Under the cover of darkness, armed workers, soldiers, and sailors loyal to the Bolsheviks occupied bridges, railway stations, and the telephone exchange before storming the Winter Palace, seat of the Provisional Government. Resistance was minimal; the government's defenders had largely melted away. By dawn the Bolsheviks controlled the capital, and Lenin proclaimed a new government of workers' and soldiers' councils, setting in motion the creation of the Soviet Union.
By late 1917, Russia's Provisional Government under Alexander Kerensky had lost nearly all authority. The army was disintegrating, food shortages plagued the cities, and peasants were seizing land on their own. Lenin, having returned from exile in April, argued relentlessly that the moment for insurrection had come, overruling colleagues who feared acting too soon.
The actual seizure of power was almost anticlimactic. The cruiser Aurora fired a symbolic blank shot as a signal, and Red Guards entered the barely defended Winter Palace, where government ministers were arrested while meeting in the Malachite Room. Kerensky himself had already fled the city in a car borrowed from the American embassy, disguised, according to later Soviet propaganda, as a woman—a detail historians dispute but which stuck in popular memory.
The date is remembered as November 7 under the Gregorian calendar, though at the time Russia still used the Julian calendar, making it October 25 domestically—hence 'October Revolution.' Within days, Lenin's government issued decrees on peace and land, and within years, civil war, famine, and the rise of a one-party state would reshape a sixth of the earth's land surface.
Key people: Vladimir Lenin, Alexander Kerensky, Leon Trotsky