The October Revolution

Two Powers, Eight Months of Collapse: How Russia Reached September 1917

In February 1917, a street march by women workers demanding bread grew, in just eight days, into the end of 304 years of Romanov rule. The Petrograd garrison refused to fire on the crowds and went over to the insurrection. Nicholas II, stranded on a train bound for the front, signed his abdication in Pskov. The Tsarist regime collapsed. And two powers rose in its place simultaneously.

One was the Provisional Government, formed by Duma deputies and headed by Prince Georgy Lvov. It set itself the task of governing until a Constituent Assembly could be elected and proclaimed freedom of speech and assembly, abolition of the death penalty, and an end to all religious, class, and national restrictions. But it had never been elected, and it insisted on keeping Russia in the war. The other was the Petrograd Soviet of Workers' and Soldiers' Deputies. The Soviet commanded the loyalty of the garrison, held de facto control of the railways and telegraph, and possessed what the Provisional Government never could: the trust of the street. On March 1, the Soviet's Order No. 1 mandated the election of soldiers' committees in every unit and declared that no officer's order was valid without the Soviet's approval, transferring effective control of armed force. Lvov himself distilled the arrangement: "The Government is an authority without power, while the Soviet is a power without authority." This was dual power.

The unstable coexistence cracked first in April, over the war. When it was revealed that Foreign Minister Pavel Milyukov had sent a secret note to the Allies pledging to fight on "to a victorious conclusion," armed workers and soldiers filled the streets of Petrograd. The government sacked Milyukov and War Minister Guchkov and brought Mensheviks and Socialist Revolutionaries (SRs) into a coalition cabinet. But the new government continued the war, now under the banner of "Revolutionary Defencism."

Lenin returned from exile on April 16. Stepping off the train at Finland Station, he issued the April Theses: "No support for the Provisional Government," "Not a parliamentary republic but a republic of Soviets," "Immediate peace." To the Menshevik and SR leadership that controlled the Soviet, this sounded unhinged. Even his own party was initially bewildered. But the Theses became the watershed that separated the Bolsheviks from every other political force.

Through the summer the situation deteriorated at accelerating speed. In June, War Minister Alexander Kerensky launched a major offensive, arguing that "victory would bring peace." It broke through on the first two days, then collapsed catastrophically in the face of a German counterattack, with close to 200,000 casualties. Entire units refused orders and melted to the rear. The economy, too, was disintegrating. The ruble, printed to finance the war, had driven prices to four times their 1914 level. Peasants hoarded grain rather than sell it for worthless paper. Petrograd's per-capita bread ration fell steadily through 1917; factories shut down for lack of fuel. In the countryside, peasants began seizing and dividing estates on their own: the government had neither the administrative capacity nor the will to stop them.

Then, in early July, soldiers of the First Machine Gun Regiment and Kronstadt sailors marched armed on the Tauride Palace, shouting "All Power to the Soviets!" — the July Days. The Provisional Government summoned loyal troops to suppress the demonstrations, then turned on the Bolsheviks, branding them "German agents," smashing the Pravda printing plant, and arresting party cadres. Lenin fled to Finland; Trotsky was jailed in the Kresty Prison. Kerensky became prime minister and proclaimed a republic, but the suppression of the July Days gave the government a temporary reprieve while giving the Bolsheviks a martyr's aura.

The decisive pivot came in late August (Old Style), when General Lavr Kornilov, the commander-in-chief, attempted a coup. Kornilov regarded the Petrograd Soviet as a nest of German agents and ordered General Krymov's 3rd Cavalry Corps to march on the capital. Kerensky, who had been suppressing the Soviet weeks earlier, now had to beg it for help. The Soviet formed a Committee for the Struggle Against Counterrevolution; Trotsky, just released from prison, joined it. Railway workers diverted and uncoupled Kornilov's troop trains; Bolshevik agitators infiltrated the advancing units and persuaded soldiers that "the general wants to kill the revolution." The corps dissolved before it reached Petrograd. Krymov shot himself; Kornilov was arrested.

