Bolsheviks Seize Winter Palace: Russia's Revolution Begins

Armed workers and soldiers loyal to the Bolshevik Party stormed the Winter Palace in Petrograd on November 7, 1917, overthrowing the Provisional Government in a coup that took less than a day and changed the political landscape of the twentieth century. The ministers were arrested in the palace's White Dining Room. Alexander Kerensky, the head of government, had already fled the capital in a borrowed car, disguised as a Serbian officer. The October Revolution, as it became known under the old Julian calendar, was orchestrated by Vladimir Lenin and Leon Trotsky through the Military Revolutionary Committee of the Petrograd Soviet. Trotsky had spent weeks positioning loyal units at key points throughout the city. On the morning of November 7, Red Guards seized telephone exchanges, bridges, railway stations, and the state bank with minimal resistance. The Provisional Government, weakened by months of paralysis and the disastrous continuation of World War I, had virtually no defenders. Lenin had returned to Russia from exile in April 1917 aboard a sealed train provided by Germany, which hoped Russian chaos would knock its eastern adversary out of the war. His April Theses demanded an immediate end to the war, redistribution of land to the peasants, and transfer of power to the soviets, the workers' councils that had sprung up across Russia. These positions attracted mass support from war-weary soldiers and land-hungry peasants. The new government moved swiftly. The Decree on Peace called for immediate negotiations to end the war. The Decree on Land abolished private ownership of farmland. Elections for a Constituent Assembly gave the Bolsheviks only 175 of 715 seats; Lenin dissolved the assembly after its first session in January 1918. The Russian Civil War that followed killed millions and ended with the creation of the Soviet Union in 1922, a state that endured for seven decades and reshaped global politics from Berlin to Beijing.