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The October Revolution of 25 October 1917 (7 November by the Western, Gregorian calendar) was one of the most consequential political events in modern history. In the space of about forty-eight hours a small, disciplined party seized power in the name of the working class, founded the world's first avowedly socialist state, and set in train a course that would reshape global politics for the rest of the twentieth century. Yet the event itself was strikingly undramatic: there was no mass storming of barricades, no pitched battle for the capital, but rather the methodical, near-bloodless occupation of bridges, stations and ministries by units acting in the name of the Petrograd Soviet.
That very quietness is what makes October so contested. Was it a popular revolution — the culmination of the social upheaval begun in February, carried by genuinely Bolshevik-minded workers and soldiers? Or a military coup — the seizure of a power vacuum by a conspiratorial minority who then imposed a dictatorship in the name of a class? Or, as most modern scholarship concludes, something irreducibly both? This lesson reconstructs the seizure in granular detail, examines why the Bolsheviks succeeded and the first decrees of the new regime, and trains the AO2 source-evaluation skill on the partisan documents through which October is known.
By the end of this lesson you will be able to:
This lesson belongs to Edexcel 9HI0 Paper 2, Option 2C.2 (Route C depth study): "Russia in revolution, 1894–1924." A depth study rewards close, granular analysis — the precise sequence of 24–26 October, the named bodies (MRC, Sovnarkom), the Central Committee vote of 10 to 2, and the first decrees — deployed to sustain argument rather than narrated for its own sake. Within our teaching sequence October is the pivot of the whole course: the legitimacy claims, the party-state, the use of terror and the command economy all flow from how and by whom power was seized.
Because this is a depth study, examiners reward detail used to sustain argument. For the exact assessment weightings and question wording, consult the official Edexcel specification and sample assessment materials rather than any paraphrase.
By the autumn of 1917 the political balance had shifted decisively toward the Bolsheviks, largely as a consequence of the Kornilov Affair, which had rehabilitated and rearmed them while destroying the moderate centre. The wider context was one of accelerating collapse: the economy was disintegrating, the bread ration in Petrograd was being cut, the army was melting away through desertion, and peasant land seizures were spreading across the empire. Against this backdrop the slogan "All Power to the Soviets" — which the Bolsheviks had quietly resumed after the July Days — acquired real force, because the soviets now had Bolshevik majorities and the government had no answer to any of the crises.
| Factor | Detail |
|---|---|
| Soviet majorities | The Bolsheviks won majorities in the Petrograd Soviet (early September) and the Moscow Soviet |
| Trotsky as Soviet chair | Trotsky was elected chairman of the Petrograd Soviet on 25 September, giving the Bolsheviks the platform from which the MRC would act |
| Membership surge | Party membership had grown from roughly 24,000 in February to several hundred thousand by October |
| Armed workers | The Red Guards, armed during the Kornilov Affair and never disarmed, provided a ready paramilitary force in the tens of thousands |
| Garrison sympathy | The Petrograd garrison, dreading transfer to the front, would not fight for Kerensky |
| Government isolation | Kerensky's government was discredited, friendless and almost without reliable troops |
Key term — Military Revolutionary Committee (MRC): a body formed within the Petrograd Soviet in mid-October 1917, ostensibly to defend the city against German attack and counter-revolution, but used by Trotsky to organise the military side of the Bolshevik seizure of power. It supplied a veneer of soviet legitimacy for what was in practice a Bolshevik party operation — a distinction at the heart of the "coup versus revolution" debate.
From his Finnish hiding-place Lenin bombarded the Central Committee with letters of mounting urgency — most famously the September pamphlets The Bolsheviks Must Assume Power and Marxism and Insurrection — insisting that delay was fatal. His argument was twofold: militarily, the balance of forces in the capital was favourable and would not stay so; politically, the party must seize power before the Second Congress of Soviets so as to present the Congress, and the country, with an accomplished fact rather than seek anyone's permission. Lenin's letters of September–October 1917 — including the famous insistence that delay would be a "crime" and a "betrayal" — are well attested; characterise their thrust rather than rely on an exact wording. He slipped back into Petrograd around 10 October and, at a clandestine Central Committee meeting, won the decision for an armed seizure by a vote of 10 to 2.
Crucially, the insurrection was opposed from within. Lev Kamenev and Grigory Zinoviev cast the two dissenting votes at the Central Committee meeting of 10 October and then, extraordinarily, aired their opposition in the non-party press (Gorky's Novaya Zhizn), effectively publicising that a rising was planned. Their reasoning deserves attention because it was not cowardice but a coherent alternative strategy: they argued that the Bolsheviks should advance through the Second Congress of Soviets and a broad socialist coalition, trusting that the tide of events and the coming Constituent Assembly elections would deliver power legitimately, without the risk of a premature armed gamble that might be crushed and isolate the party from the peasantry and the other socialist parties. Lenin regarded this as fatal hesitation and demanded their expulsion; it did not happen, and both men returned to the leadership within weeks. The episode is doubly important: it shows that "the party" was not a monolith, and it demonstrates that the line which prevailed in October was specifically Lenin's, carried against serious internal resistance — strong evidence, in the historiographical debate, for the willed, party-driven character of the seizure.