The results were paradoxical. Kerensky distributed 40,000 rifles to Petrograd's workers — a large share of which remained in Bolshevik hands as the armament of the Red Guards. Bolshevik Party membership surged from roughly 24,000 in February to 200,000 by September. And on September 13 (Old Style, August 31), the Petrograd Soviet passed a Bolshevik resolution on power for the first time, giving the party a majority it had never held since February. On September 25, Trotsky was elected chairman of the Soviet. The same day, the Moscow Soviet adopted a Bolshevik resolution. The stage for October was set.

Kornilov's Gift: How the Soviets Became Bolshevik

In late August 1917, when General Lavr Kornilov sent a cavalry corps toward Petrograd, the Bolsheviks were underground. After the July Days, the party had been branded 'German spies,' Lenin was in hiding in Finland, and Trotsky was locked in Kresty Prison. But the Kornilov affair collapsed in five days, and everything turned upside down.

Only the Soviet had the real capacity to stop the coup. The Kerensky government was forced to appeal to the Soviet, and a 'Committee for the Struggle Against Counterrevolution' was formed. Its sole operational military force was the Bolshevik Military Organization. The government distributed 40,000 rifles to Petrograd workers; a large share ended up in the hands of Bolshevik Red Guards. Bolshevik prisoners, including Trotsky, were released at the Soviet's demand. Railway workers snarled Kornilov's troop trains, and agitators moved among his Caucasian mountaineers explaining that Petrograd held not rebels but a workers' soviet. General Krymov's corps melted away without firing a serious shot; Krymov himself, after meeting Kerensky, put a bullet through his heart.

The political reckoning was immediate. On 31 August (Old Style), the Petrograd Soviet passed a Bolshevik resolution by 279 votes to 115. It called for breaking the coalition with bourgeois parties, transferring all land to peasant committees, workers' control of industry, and an immediate democratic peace: the core of the Bolshevik programme. A month earlier such a vote would have been unthinkable. On 5 September, the Moscow Soviet passed the same resolution. Then Briansk, Samara, Saratov, Tsaritsyn, Minsk, Kiev, Tashkent: soviet after soviet across the country adopted Bolshevik resolutions. Party membership, 24,000 in February, passed 200,000 by September.

The old Soviet leadership, the Mensheviks and Socialist Revolutionaries (SRs), scrambled to manage the shift. From 14 to 22 September they convened an All-Russian Democratic Conference, stage-managed to mask their decline. The Bolsheviks, now the country's strongest political force, were allotted barely over a hundred seats out of more than 1,700. But the reality of the streets and factories bore no relation to the seating plan. Trotsky remarked that if the Bolsheviks were truly represented in proportion, a Soviet government would already be in place.

From his hideout in Helsingfors (Helsinki), Lenin sent two letters to the Central Committee before the Democratic Conference even opened. Written between 12 and 14 September, 'The Bolsheviks Must Assume Power' and 'Marxism and Insurrection' struck without preamble. In the first, Lenin declared: 'The Bolsheviks, having obtained a majority in the Soviets of Workers' and Soldiers' Deputies of both capitals, can and must take state power into their own hands.' They could hold it, he argued, by immediately proposing a democratic peace, giving the land to the peasants, and restoring the democratic liberties Kerensky had shattered. In Lenin's judgment, the majority of the people were already on the Bolshevik side.

The second letter, 'Marxism and Insurrection,' was more methodical. Lenin invoked Marx's thesis that insurrection must be treated as an art, then compared the objective conditions of July and September point by point. In July: (1) the Bolsheviks lacked a majority in the two capital soviets; (2) there was no country-wide revolutionary upsurge; (3) vacillation among enemies and irresolute allies was insufficient. Now all three conditions were met. 'History will not forgive us if we do not assume power now.'

