The Bolsheviks seized power in the October Revolution
On this day · 7 November 1917
Called the October Revolution but staged in November by the modern calendar, Lenin's Bolsheviks toppled Russia's Provisional Government.
On the night of 24 October 1917 by the old Julian calendar—7 November by the Gregorian one—Bolshevik Red Guards began seizing railway stations, telegraph offices, and government buildings across Petrograd (now St. Petersburg). By the following evening they controlled the capital except for the Winter Palace.
Led by Vladimir Lenin, the insurgents stormed the palace, arrested the ministers of the Provisional Government, and transferred power to the Bolshevik-led soviets. The takeover met little resistance and remarkably few casualties.
It is named for October, yet falls in November—a quirk of Russia’s then-outdated calendar.
The coup ended months of dual authority that had followed the tsar’s abdication and set off the Russian Civil War. Within a year it had produced the world’s first avowedly communist state, an upheaval whose consequences shaped the entire twentieth century.
Sources & references
2 referencesWell-established. Corroborated by 2 independent sources.
