The actual seizure of power passed off so smoothly that many did not realise it had taken place. For this reason, the enemies of the October Revolution present it as a coup. In fact, there are two reasons why it went so smoothly – one technical, the other political. The technical preparations for the final offensive were meticulously carried out by the Military Revolutionary Committee under the leadership of Trotsky. The basic rule, as always in warfare, was to concentrate, at the decisive moment and at the decisive point, an overwhelming superiority of force, and then strike hard. But this did not exhaust the question of tactics in the insurrection. The element of surprise and of manoeuvring to deceive the enemy as to the real intentions of the revolutionaries played a role here, as in any other kind of military operation. Every step was presented as a defensive move, but in practice, the character of the insurrection was necessarily offensive, moving swiftly to take one position after another, taking the enemy unawares and off guard.

But the real reason why the insurrection was carried off so quickly and almost painlessly was neither military nor technical, but political. Nine-tenths of the work of the insurrection had already been accomplished beforehand – by winning a clear majority in the workers’ and soldiers’ soviets. In the moment of truth, the Provisional Government, like the tsarist regime in February, had no one to defend it. The real position at the moment of the insurrection is shown by the statements of one of the main players – Kerensky. In an extract pregnant with unconscious irony, he writes:

The night of 24-25 October was a time of tense expectation. We were waiting for troops to arrive from the front. They had been summoned by me in good time and were due in Petrograd on the morning of 25 October. But instead of the troops, all we got were telegrams and telephone messages saying that the railways were being sabotaged.

By morning (25 October) the troops had not yet arrived. The central telephone exchange, post office, and most of the government offices were occupied by detachments of Red Guards. The building that housed the Council of the Republic, which only the day before had been the scene of an endless and stupid discussion, had also been occupied by Red sentries. (A. Kerensky, Memoirs, p. 437.)

The same Kerensky who had earlier boasted to the British ambassador that he was just waiting for the Bolsheviks to make a move, in order to put them down, now found himself with no troops to do the job and was obliged to flee Petrograd in a car graciously lent by the American embassy.

This is not the place to repeat the history of the insurrection, which is sufficiently well known from the writings of John Reed and Leon Trotsky. What is astonishing about the October Revolution is the degree to which it was played out in the full glare of public attention. If people were not aware that the Bolsheviks intended to take power, then the public declarations of Kamenev and Zinoviev would soon have alerted them to the fact. The French paper Entente, published in Petrograd on 15 November, one week after the revolution, commented:

“The Government of Kerensky discusses and hesitates. The Government of Lenin and Trotsky attacks and acts.

“This last is called a Government of Conspirators, but that is wrong. Government of usurpers, yes, like all revolutionary Governments which triumph over their adversaries. Conspirators – no!

“No! They did not conspire. On the contrary, openly, audaciously, without mincing words, without dissimulating their intentions, they multiplied their agitation, intensified their propaganda in the factories, the barracks, at the Front, in the country, everywhere, even fixing in advance the date of their taking up arms, the date of their seizure of the power…

“They – conspirators? Never…” (Quoted by J. Reed in Ten Days That Shook the World, p. 107.)

Towards the evening of 24 October, groups of Red Guards began to occupy the print shops of the bourgeois press, where they printed large numbers of revolutionary proclamations as well as Bolshevik papers like Rabochy Put’ and Soldat. Soldiers ordered to attack the print shops refused to obey orders. This was the general picture in Petrograd. Resistance was practically non-existent. As sleepy delegates to the Congress watched from doorways – some with alarm, others with expectation – detachments of soldiers and sailors departed from the Smolny Palace to key points of the city. By one o’clock in the morning, they had occupied the telegraph agency. Half an hour later, the post office was taken. At five o’clock, the telephone exchange followed. By ten o’clock in the morning, a cordon was thrown around the Winter Palace, where some resistance was anticipated. In point of fact, it fell, not with a bang, but a whimper.