The Central Committee's response, however, was cautious. On 15 September it discussed Lenin's letters and voted to preserve only a single copy, restricting circulation rather than broadcasting the call (6 in favor, 4 against, 6 abstentions). Kamenev moved a resolution opposing the course toward armed insurrection; it was defeated. The party leadership accepted the direction of insurrection in principle, but tensions over timing and method were already gathering. When Trotsky was elected chairman of the Petrograd Soviet on 8 October (25 September, Old Style), the man who would lead the insurrection's operational apparatus was in place, and Lenin's letters were no longer arguments on paper.

Secret Resolution, Leaked Uprising: The Central Committee's 10-to-2 Vote and the Birth of the Military Revolutionary Committee

In late September 1917, Lenin secretly returned to Petrograd from Helsinki. For the man who had been hiding in Finland since the failed July uprising, September had been agonizing. The soviets were already in Bolshevik hands, peasant rebellions were spreading, and a mutiny had erupted in the German navy. Yet the Central Committee seemed content to repeat resolutions. On October 10 (O.S.), wearing a wig and glasses as disguise, Lenin entered an apartment on the Karpovka embankment: the home of Menshevik Nikolai Sukhanov, whose wife was a Bolshevik, making the location possible. Twelve members attended that night: Lenin, Trotsky, Sverdlov, Stalin, Dzerzhinsky, Uritsky, Kollontai, Sokolnikov, Bubnov, Lomov, Kamenev, and Zinoviev. Sverdlov chaired.

Lenin opened bluntly: "An armed uprising is inevitable, and the time for it is fully ripe." His arguments were concrete: the German naval mutiny, evidence that Kerensky's government was preparing to surrender Petrograd to the Germans, the Bolshevik majority in both capitals' soviets, the nationwide spread of peasant uprisings, and the clear preparations for a second Kornilov-style counterrevolution. Lenin particularly stressed the "technical aspect": the political conditions were mature, yet a mood within the party treated systematic preparation of an uprising as something akin to a "political sin."

After debate lasting through the night, the vote was 10 to 2. Only Kamenev and Zinoviev voted no. Their argument: Bolshevik influence was rising and the party could win over a third of the seats in the Constituent Assembly. A premature uprising would gamble not only the party's fate but the fate of the Russian and international revolution. The German naval mutiny was encouraging but it was far too soon to expect active support from the European proletariat. Defeat would mean not a repeat of July but the defeat of the revolution itself.

Even among the ten who supported Lenin, positions varied. Trotsky did not oppose the uprising but argued it should be timed to the opening of the Second Congress of Soviets: let the Congress first declare the transfer of power, and if the Provisional Government refused, the uprising could proceed under the guise of defense. The Central Committee formed a Political Bureau to direct practical preparations. Composed of Lenin, Trotsky, Stalin, Sokolnikov, and Bubnov, it was the first Politburo in Bolshevik Party history.

The secret did not hold. Kamenev and Zinoviev circulated a dissenting statement, "On the Current Situation," to party organizations. On October 16 (O.S.), an expanded meeting of party activists reaffirmed the uprising resolution 20 to 2 (with 3 abstentions). Kamenev resigned from the Central Committee. Then came the decisive breach: on October 18 (O.S.), Maxim Gorky's newspaper Novaya Zhizn published a short piece by Kamenev revealing that the Central Committee had debated armed uprising and that he and Zinoviev had opposed it. The party's highest secret lay exposed to the Provisional Government on a newspaper page. Lenin, in fury, branded the two "strikebreakers" and demanded their expulsion, but the Central Committee settled for Zinoviev's resignation and a ban on Kamenev's public activity.

It was at precisely this moment that the Bolsheviks received an unexpected opportunity to conceal insurrectionary preparations within a legal Soviet body. On October 9 (O.S.), at the Petrograd Soviet Executive Committee, the Mensheviks and SRs proposed a "Committee of Revolutionary Defence." With German forces having taken Riga and the Baltic archipelago and now threatening the capital, the idea was to mobilize workers for defense. The Bolsheviks seized the proposal. In his report, Trotsky declared: "Long live the direct and open struggle for a revolutionary power throughout the country!" That was the slogan "Long live the armed uprising!" translated into the language of Soviet legality.

