1. October revolution
By Bailey Smith

2. Dual Power
After the events of the February revolution there are basically three main powers in Russia. Provisional government: basically they carry all the legal authority but don’t have any control over the people. Soviets: they are for the people and made up by them. They have control over the peoples opinions but no official authority. Military: this is a group that isn’t really a official power but the other two were worried that the army would just march in and take back the power.

3. Provisional Government members

4. Dual Power (continued)
By the end of the revolution the soviets and Provisional government joined forces to create the Dual Power. The soviets were made up of all political parties as well as most all Russians, the people didn’t want to be controlled by anyone group but have all of them have a say. The amount of power each group would have would be based on how many votes they got.

5. Votes
With this new system created the people voted in the first Russian congress, at this point the SR had the majority and the Bolsheviks held a minority. After this the Bolsheviks started to do something different from all the other parties, they supported the Soviet. The soviet had the support of the people and the fact that the Bolsheviks were supporting the Soviets gained them a lot of popularity. At the second Russian congress they actually gained a majority with 60% of all votes.

7. Petrograd Soviets
With the majority the Bolsheviks passed a motion that created a Soviet Government. Trotsky became the chairman for this government. Trotsky wasn’t in any major party, eventually joining the independent faction of the social Democrats. He was loved by the people, he spoke to them every night the week coming up to the coup. The soviet government was not supposed to be a dictatorship, it was supposed to be controlled by the people and all the parties.

8. Have you ever seen Trotsky and Borat in the same place?
Trotsky Borat

9. Leading up to…
The weeks leading up to the October Coup has been described as Russia decent into Anarchy. Strikes were happening across the country, Rising inflation made people who previously had not strike start to. This included city, hospital, and clerical workers. Even the unions and factory committees couldn’t control them. Looting, crime, drunkenness, vandalism, ethnic conflict and anti-jewish programs happened more frequently across the country.

10. Lenin and the Bolsheviks
The whole time the Provisional government and the soviets had been collaborating Lenin had been against it the whole time. Lenin didn’t want a democracy or equal power between parties he wanted a strong, repressive party, a dictatorship of the proletariat. So on September 14th a democratic conference was held to get the soviets to assume power. This would mean the Bolsheviks could no longer use a armed uprising but would have to compete for power within the soviet. The conference was a flop showing the soviets political inability.

11. Lenin and the Bolsheviks, the only supporters of the Soviets.

12. The Uprising
Lenin didn’t want a coalition government, even with the Bolshevik majority he still wanted the Bolsheviks to have complete power. So he called for his ministers to meet. 12 of the 21 inner-circle ministers met with him to vote on the armed uprising, Lenin won 10-2 so the October Coup was agreed to happen. Kerensky realised what was going top happen so tried to move soldiers to the front of WW1, the military denied and the provisional government lost all of its military control. The Bolshevik leaders, even though Lenin had got it passed, didn’t really want the Coup to happen. They were happy with waiting for the provisional government to occur and then taking power threw that but Lenin eventually convinced them to join him. The Bolsheviks red guards took over the cities strategic points, Lenin arrives and now convinced the insurrection begins.

13. The two sides – Provisional government
Originally the winter palace was protected by 3000 thousand soldiers but they didn’t have enough food to feed them. So these hungry soldier simply put down their guns and left to grab some tea. All that was left was about 300 men. So the provisional government sent out a request for help, the only people that responded was the Petrograd duma, so 300 deputies went to march there. They were going to stand in front of the Bolsheviks cannon but they were stopped less than a block away from were they started and sent back with a spanking.

14. The two sides – The Bolsheviks
The Bolsheviks weren't much better off. The Consisted of about 30,000 men, a large portion of this was made up of the Baltic sailors, who hadn't arrived till much later. The rest of the force refused to progress into they arrived so they ended up waiting. They intended to begin the Coup by firing upon the winter palace with he field guns on top of the peter and Paul fortress but arrived to find they were rusted and un-usable. They then used their own cannons but didn’t have any ammunition for them. With this idea failed they went to just start the insurrection, they had planned to use a red lantern but they didn’t have one. Eventually someone was sent off to find one but got lost along the way and got stuck in a bog. Je arrived back with a regular lantern so they begun anyway.

15. Bad timing
Due to all the problems with the Coup the time it took to organise was long and drawn out. The Bolsheviks had intended to attack before the next congress but ended up waiting to long. The Bolsheviks didn’t have the absolute majority at the congress but the other two leading parties denounced the Bolsheviks violence and ended up leaving early. This left a clear path for the Bolsheviks takeover and the Bolsheviks monopolise the Soviet.

16. The mood and takeover
The October Revolution was a really small thing. As said before it consisted of about 30,000 men but only about 10-15,000 actually participated in the storming. The vibe wasn’t like that of the February revolution, it was quite and went relatively unnoticed by the rest of the city. The storming of the palace was less of a storming and more of a house arrest, they snuck in threw a back door that had been left open and easily took the palace with little resistents.

17. A depiction of the storming of the winter palace.

18. Wine cellar and drunken fun
With the little resistants they found at the palace little energy was spent. So now they had thousands of sailors and soldiers who wanted a battle. This combined with the fact that they found the Places wine cellar lead to bad things. The palace was vandalised and the soldiers and sailors went around the noble communities and killed innocent people. Seeing this problems the leaders eventually poured the wine into the streets and set up machines gun to detour lotters. This did little to stop as people would drink out of the gutters so eventually martial law had to be put into place to stop the crimes.