Trotsky was the organisational genius of October. His method was to seize power in the name of the Soviet through the MRC (formed around 16 October), thereby cloaking a party operation in soviet legitimacy and presenting any resistance as counter-revolution. When, on 24 October, Kerensky ordered the closure of Bolshevik newspapers and the raising of the Neva bridges to cut off the workers' districts, he handed the MRC the perfect pretext to act "in defence" of the revolution.
| Date (OS) | Event |
|---|---|
| 24 October | Red Guards and pro-MRC soldiers occupy key points — the telephone exchange, telegraph, railway stations, bridges, the State Bank and the Central Post Office — against virtually no resistance |
| 25 October (morning) | Lenin emerges and proclaims that the Provisional Government has been deposed — premature, since the Winter Palace had not yet fallen |
| 25 October (evening) | The Second All-Russian Congress of Soviets convenes with a Bolshevik majority; the Mensheviks and right-wing SRs walk out, Trotsky dismissing them (in the celebrated phrase) to "the dustbin of history" |
| 26 October (early hours) | The Winter Palace is taken — barely defended by a few hundred cadets, Cossacks and the Women's Death Battalion; the "storming" was far less dramatic than later Soviet mythology portrayed |
| 26 October | Lenin announces the Council of People's Commissars (Sovnarkom), the new all-Bolshevik government, and the Congress passes the Decrees on Peace and Land |
The night of 25–26 October has become the iconic image of the revolution, but the reality was far more prosaic than the legend. The cruiser Aurora fired a blank shot as a signal; the defenders of the Winter Palace — a few hundred officer cadets (junkers), Cossacks and the Women's Death Battalion — gradually melted away or surrendered; and the eventual entry into the Palace in the early hours of 26 October was less a heroic assault than a disorganised influx of Red Guards and soldiers who arrested the remaining ministers. Casualties were minimal. The contrast between the reality (a methodical, near-bloodless takeover of infrastructure) and the myth (Eisenstein's 1928 film October, with its surging crowds storming the Palace gates) is itself a key analytical theme — and a standing warning about taking later Soviet sources at face value. The mythologised "storming" served a clear purpose: a regime that had taken power by a disciplined minority operation needed, retrospectively, to portray October as a great popular uprising to legitimise itself.
A compressed chronology of the seizure (Old Style dates):
| Date (OS) | Event |
|---|---|
| 25 September | Trotsky elected chairman of the Petrograd Soviet |
| 10 October | Central Committee votes 10 to 2 for insurrection |
| 16 October | Military Revolutionary Committee (MRC) established |
| 24 October | MRC forces occupy bridges, stations, telegraph and banks |
| 25 October | Lenin declares the government deposed; the Second Congress convenes; the moderates walk out |
| 26 October | The Winter Palace is taken; Sovnarkom is formed; the Decrees on Peace and Land are passed |
The seizure is unintelligible without its protagonists. Lenin supplied the will: he alone forced the seizure when many colleagues favoured waiting, judged correctly that the window was narrow, and provided the ideological justification — that the soviets, not a parliament, embodied the true will of the working class. Trotsky supplied the method: as Soviet chairman and MRC chief he planned and executed the takeover with cool efficiency and won wavering units by oratory. Kerensky supplied the vacuum: forewarned but powerless, he could muster no loyal force and left Petrograd on 25 October in a futile search for troops.
The brilliance of Trotsky's method lay in the timing of the seizure to the Congress and in the legal fiction of the MRC. By acting on 24–25 October, just as the Second Congress assembled, the Bolsheviks could present the takeover not as a party coup but as the Congress "assuming power"; and by acting through a body ostensibly defending the Soviet, they could claim every move was a defence of the revolution against Kerensky's "counter-revolutionary" provocations. When Kerensky obligingly tried to close the Bolshevik press and raise the bridges on 24 October, he supplied exactly the provocation the MRC needed. Loyalist officers and the moderate parties were left arguing about legality while the MRC quietly took the city. Lenin's insistence on striking before the Congress, against Kamenev's preference for letting the Congress decide, was vindicated: power was seized first and ratified afterwards, presenting the delegates — and the country — with a fait accompli.
The success of October is best explained as a convergence of Bolshevik strengths and the catastrophic weakness of every alternative. It is a multi-causal problem, and the strongest answers weigh the factors rather than list them.
| Factor | Contribution to success |
|---|---|
| Bolshevik organisation | A disciplined party with the MRC and the Red Guards could plan and execute a takeover that leaderless February could not |
| Leadership | Lenin's will to act and Trotsky's organisational and tactical command — the two were arguably individually necessary |
| Provisional Government failure | Eight months of war, hunger and broken promises had drained the government of any loyal constituency |
| The Kornilov legacy | The August affair armed the Red Guards, rehabilitated the Bolsheviks and destroyed the moderate centre |
| Slogans and decrees | "Peace, Bread, Land" and "All Power to the Soviets" answered real demands; the first decrees instantly cashed the cheque |
| Opposition paralysis | The garrison would not fight for Kerensky; the moderates walked out rather than resist; counter-revolution was disorganised |
The decisive analytical point is that Bolshevik strength and opponents' weakness were two sides of one coin: the party's promises had force because the government had failed to deliver peace and land, and its seizure met no effective resistance because the Kornilov Affair had already cleared the field. October was neither a miracle of conspiracy nor an inevitable tide of history, but the meeting of a uniquely prepared party with a uniquely exhausted alternative.
The new regime moved at once to convert its promises into decrees, binding the population to it before any opposition could organise. The decrees of the first days were as much political weapons as legislation — designed to make the seizure irreversible by giving workers, peasants and soldiers a concrete stake in the Bolshevik order.
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