October Revolution

Morning on Nevsky Prospekt: quiet after decisive footsteps

The city that morning did not look like a place where a regime had just been toppled. Nevsky Prospekt, the wide avenue that had been the artery of imperial Petrograd, was more like a film still than a battlefield: an armored car parked by a tram line, a few sailors in peacoats keeping watch, a red banner hung from a stately façade. Chairs lay overturned outside a café, loose papers fluttered. The streets smelled of cold and coal smoke rather than gunpowder. That calm — the tense, brittle quiet after a fast, effective operation — would become one of the defining images of the October Revolution. It asked a question everyone in Russia would have to answer: how did so much change so quickly, and at what cost?

The war that broke the old order

By 1917 Russia had been at war for three years. The casualty lists were obscene. Trenches and ration lines had hollowed out confidence in the tsar and then in the Provisional Government that followed his fall. The February Revolution earlier that year had toppled Nicholas II and opened a period known at the time as “dual power.” On one side stood the Provisional Government, populated by liberals and moderate socialists trying, haltingly, to run a collapsing state. On the other stood the soviets — councils of workers and soldiers that exercised real authority on factory floors and in barracks.

The Provisional Government’s decision to keep fighting the Great War, its slow approach to land reform and its inability to fix food shortages alienated peasants, workers and troops. In Petrograd the mood hardened. The Bolsheviks, a party led by Vladimir Ilyich Lenin and disciplined by a revolutionary core, offered a simple set of promises — “peace, land and bread” — that read like an answer to exhaustion. But the path to power was not straight or inevitable. A sequence of crises in 1917 — the defeat of protests during the July Days and the alarm of the Kornilov affair in August, when General Lavr Kornilov’s apparent attempt to march on Petrograd briefly threatened the city — shaped politics by discrediting the Provisional Government and boosting the Bolsheviks as defenders of the capital.

A party divided and a leader impatient

Lenin was ruthless and impatient by temperament; his April Theses had called for turning protest into seizure. Yet the Bolshevik leadership was not monolithic. The Central Committee debated and fretted. In late October, with the city in a tense equilibrium, Lenin again pushed for decisive action. Some senior Bolsheviks hesitated. Grigory Zinoviev and Lev Kamenev famously opposed or abstained from the final vote authorizing an insurrection. That internal dissent matters because it undercuts any simple story of one man ordering a coup and everyone else following. The decision emerged from pressure — from events on the ground, from a party that believed the moment for power had come, and from Lenin’s urgency.

Into this mix stepped Leon Trotsky. Elected chairman of the Petrograd Soviet in September, Trotsky became the operational brain: he organized the Military Revolutionary Committee (MRC), marshalled units, coordinated signals and oversaw the details of who took which bridge, post office, telegraph office and railway station. It was his thread of discipline and organization, combined with Lenin’s political push and the fervor of workers, sailors and soldiers, that translated the idea of revolution into movement.

The military map of a city

Petrograd was a city of chokepoints. Control telephones, telegraph lines and bridges; control the rail stations and the printing presses; hold the garrison and the sailors. The MRC spent October converting those tactical truths into orders. The Bolsheviks recruited from the factory militias known as Red Guards, enlisted disaffected soldiers from Petrograd barracks, and activated crews from the Baltic Fleet — sailors who had proven both radical and reliable in past actions. Armored cars and a few field pieces were pressed into service. Armored trains ferried men and supplies. From the vantage of the MRC, the operation looked less like a pitched battle plan and more like a chess game in which pieces would be quietly set, then snapped into place.

The night the city doors were shut: 24–25 October

At dusk on 24 October (6 November Gregorian) orders went out. The MRC warned units to move. By midnight detachments were at telephone exchanges, grain warehouses, the State Bank, and key railway stations. For the most part these seizures met only limited resistance. Many of the ministries and posts had small garrisons or civil servants unwilling to fight; others were simply isolated once the telegraph and telephone lines were cut. The strategy emphasized speed, surprise and control of communications — a modern coup’s essentials.

Approach to the Winter Palace

The Winter Palace — where the ministers of the Provisional Government had gathered — offered the most cinematic moment. A column of Red Guards, sailors and soldiers, with a few armored cars and light guns, moved toward the riverbank and the palace steps late on the night of 25 October. Contemporary reports and later archival material show the defenders were not a vast loyal army. The action at the palace was not a prolonged, heroic siege as later Soviet tableaux would depict; it was a brief, chaotic arrest of ministers, interrupted by small pockets of resistance. Eyewitness accounts vary. Some witnesses remember gunfire and confusion; others recall that many officials surrendered or fled. The later, monumental representations — films, tableaux, heroic paintings — amplified the drama. The real event was sharper in its efficiency than in its theatrics.

