October Revolution
On the night of 24-25 October 1917 (6-7 November NS), Bolshevik Red Guards and sympathetic soldiers and sailors seized the bridges, stations, and telephone exchanges of Petrograd and stormed the Winter Palace, overthrowing Kerensky's Provisional Government in a coup timed by Lenin to coincide with the Second Congress of Soviets. The Bolsheviks' slogans — 'Peace, Land, Bread' and 'All Power to the Soviets' — answered precisely the demands the Provisional Government had failed to meet, above all the demand to end the war. Lenin's first decrees proposed immediate peace negotiations and sanctioned the peasant seizure of landed estates. The revolution took Russia out of the Entente war effort, horrified the Allied governments, and began the Russian Civil War. Its consequences — a one-party communist state, the Comintern, and the ideological division of Europe and the world — made it, with the war itself, one of the two founding catastrophes of the twentieth century.
- Year: 1917 CE
- Category: Political
