The October Revolution

Dan Snow (0:03)

At 10 o'clock on the evening of Wednesday the 10th of October 1917, a rather unlikely figure made his way through the streets of Petrograd. He was dressed as a priest, but beneath the clerical collar and the bushy wig of hair was not a man of the cloth, not a disciple of the Prince of Peace. Instead, it was Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov, Lenin, Russia's most wanted revolutionary.

He was in hiding. He had just risked all by returning from exiles. He was disguised and he was on his way to one of the most important meetings in the history of the world, one that would change the course of the 20th and 21st centuries.

His destination was 32 Karpovka, a small apartment block overlooking the Neva River. The apartment belonged to Nikolai Sukhanov, a prominent Menshevik journalist. He was a fierce critic of Lenin's Bolsheviks. They were both parties of the radical left. It's precisely because Sukhanov was so hostile to Lenin's party that the apartment was considered a safe place for this meeting to go ahead. And there was another interesting reason why it was a perfect venue. And that's because Sukhanov's wife, Galina Flagsaman, was a secret Bolshevik. And that evening she had gently stressed to her husband that he should spend the night near his office downtown, sparing himself the long journey home through a city where trams were unreliable. And so, while Sukhanov was away, Lenin slipped into his living room and found a table lit by a flickering lamp around which 12 men sat.

They were the members of the Bolshevik Central Committee, a small group at the summit of a small revolutionary party. And yet, in this modest department, they were about to make a decision with staggering consequences. Lenin always understood the power of simplicity, and tonight he had arrived with a very simple demand, an armed uprising, a coup to take over the government of Russia.

For an hour, he argued that the time for waiting was over. Russia's shambolic, provisional revolutionary government was divided, it was weak. The political situation was shifting by the day. The Bolsheviks, he insisted, had to seize power before the opportunity disappeared. He was impatient, he was angry. At times he struggled to contain his temper. Occasionally his fist came down hard on the table. We must seize power now. Now is the time was the essence of his argument. Not after another congress, not after an assembly has time to meet and gather legitimacy, not wait until the government perhaps catch a lucky break, a good harvest, or success in the war with Germany. They had to seize power now. But there was resistance in the room. Lenin's oldest comrades, Gryogiy Zinoviev and Lev Kamenev, warned that an uprising, an armed uprising, was really a gamble with the future of the revolution. Why launch a coup, they said, when the Bolsheviks might win elections, and might win a majority in a new parliament within weeks? Why risk everything when there wasn't really the popular demand for a violent uprising? If it failed, everyone in that room would surely face execution. The argument went on and on. Seven and a half hours passed. But as the night wore on, Lenin slowly won the doubters' round. Just before dawn, he asked for a vote. Two voted against, ten in favor.

Lenin reached across the table and picked up a pencil. There was no sheaf of paper at the time, but he did find a children's exercise book. And in that, he wrote the resolution that would commit the Bolshevik leadership to armed insurrection. A few lines of scrawled text in a child's notebook. That was the enormous decision. The decision taken not in a vast public meeting, in a parliament, or on a battlefield. But around a small table in a private apartment, not much of Petrograd slept. The planning began, and within days, the Bolsheviks would move to take control of the capital. The October Revolution was about to begin. But why was Lenin and his small group of men even in a position to take over the government of one of the biggest empires on earth? What was going on? Why was Russia in such turmoil in 1917?

How did this war-weary empire slip from the grip of the Romanov family and into that of the Bolsheviks?

How has this revolution come to determine the course of history since? In this episode, we're going back to St. Petersburg, going back to Petrograd as it was called at the time in 1917, a time of revolution and war, when there were competing visions for Russia's future. We're going to look at the extraordinary chain of events that culminated in the Bolsheviks seizure of power. To help us understand why this happened, we're really pleased to be joined by the historian and author Victor Sebestyen. His book, The Russian Revolution, brings together the personalities, the politics and the human drama behind one of the defining events of modern history. He's also the author, more recently, of Weimar Germany, Death of a Democracy, there you go, which was published earlier this year and we're going to be having him back on soon to discuss all that. Now, let's get into it.