The Russian Revolution: History in an Hour

by Rupert Colley

Soviet tradition had it that a single blank shot fired from the ship Aurora, a veteran of the Russo–Japanese War, signalled the storming of the Winter Palace. Subduing Cossack guards, and women from the Women’s Death Battalion, the revolutionaries found Kerensky’s cabinet and arrested them on the spot where the illiterate revolutionaries forced them to write their own arrest warrants. Meanwhile, Lenin, never one to expose himself to danger, donned his disguise, hid, and waited for news. In the end, the toppling of Kerensky’s Provisional Government had been relatively bloodless and easy. There were no demonstrations, no violence. Not a shot was fired. All told, it was a very different revolution from February. Kerensky, disguised as a nurse, fled to the town of Pskov, where eight months earlier, Nicholas II had abdicated. Gathering the few remaining troops still loyal to him, he attempted a counterattack but was defeated and went into hiding, eventually fleeing to France. Later that evening on the momentous day of 7 November, the Second All-Russian Congress of Soviets met in the Smolny Institute. The meeting was not without disagreement. Moderate socialists argued that the Bolsheviks’ overthrow of the Provisional Government, of which many had been members, was illegal and walked out in protest. As they left, Trotsky sneered at them, ‘You’re finished; you pitiful bankrupts; your role is played out. Go where you now belong – into the dustbin of history.’ The next day, Congres...