Assembly met in January 1918, guards let it sit for one day and then closed it. The party had shut a democratic route and refused to make its power depend on a national vote it could lose.
The full story
The Bolsheviks did not have to conquer Petrograd street by street. Trotsky, as chair of the Petrograd Soviet, built a Military Revolutionary Committee that won over key units of the garrison. Its forces occupied bridges, railway stations, the telegraph, banks and power stations. By controlling the places through which the government moved, communicated and operated, they took possession of much of the machinery of the state.
At the Winter Palace, the Provisional Government’s seat, the end was less spectacular than later films would suggest. Kerensky had already fled. Armed men entered in scattered groups and arrested the ministers; few people were prepared to fight for them. A few thousand determined men could take power because the government they displaced had so little dependable support left.
The seizure’s timing mattered as much as its organization. It came on the eve of the Second Congress of Soviets, so the Bolsheviks could present it as the transfer of power to the soviets rather than to their party. Many soldiers and workers favored soviet authority without being willing to march for the Bolsheviks by name. The claim helped neutralize them. At Smolny, moderate socialists walked out of the Congress in protest, leaving Lenin with the mantle of soviet power. The Congress ratified decrees on peace and land, answering demands that soldiers and peasants had pressed throughout the year.
The election to the Constituent Assembly had been arranged before October and offered another test of the regime’s standing. The Bolsheviks let Russia’s first and last free national vote proceed, and lost: the Socialist-Revolutionaries drew the great peasant majority. On 5 January 1918 the Assembly met, sat for one day, and was dispersed by Red Guards. It never reconvened.
Lenin had insisted on taking power before both the Congress and the vote. The Congress could then ratify a seizure already made, and when the national electorate chose differently, the party did not yield. The closing of the Assembly marked the fork at which a plausible democratic revolution became a one-party state.
FULL EXPLANATION
Why “coup” and “revolution” can both fit
October can be called a coup because of the way the state was taken. A disciplined party used armed committees to capture its institutions in one city. That tells us who organized the force, but it does not describe the whole situation in which the force was used. Soldiers wanted peace, peasants were seizing land, and workers supported soviet authority. The Bolsheviks held majorities in important urban soviets, and their first decrees answered demands with wide appeal. Without that revolutionary setting, the limited resistance to the seizure is harder to explain. Without the seizure, we miss the party’s concentration of force and its later coercion. These emphases shape the account of dictatorship. From the standpoint of the soviet mandate, dispersing the Constituent Assembly looks like a betrayal of the revolution. From the standpoint of the party’s seizure, one-party rule looks like a logic present from the beginning. We need to distinguish who wanted change, who organized the force that brought it, and who retained the right to revoke the resulting power.
The Constituent Assembly as a fork
The national election was not a perfect snapshot of opinion in January 1918. Party lists had been drawn up before the Socialist-Revolutionaries split, political conditions were changing rapidly, and the soviets claimed to represent a newer, class-based politics. These are reasons to ask what the result meant. They do not make the result disappear: the Bolsheviks lost a broad national vote, especially in the countryside. The Assembly sat once before the regime dissolved it. Historians disagree about whether parliamentary government could have worked amid war and state collapse. The Bolsheviks chose not to test an arrangement in which they could be outvoted and would have had to share divided authority. Their opponents could now say that force had closed the path to peaceful competition. The decision established a durable principle of Soviet rule: legitimacy would rest on the party’s own reading of revolutionary interest, rather than on an institution able to remove it from office.
Key places on the map
On this day
Why it happened
Organization beats numbers. The Bolsheviks were never a majority of Russians, but they had organization, a plan and a single will in the two cities that ran the state. Trotsky’s Military Revolutionary Committee could use the garrison’s passivity to occupy decisive points. General popularity and the ability to seize those points were different kinds of strength.
The cover of the soviets. Many workers and soldiers supported “soviet power” without supporting a march for the Bolshevik Party by name. Acting just before the Congress and in the soviets’ name gave a party coup the appearance of a mass mandate. That presentation helped neutralize potential opposition.
A government no one would defend. Almost no one had died for the Tsar in February; almost no one died for Kerensky in October. Eight months of postponement had left the Provisional Government without a constituency willing to fight for it. The weakness of its defense helps explain the easy fall of the Winter Palace.
Lenin’s insistence on timing. Cautious comrades wanted to wait for the Congress or the Assembly. Lenin insisted that the seizure come first, so the Congress would be asked to bless an accomplished fact. The Bolsheviks lost the election; had they waited for it, October would have been impossible. The order of events mattered to the result.
THE TURNING POINT
The Winter Palace, night of 25 October/7 November 1917. On the night of 25 October/7 November 1917, the Winter Palace fell with a few casualties. Attackers found doors open and arrested the government at a table, a far quieter event than the heroic storm of later myth. Its modest scale showed how little force the state could summon in its own defense: a committee with a few thousand armed men could take it. The larger significance lay in the claim that the seizure represented Soviet power, and in the decision three months later to disperse an elected assembly rather than surrender that power.
What it changed
“Soviet power” — and the decrees that bought it. The Decree on Peace promised an immediate armistice; the Decree on Land abolished gentry property and ratified peasant seizures. Soldiers had wanted to go home and peasants wanted land, and the new regime offered both. The promise of peace also led to Brest-Litovsk, where it would be bought at a terrible price.
The Constituent Assembly dispersed — democracy’s fork. The regime lost the only free election it ever allowed and dispersed the Assembly in January 1918. It chose the party over the ballot, closing a plausible democratic route toward a one-party state. Later Soviet claims to represent “the people” must be considered alongside that decision.
The lines of civil war are drawn. Rule by a minority party issuing decrees, the dissolution of parliament and the surrender of western territory gave enemies both motive and pretext. Officers, Cossacks, Socialist-Revolutionaries, nationalists and the Allies would oppose the regime; within months armies were forming on every frontier. October settled who held the capital, not the struggle for Russia.
DISCUSSION QUESTION — Was October a popular revolution or a coup — and does the distinction actually matter?
The two descriptions answer different questions. A disciplined minority used armed force to seize the state in one city and later dispersed a parliament elected by a majority. That mechanism was a coup. But it took place within a genuine mass upheaval: the soviets had gone Bolshevik, soldiers wanted peace, peasants were taking land, and the new regime promised them all three. The distinction changes how we interpret the dictatorship that followed. If October expressed the people’s will, party dictatorship appears as a betrayal requiring explanation. If a coup wore a mass costume, the seed of dictatorship was visible from the first night. Both the revolutionary movement and the party’s seizure of it matter; the party then refused to let the revolution be counted.
An interesting fact
The Winter Palace had fallen, but a struggle over its wine cellar continued. Reputedly the largest in the world, the cellar drew soldiers, sailors and passers-by who fought over the Tsar’s vintages. Guards sent to protect it got drunk too, and drunken looting convulsed Petrograd for weeks. The Bolsheviks tried machine-guns and martial law, then pumped wine into the gutters; crowds knelt to drink it from the snow. A city-wide binge became the new regime’s first sustained security operation.
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