A twenty-four-hour seizure of a nearly undefended capital
Following the February Revolution that had already removed Tsar Nicholas II, the Bolshevik Central Committee voted 10 to 2 on 10 October 1917 to authorise an armed uprising, which unfolded over roughly twenty-four hours on 24 and 25 October. Bolshevik forces, organised under Leon Trotsky as head of the Petrograd Soviet, took key points across the city with little resistance, and the Winter Palace, defended by around 3,000 cadets, cossacks and a 140-strong women’s battalion against some 40,000 Bolshevik fighters, fell by 2:10 in the morning of 26 October. Alexander Kerensky, head of the Provisional Government, fled the city that morning in a borrowed American embassy vehicle.
A staged 1920 reenactment that became the accepted history
The event’s most enduring visual image comes not from 1917 itself but from a 1920 staged reenactment, watched by an audience of 100,000, that later Soviet filmmakers used as the template for dramatic scenes of fierce fighting at the palace. In reality, the article notes the initial assault occurred largely without casualties, since the defending garrison was small, lacked functioning artillery, and largely dispersed or surrendered rather than fighting. This gap between a bloodless, poorly defended takeover and the heroic battle scenes later produced for Soviet cinema and commemorative art illustrates how thoroughly the event’s popular memory was shaped after the fact rather than by what actually happened that night.
War exhaustion and a promise of peace, land and bread
The uprising’s popular support grew directly from war exhaustion: the Provisional Government had continued Russia’s participation in the First World War despite widespread public opposition, while food shortages and military setbacks continued to erode confidence in the country’s leadership. The Bolsheviks capitalised on this discontent with a platform promising peace, land and bread, slogans that addressed the war-weariness, land hunger among the peasantry, and hunger in the cities directly, giving the party a base of support sufficient to organise and carry out the October uprising even though its formal political support, as later elections would show, remained well short of a majority.
A coup dressed as history, and a history later purged of its own participants
Under Stalin, official Soviet history systematically distorted the revolution’s actual record. The 1938 History of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union recast Stalin, a relatively minor figure at the time of the actual events, as the revolution’s chief organiser, while prominent participants including Zinoviev, Trotsky, Radek and Bukharin were retroactively branded as vacillating opportunists or foreign agents. Trotsky’s own later book, written from exile, used private letters, telegrams and suppressed party documents to document this systematic falsification, giving historians an unusually direct record of how thoroughly an authoritarian state can rewrite its own founding story once it controls the archives.
An election won by someone else, and dissolved anyway
Despite seizing power, the Bolsheviks held only 24 percent of the vote in elections to the Constituent Assembly held in November 1917, finishing well behind the Socialist Revolutionary Party’s 370 seats to their own 175. When the Assembly convened for its single session on 5 January 1918 and rejected Soviet decrees, the Bolsheviks dissolved it outright, a move that revealed the new government’s actual electoral position and its willingness to abandon parliamentary process once it conflicted with retaining power, a decision that set the pattern for one-party rule and helped precipitate the Russian Civil War that followed.
Worth reading for the gap between the coup and its legend
The October Revolution rewards close study precisely because its most vivid popular image, a dramatic storming of a heavily defended palace, is a later invention layered onto an event that was, in its immediate military terms, almost anticlimactic. Readers who arrive with the cinematic version in mind gain the most from tracing how a comparatively bloodless seizure of a poorly defended capital was transformed, first through 1920s reenactment and later through Stalinist historiography, into the founding heroic myth of a state that, at the actual moment of its birth, held a clear minority of the popular vote it would go on to govern without.