On October 12 (O.S.), the Soldiers' Section of the Petrograd Soviet approved the creation of the Military Revolutionary Committee (MRC). On October 16, the Soviet plenum formally ratified it. The appearance was carefully managed: the chairmanship went to the Left SR Pavel Lazimir rather than a Bolshevik. But the operational bureau was staffed by Bolshevik military specialists (Podvoisky, Antonov-Ovseenko, Sadovsky), and real command rested with Soviet chairman Trotsky. On paper the MRC encompassed the garrison, Baltic Fleet, railway union, factory committees, trade unions, Red Guard, and party military organizations. In practice the full committee barely met; Trotsky's bureau made every decision, with Sverdlov drawn into all critical ones.

The MRC's first task was dispatching commissars to every garrison unit, arms depot, and strategic point. On October 21 (O.S.), an MRC delegation visited General Polkovnikov, commander of the Petrograd Military District, and informed him that no troop movement orders would be executed without MRC approval. The Czech historian Michal Reiman observed that "this act would be considered by any nation a clear case of mutiny and insurrection." Yet the pretext of defending the capital gave the MRC political legitimacy, and the Provisional Government hesitated to strike first. The very body the Mensheviks had warned would create "dual power" was now becoming, under the cover of defense, the weapon of a single power.

Defense or Insurrection: Kerensky's Last Strike and Smolny's 24 Hours

At dawn on 24 October (Old Style), Kerensky tried to seize his last initiative. Government troops raided the printing house of the Bolshevik newspaper Rabochy Put, smashing the type and confiscating the run; the left-wing Soldat was shut by decree soon after. At the same time, the government cut the telephone lines to the Smolny Institute and ordered the arrest of the Military Revolutionary Committee's commissars. It was the most decisive preemptive strike the government had mounted since the July Days.

But the blow backfired. At 9 a.m., the MRC issued a statement denouncing the government's actions as a 'counterrevolutionary attempt,' and by 10 a.m. revolutionary soldiers had retaken the printing house and the paper was rolling again. Trotsky's MRC framed every response as defending the coming Congress of Soviets. The framing was not mere rhetoric. With the Second All-Russian Congress of Soviets set to open the next day, every move the MRC made was justified as protecting that body. Trotsky would later describe the approach in a phrase that became famous: 'defensive in form, aggressive in essence.'

At 3 p.m., Kerensky repeated a tactic from the July Days, ordering the Neva bridges raised to cut the working-class districts off from the city center. But the cadets who reached the Liteiny Bridge were confronted by armed workers and dispersed; the Nikolaevsky Bridge was briefly raised but soon taken by Red Guards. Two of the three main bridges were in MRC hands by evening. At 5 p.m., MRC troops seized the Central Telegraph, effectively severing the government's communications.

Through the night, Smolny turned into an armed camp. Trucks and motorcycles raced in and out; Bolsheviks and Red Guards streamed in from every district, carrying resolutions for soviet power. And Lenin, who had watched all this from hiding in mounting frustration, finally moved. In his customary disguise, a wig and bandaged face, he defied the Central Committee's order restricting his movements and set out for Smolny. The note he left for his host, Party worker Fofanova, read: 'I am going where you did not want me to go. Good-bye.' Lenin had insisted for weeks that the Congress of Soviets must be presented with a fait accompli, and now he was coming to write that fait accompli himself.