The congress that changed the law

While the city’s streets were being secured, another struggle for legitimacy was playing out inside a hall. The Second All‑Russian Congress of Soviets, a body of delegates from workers’ and soldiers’ councils around the country, convened during the night. The Bolshevik-controlled Petrograd Soviet announced that power had been transferred to the soviets. Delegates debated. The Mensheviks and the Socialist Revolutionaries, who still held seats and influence, largely walked out after the arrest of Provisional Government ministers, condemning the Bolsheviks’ seizure as undemocratic. The delegates who remained voted to approve the new power arrangement and witnessed the proclamation of the Council of People’s Commissars (Sovnarkom), with Lenin as its head.

From those benches came the first revolutionary orders: a Decree on Peace proposing an immediate armistice and open peace negotiations; a Decree on Land that effectively authorized peasants to seize land from landlords; and decrees to nationalize banks and place factories under workers’ control. These measures were immediate political currency — appeals to troops, peasants and workers — even as their legal and practical consequences would unfold with violence and dislocation.

From seizure to consolidation — the road to civil war

In Petrograd the Bolsheviks continued to solidify control. They occupied ministries, arrested opponents, and moved to secure supply lines. Yet the seizure of the capital did not equate to dominance across the former empire. Regional power holders, anti‑Bolshevik officers, and rival parties resisted. The Constituent Assembly, elected in November 1917, refused to endorse Bolshevik rule and was dissolved by force in January 1918 — a watershed in the elimination of political pluralism.

The Bolsheviks responded to threats with institutional tools and radical policies. In December 1917 they created the Cheka, an extraordinary commission tasked with combating counter‑revolution and sabotage. The Red Army, organized under leaders including Trotsky, mobilized to fight multiple opponents: White forces, regional nationalists, peasant rebellions, and foreign interventionists. The civil war that followed between 1918 and 1922 consumed Russia’s energies and people. War communism policies centralized requisition and distribution; when famine and economic collapse loomed, the New Economic Policy (NEP) in 1921 relaxed controls in a pragmatic pivot.

Counting the cost — immediate and long view

The violent seizure of Petrograd itself resulted in relatively limited direct casualties — most contemporary counts place deaths during the key nights in the dozens rather than hundreds. Precise numbers are elusive and often politicized.

The larger human cost is staggering and contested. The civil war, combined with famine, disease and political repression from 1917 into the early 1920s, produced multi‑million excess deaths. Scholars estimate total deaths across the revolutionary and civil‑war years in wide ranges — commonly cited figures are on the order of 7 to 12 million when including famine and disease. Estimates of violent deaths from combat and executions tend to be lower, often in the range of one to two million. Methodological debates continue: archival openings and demographic studies have refined counts but have also shown how difficult absolute certainty remains.

Economically, the immediate effects of the October seizure were less about burning palaces than about legal and institutional transfers. Banks were nationalized; land was declared free for peasant appropriation; industry was placed under worker committees. But these actions took place amid supply chain collapse, blockades and a fragmented currency. Productivity plunged, trade contracted, and recovery would be halting.

How memory reshaped reality

The October events quickly entered two competing archives: the documentary, paper record of orders, minutes and telegrams; and the mythic, visual archive crafted by Bolshevik commemorators. The dramatic storming of the Winter Palace became a stage set in paintings, ballets and silent films. For decades Soviet historiography amplified the image of a heroic masses’ rising. Later historians, aided by the opening of archives in the late twentieth century, have complicated that picture. The current consensus among many scholars is balanced: October was neither the spontaneous eruption of all Russia nor a mere putsch by a tiny cabal. It was a well‑planned seizure by a disciplined minority that nevertheless drew on significant social support in key urban centers and military units at a decisive moment.

Trotsky’s operational role is now better documented; Lenin’s political leverage remains central; the hesitations of other Bolshevik leaders are clearer. Regional studies have shown why Bolshevik authority stuck in some cities and not in others — local conditions, agrarian pressures, and the placement of troops all mattered.

The world pivoted

International actors watched and sometimes intervened. Allied governments feared the spread of revolutionary contagion and were alarmed by Russia’s separate peace with the Central Powers. In March 1918 the Bolsheviks signed the Treaty of Brest‑Litovsk, ceding large territories to end Russian involvement in World War I — a politically costly move that bought breathing room at home. Allied military aid to anti‑Bolshevik forces in the north and east was real but limited and ultimately unsuccessful.

By 1922 the Soviet project had consolidated sufficient power to form the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. The October events had done more than rearrange Russian cabinets; they rewired the structure of the state, the definition of property, and the locus of political legitimacy for generations.

A small, decisive act with enormous consequences

Standing now with the benefit of hindsight, the image of sailors and Red Guards beneath a red flag on Nevsky Prospekt keeps returning. It is an image of concentrated initiative: a relatively small, organized group seizing the levers of a large, exhausted state at a moment of extreme crisis. That combination — organization plus social exhaustion — was the engine of October.

The revolution’s first night was swift and selective. What it set in motion was protracted and brutal. The seizure of Petrograd inaugurated a decade of violence, reconstruction, and ideological transformation that altered millions of lives and reshaped the map of the twentieth century. The story of October is a lesson in how political opportunity, military control of urban chokepoints, and the commitments of a determined leadership can combine to bend history — for better to some, for catastrophe to many others.