What Was the October Revolution of 1917?
On the morning of 25 October 1917, the cruiser Aurora fired a blank shot at the Winter Palace, and the Red Guards of the Petrograd garrison occupied the bridges, the railway stations, the post office, the State Bank, and the central telegraph office. By 2 am on 26 October the Provisional Government had been arrested in the Winter Palace, and the Second All-Russian Congress of Soviets, meeting at the Smolny Institute, declared the Provisional Government overthrown. The Provisional Government had lasted 237 days. The Russian Revolution’s second act had begun (see Pipes, The Russian Revolution, 1990; Figes, A People’s Tragedy, 1996).
The background
The October Revolution was the product of eight months of crisis. The Provisional Government, formed after the February Revolution and forced to share power with the Petrograd Soviet, faced four crises: the April Crisis of 18-21 April, the July Days of 3-7 July, the Kornilov Affair of 27-30 August, and the Bolshevik rise in the Soviets that culminated in the October seizure of power. The crises were not, however, the cause of the revolution. They were the moments when the underlying crisis of the war and the social question became visible.
The first issue was the war. The Provisional Government had inherited the war and the network of secret treaties — the Anglo-Russian Convention of 1907, the Sykes-Picot Agreement of 1916, the Treaty of London of 1915 — that the imperial government had signed. The Bolsheviks offered “Peace, Land, and Bread” and a “Decree on Peace” to the workers and soldiers, and the slogan was the most popular political proposition in Russia by September 1917. The second issue was the land: the emancipation of 1861 had never produced the holdings that the Russian peasant wanted, and the 1917 summer riots showed that the peasantry, like the soldiers, would not wait for the Constituent Assembly. The third issue was the nationalities: the Provisional Government had granted independence to Poland in March 1917, but Finland, Ukraine, and the Transcaucasus were not yet decided (Figes, 1996).
Lenin’s April Theses
On 4 April 1917, in a hall in the Tauride Palace, Vladimir Lenin delivered the April Theses to a meeting of Bolsheviks. The Theses, written in his Swiss exile and posted in Lenin’s Pravda, were a four-page political statement that broke with the Bolshevik position of 1905-1917. Lenin argued that the Russian revolution was the first stage of a world revolution, that Russia was “the weakest link” in the imperialist chain, and that the Bolsheviks should not support the Provisional Government but should aim at the immediate seizure of power. The Theses were opposed by some Bolsheviks, including Lev Kamenev, Grigory Zinoviev, and the “Old Bolsheviks” who had learned their politics in the period of Stalin’s later slogan of “socialism in one country.” The Theses were carried by the Bolshevik Central Committee in April 1917 and became the basis of the Bolshevik policy of the summer of 1917 (Service, The Russian Revolution 1900-1927, 2009).
The Bolshevik rise
The Bolshevik Party grew rapidly between the February and October revolutions. In February 1917 the party had about 24,000 members; by the autumn of 1917, about 350,000. The growth was concentrated in Petrograd, Moscow, Kiev, Kharkov, Baku, and the Baltic Fleet — and in the army, where the agitation of the Bolshevik agitprop reached the front.
The Bolshevik strategy was a continuation of Lenin’s State and Revolution, written in the summer of 1917, which had argued that the proletariat, with the help of the peasantry, should overthrow the state and establish the dictatorship of the proletariat. The Bolshevik slogan of “All Power to the Soviets” was a way of distinguishing the Bolshevik position from the Provisional Government’s: the soviets, argued the Bolsheviks, were the organs of the working class; the Provisional Government was an organ of the bourgeoisie (Service, 2009).
The October seizure of power
The decision to organise an armed insurrection was taken at a closed meeting of the Bolshevik Central Committee on 10 (23) October 1917, with the support of Lenin, Trotsky, and the majority of the Central Committee, and against the votes of Zinoviev and Kamenev. The Military Revolutionary Committee, set up on 12 (25) October 1917 under the chairmanship of Trotsky, organised the seizure of power in the capital.
The seizure of power itself was almost bloodless. The Red Guards and the loyal units of the Petrograd garrison occupied the bridges and the railway stations. The cruiser Aurora fired a blank shot as the signal. The Red Guards and the soldiers of the Pavlovsk and Kexholm regiments stormed the Winter Palace at 6 pm, and the Provisional Government was arrested shortly after midnight. The Second All-Russian Congress of Soviets, which had been scheduled to open on 25 October, opened on the evening of 25 October and continued through 26 October. The Congress passed the Decree on Peace and the Decree on Land; the Congress elected the Council of People’s Commissars under the chairmanship of Lenin (Pipes, 1990; Figes, 1996).
The establishment of Soviet rule
The October Revolution was followed by a series of radical measures. The new Soviet government nationalised the banks, the industries, and the land. The Cheka (the All-Russian Extraordinary Commission) was set up on 20 December 1917 to fight counter-revolution and sabotage. The Constituent Assembly, elected in November 1917 and convened on 5 January 1918, was dissolved by the Red Guards on the orders of Lenin, who feared the SR majority. The Treaty of Brest-Litovsk, signed on 3 March 1918, ended Russia’s participation in the First World War. The Russian Civil War began in May 1918. The Soviet government had survived its first six months and was about to face the deepest test of its history (Figes, 1996).