When the morning of 25 October broke, MRC forces took the capital's key points one after another, almost without resistance. Sailors from the Baltic Fleet who had pledged allegiance steamed into the Neva; the revolutionary crew of the cruiser Aurora took command of their ship and moved under the Nikolaevsky Bridge, neutralizing the last government strongpoint there. The telephone exchange, the State Bank, the Warsaw Station, and the electric power station all fell to the MRC in succession. At 10 a.m., Lenin sat down and wrote a proclamation as short as it was absolute: 'The Provisional Government has been deposed. … The cause for which the people have fought, the immediate offer of a democratic peace, the abolition of landed proprietorship, workers' control over production, the creation of a Soviet government, is assured.' Dispatched by telegraph across Russia under the title 'To the Citizens of Russia,' the document meant that the Congress of Soviets, due to open in a few hours, would face a completed transfer of power. Insurrection or defense, the distinction had already collapsed.

Two Dramas in One Night: The Palace's Final Hours and the Congress's First Votes

Two Dramas in One Night: The Palace's Final Hours and the Congress's First Votes

On the afternoon of 7 November, when Prime Minister Kerensky fled the capital in a Renault borrowed from the American embassy, what remained in the Winter Palace was a cabinet of fifteen ministers and a dwindling defensive force. Nikolai Kishkin, a Cadet appointed special plenipotentiary for order, dismissed the military district commander and installed General Bagratuni, but there were scarcely any troops left to command.

The units guarding the palace melted away through the afternoon. Cadets of the Mikhailovsky Artillery School took their guns and left. The Cossacks, the only regular troops to have sworn loyalty to the government, withdrew to their barracks, declaring that "Cossack blood would not be spilled in vain this time either, just as in July." By 8 p.m. all 200 Cossacks had gone. The remaining defenders numbered perhaps two to three companies of cadets, about 137 women of the 1st Petrograd Women's Battalion of Death, and forty St. George's Cross invalids led by a captain on prosthetic legs. A more basic deficit was food and officers: the cadets had not been fed lunch, and only five officers commanded the entire defense.

The Military Revolutionary Committee's forces were sluggish too. At 6:15 p.m. they postponed the assault because they could not find functioning artillery. At 9:40 p.m. the cruiser Aurora fired a single blank round from the Neva, a signal and nothing more. The Aurora's six-inch guns were physically incapable of aiming at the palace. The Peter and Paul Fortress then fired thirty-five live shells; two grazed the roof. At 6:30 p.m., MRC commissar Grigory Chudnovsky had entered the palace with the first surrender ultimatum, was briefly arrested by the cadets, then released on their surety. When he left, another group of cadets left with him.

The actual entry began after 11 p.m. The palace façade was barricaded but the rear doors on the Neva side stood open. Sailors and Red Guards poured through, and John Reed records that "like a black river" the crowd flowed into the building. Looting broke out in several rooms, but as Reed witnessed, the cry "This is the property of the People!" went up and the Red Guards restored order by themselves.

At 2:10 a.m. on 26 October, Vladimir Antonov-Ovseenko stood before the ministers in the Malachite Hall. "In the name of the Military Revolutionary Committee, I declare you arrested." Someone among the ministers replied, "We have not surrendered; we have merely submitted to force." The ministers were marched to the Peter and Paul Fortress. Near the Troitsky Bridge a crowd surrounded the convoy shouting "Cut off their heads and throw them into the Neva!" but the guards got them through safely.

All this unfolded while, a few kilometers away at the Smolny Institute, the Second All-Russian Congress of Soviets opened its first session. The Menshevik Fyodor Dan gaveled it to order at 10:45 p.m. The Bolsheviks already held the capital, though the Winter Palace had not yet fallen. Of 649 delegates, 390 were Bolsheviks, 160 SRs, and 72 Mensheviks.

The opening debate shaped the fate of the congress. Yuli Martov proposed an immediate cessation of the armed clash and the formation of a government of all socialist parties. Speaking for the Bolsheviks, Anatoly Lunacharsky agreed, and Martov's resolution passed unanimously. But then the Right SR and Menshevik leaders took the floor to denounce the insurrection as "a conspiracy against democracy" and "a usurpation of the people's will," and walked out. Trotsky called after them: "You are miserable bankrupts, your role is played out; go where you ought to go: into the dustbin of history."