The October insurrection merely legitimised what was a self-evident reality. Everyone knew that the Bolsheviks and their allies would have a decisive majority at the Congress of Soviets. The decision was therefore made that the insurrection should coincide with the opening of the Congress. The formal aspect here quite clearly had to take second place to the exigencies of a military operation. The notion that the question of an armed uprising should be determined by the result of a public debate in the Congress is as ludicrous as would be the demand that the plans for battle should be publicly debated in parliament in time of war. Anyone who demanded such a thing would undoubtedly be branded a traitor and probably locked up in an asylum for the criminally insane. Yet such considerations do not prevent the critics of October from complaining that Lenin and Trotsky did not wait for the formal approval of the Congress of Soviets before launching the offensive. Such arguments are without a shred of validity. The opinion of the overwhelming majority of the workers and soldiers was already well known: that the Soviets should take power. That question had been settled in advance, and the Congress simply put a stamp on it. Once this central question was resolved, the issue of when and how the rising should be carried out – a purely technical and military decision – had to be determined by the appropriate bodies, in this case the Military Revolutionary Committee, according to the rules, not of formal democracy, but of war.

At 2.35 p.m., Trotsky opened an emergency session of the Petrograd Soviet. Stepping up to the tribune, he shouted the words everyone had been waiting for:

On behalf of the Military Revolutionary Committee, I declare that the Provisional Government no longer exists! Long live the Military Revolutionary Committee!

One after another, he listed the conquests of the insurrection, pausing only to explain the situation of the Winter Palace:

The Winter Palace has not been taken, but its fate will be decided momentarily… In the history of the revolutionary movement I know of no other examples in which such huge masses were involved and which developed so bloodlessly. The power of the Provisional Government headed by Kerensky, was dead and awaited the blow of the broom of history which had to sweep it away… The population slept peacefully and did not know that at this time one power was replaced by another. (Quoted in A. Rabinowitch, The Bolsheviks Come to Power, p. 278.)

At that point, Lenin entered the hall, still disguised as a workman. In the middle of his speech, Trotsky paused and turned to the man to whom he was now completely united as a comrade-in-arms. All the differences of the past forgotten in the heat of struggle. “Long live Comrade Lenin, back with us again,” were Trotsky’s words as he ceded the speakers’ platform to Lenin, who now addressed the delegates for the first time. In his historic speech to the Congress of Soviets on 25 October, 1917, he said:

Comrades, the workers’ and peasants’ revolution, about the necessity of which the Bolsheviks have always spoken, has been accomplished.

What is the significance of this workers’ and peasants’ revolution? Its significance is, first of all, that we shall have a Soviet government, our own organ of power, in which the bourgeoisie will have no share whatsoever. The oppressed masses will themselves create a power. The old state apparatus will be shattered to its foundations and a new administrative apparatus set up in the form of the Soviet organisations.

From now on, a new phase in the history of Russia begins, and this, the third Russian Revolution, should in the end lead to the victory of socialism.

One of our urgent tasks is to put an immediate end to the war. It is clear to everybody that in order to end this war, which is closely bound up with the present capitalist system, capital itself must be fought.

We shall be helped in this by the world working-class movement, which is already beginning to develop in Italy, Britain and Germany.

The proposal we make to international democracy for a just and immediate peace will everywhere awaken an ardent response among the international proletarian masses. All the secret treaties must be immediately published in order to strengthen the confidence of the proletariat.

Within Russia a huge section of the peasantry have said that they have played long enough with the capitalists, and will now march with the workers. A single decree putting an end to landed proprietorship will win us the confidence of the peasants. The peasants will understand that the salvation of the peasantry lies only in an alliance with the workers. We shall institute genuine workers’ control over production.

We have now learned to make a concerted effort. The revolution that has just been accomplished is evidence of this. We possess the strength of mass organisation, which will overcome everything and lead the proletariat to the world revolution.

We must now set about building a proletarian socialist state in Russia.

Long live the world socialist revolution! (stormy applause.) (LCW, Meeting of the Petrograd Soviet of Workers’ and Soldiers Deputies, 25 October (7 November), 1917, vol. 26, pp. 239-40.)