The walkout was a decisive gift to the Bolsheviks. Martov's coalition proposal, now stripped of the votes of those who had left, failed. Martov himself, though he had sought compromise, could not break with his party's majority. With about seventy Menshevik-Internationalists and SR delegates gone, the Bolshevik-Left SR bloc commanded roughly 90 percent of the remaining seats.

Near 5 a.m. word arrived that the Winter Palace had fallen. The Congress adopted the appeal "All Power to the Soviets" and adjourned the first session at 6 a.m. When the second session opened that evening, Lenin appeared in public for the first time in four months. The Congress passed the Decrees on Peace and Land and formed the Council of People's Commissars, chaired by Lenin. His first words from the tribune were: "We shall now proceed to construct the socialist order."

The First Six Weeks: A Flood of Decrees and the Coming Collision of Two Legitimacies

In the first six weeks after taking power, Sovnarkom poured out decrees without pause. The Decree on the Eight-Hour Working Day of 11 November set a maximum eight-hour day and 48-hour week, regulating night work and overtime. It gave legal force to what workers had been imposing unilaterally in factory after factory since the February Revolution, though in practice, under the pressure of wartime arms production, many factories were already working a compromise of "eight hours in principle, extra hours as overtime." Two days later, on 13 November, the Decree on Social Insurance declared a comprehensive system covering all wage earners and the urban poor for sickness, injury, disability, old age, maternity, widowhood, orphanhood, and unemployment, with the entire cost borne by employers. Proclaimed with no state funds to implement it, the decree was closer to a declaration than a functioning program, but it served as proof that the Bolsheviks meant to inaugurate a workers' state in law, not only in rhetoric.

On 15 November the Declaration of the Rights of the Peoples of Russia, signed by Lenin and Stalin, proclaimed the equality and sovereignty of all peoples, including the right to secession and independent statehood. On 24 November the Decree on the Abolition of Estates and Civil Ranks swept away the entire tsarist hierarchy of titles and ranks, making all Russians simply "citizens of the Russian Republic." The Decree on Workers' Control of 27 November gave factory committees the legal authority to oversee management, and on 18 December two decrees abolished church jurisdiction over marriage, introduced civil marriage, and permitted divorce at the request of either spouse alone. Overnight, Russia acquired the most advanced family law in the world. Alexandra Kollontai, as Commissar of Social Welfare, drove much of this legislative work.

But even as this flood of decrees poured forth, the elections to the Constituent Assembly on 25 November painted an entirely different picture. In the largest exercise of universal suffrage in human history up to that date, the Socialist Revolutionaries won roughly 370 seats while the Bolsheviks took only about 175, roughly a quarter of the total. The Bolsheviks carried the two capitals, Petrograd and Moscow, and won majorities among the armies of the northern and western fronts, but the peasantry, who made up 80 percent of the population, voted overwhelmingly for the SRs.

One decisive complication made the result even more misleading. The electoral lists had been drawn up in mid-October, before the SR Party split into its right and left wings. Voters cast ballots for a single "SR" label, but many of the deputies elected were Right SRs hostile to soviet power, not the Left SRs who had already entered coalition with the Bolsheviks. Lenin seized on this contradiction immediately. In his "Theses on the Constituent Assembly," published in December, he declared that "the interests of this revolution stand higher than the formal rights of the Constituent Assembly." The soviet government, invested with authority by the Second Congress of Soviets, and the parliament elected by universal suffrage were two rival legitimacies, each claiming to speak for the people, now on a collision course from which only one could emerge.

Birth of the Cheka and the Constituent Assembly's Last Day: The Two Legitimacies at War

In December, two distinct crises converged on Sovnarkom. One was institutional: the impending Constituent Assembly. The other was a daily emergency: the sabotage and administrative paralysis inflicted by officials who refused to serve the new government. By late November, senior civil servants from the old ministries were boycotting their posts en masse, and non-cooperation in banking and the railways was quietly strangling the soviet government's executive capacity. The Petrograd Military Revolutionary Committee had handled counterrevolutionary threats until then, but it was a temporary body created for the insurrection. On 5 December, the MRC dissolved itself and transferred its functions to the corresponding department of VTsIK.

Two days later, on 7 December (O.S.), Sovnarkom gave Dzerzhinsky the task of designing a new institution. Ten men gathered at the first meeting Dzerzhinsky convened: among them Peters, Ksenofontov, Yevseyev, and Trifonov. The mandate they produced for the Cheka was 'to liquidate to the root all counterrevolutionary and sabotage activities and all attempts at them throughout Russia, to hand over counterrevolutionaries and saboteurs to the revolutionary tribunals, to develop measures to combat them and to apply those measures relentlessly.' The Cheka's powers, at first, were limited to preliminary investigation; its sanctions included confiscation, deprivation of ration cards, and the publication of lists of enemies of the people. The actual judicial punishment was the task of the revolutionary tribunals. Yet the decree already specified that both the People's Commissariat of Justice, under Isaac Steinberg, and the Commissariat of Internal Affairs, under Grigory Petrovsky, were to oversee the Cheka's activity. The tension over control of the new body was embedded from the start, even within the revolutionary government itself.

If the Cheka was an emergency response to the immediate crisis of sabotage, the Constituent Assembly was a collision over legitimacy itself. Once the election results came in on 12 December, the Bolshevik leadership had to face reality. The SRs had won an overwhelming majority with over 57% of the vote, while the Bolsheviks took about a quarter. The catch was in the ballot itself. The electoral lists had been drawn up in mid-October, before the SR party had split into its pro-Bolshevik Left and anti-Bolshevik Right wings, so voters could not distinguish between them: they simply voted for the single 'SR' line. For Lenin, this was decisive proof that the Assembly no longer represented the real will of the people. His 'Theses on the Constituent Assembly,' published in Pravda on 26 December, declared that 'a republic of Soviets is a higher form of democracy than the usual bourgeois republic with a Constituent Assembly' and that 'the interests of this revolution stand higher than the formal rights of the Constituent Assembly.'

Inside the party, the position was not unanimous. Kamenev, Rykov, and Milyutin argued against a hard line on the Assembly, and as late as early December the moderates still held a majority among the Bolshevik delegates to the Assembly. But at the 11 December Central Committee meeting, Lenin secured control by having the faction's bureau reelected. Meanwhile, the ground was being prepared. On 28 November, Sovnarkom declared the Constitutional Democratic Party 'a party of the enemies of the people' and ordered its leaders arrested. On 23 December, martial law was imposed in Petrograd, and the 6th Tukums Latvian Rifle Regiment was assigned to guard the Tauride Palace. A quorum of 400 delegates was fixed, deliberately delaying the opening.

At 4 p.m. on 18 January (5 January, O.S.), the Constituent Assembly finally convened at the Tauride Palace. Viktor Chernov of the Right SRs was elected chairman with 244 votes against 153 for Maria Spiridonova of the Left SRs. Sverdlov, speaking as chairman of VTsIK, opened the session and demanded that the Assembly adopt the 'Declaration of the Rights of the Working and Exploited People.' This document would have committed the Assembly to endorsing soviet power and the Decrees on Peace, Land, and Workers' Control, effectively subordinating itself to the soviets. The Assembly rejected it 237 to 136. The Bolshevik and Left SR delegates walked out.

The remaining Right SR deputies carried on through the night. Chernov rushed through an SR-drafted land reform law, the proclamation of a federal democratic republic, and an appeal to the Entente for a democratic peace: measures the SRs had failed to enact during their months in the Provisional Government. But at 4:40 a.m., Anatoly Zhelezniakov, the anarchist sailor commanding the guard, approached Chernov and said: 'The guard is tired. I propose that you close the meeting and let everybody go home.' The next day, the deputies found the doors of the Tauride Palace locked. On 19 January, VTsIK decreed the dissolution of the Constituent Assembly, and the Third All-Russian Congress of Soviets, convened shortly afterward, ratified it.

Public reaction was remarkably muted. A demonstration in support of the Assembly took place in Petrograd, but it was far smaller than the organizers had hoped for and consisted largely of middle-class students, civil servants, and professionals. As the historian Orlando Figes argues, to the mass of peasants the Constituent Assembly 'was only a distant thing in the city, dominated by the "chiefs" of the various parties, which they did not understand, and was quite unlike their own political organizations.' The revolution had forced a choice between two forms of legitimacy, parliamentary and soviet, and that choice had already been made on the night of 7 November.

What Was Settled, What Was Left Open: A Century of Historical Debate

What the October Revolution settled and what it left open has been the most fiercely contested question among historians ever since November 1917. Three large questions stand at the centre of the debate.

First, the character of the event itself. Soviet official historiography called October the 'Great October Socialist Revolution' and described it as the necessary inauguration of the world-historical transition from capitalism to socialism. The Cold War Western 'traditionalist' school, by contrast, and Richard Pipes most sharply, defined October as 'a classical modern coup d'état accomplished without mass support.' Pipes argued that the Bolsheviks used the democratic shell of the soviets to seize power and then promptly replaced them with one-party dictatorship. From the 1970s onward, the 'revisionist' historians, above all Alexander Rabinowitch, drew on Soviet archives to argue that in the summer and autumn of 1917 the Bolsheviks genuinely won broad popular support among Petrograd workers and soldiers, and that the party itself was not a closed monolith obeying Lenin's will but a relatively open and democratic organization. Rabinowitch's research supported the conclusion that the Bolsheviks came to power because they were the party that answered the mass demands, peace, land, and bread, most consistently. Orlando Figes, in A People's Tragedy (1996), tried to bring the two currents together, but ultimately took an ambivalent position: while 1917 itself was a chain of contingencies, 'from the October insurrection and the establishment of a Bolshevik dictatorship to the Red Terror and the Civil War, there is a line of historical inevitability.'

Second: what, then, did the revolution actually achieve? On the period between November 1917 and January 1918, scholars across schools agree on a good deal. The Decree on Peace opened the path to immediate armistice talks and declared the abolition of secret diplomacy. The Decree on Land transferred landlord estates to the peasantry without compensation. The eight-hour day, workers' control, the declaration of national self-determination, and the women's rights legislation, civil marriage, freedom of divorce, maternity protection, were social measures without parallel in any other country at the time. How much of this was hollowed out by civil war and bureaucratization is a separate question, and it is exactly that question that opens the third debate.

Third: was the state born of the October Revolution fated to become Stalinism? The traditionalist school argues that Lenin's one-party dictatorship, the founding of the Cheka, and the dissolution of the Constituent Assembly had already fixed that path. The revisionists disagree. In a 2017 essay for the London Review of Books, Sheila Fitzpatrick contended that the specific conditions, civil war, blockade, the failure of international revolution, eroded soviet democracy, and that the outcome owed less to Bolshevik ideology than to the institutionalization of a wartime mobilization state. From this perspective, the hollowing-out of the soviets was the tragic product of civil war and isolation, not the inescapable logic of October itself.

After the Soviet Union dissolved in 1991, the question of October's legitimacy grew more complex than the old Cold War arguments allowed. The studies that appeared around the centenary in 2017 all rejected the old framework of 'historical inevitability' and stressed contingency and multiple possibilities. Yet beneath that consensus lay the heavy shadow of Eric Hobsbawm's 'short twentieth century': the October Revolution as 'history's great dead end, like the Inca Empire,' as one contributor to a centenary collection put it. More than a hundred years on, historians agree on this much: on 7 November 1917 the possibility that ordinary people could overturn the order of the world became a fact, and understanding how that possibility became real, and how it failed, is work that is not yet finished.