Bolshevik Revolution

The Bolshevik Revolution—also called the October Revolution—took place on 25 October 1917 in the Julian calendar then used in Russia (7 November in the Gregorian calendar). Led by Vladimir Lenin and organized militarily by Leon Trotsky through the Petrograd Soviet's Military Revolutionary Committee, Red Guards and mutinous sailors seized key points in the capital, including the Winter Palace, and arrested members of the Provisional Government headed by Alexander Kerensky.

The revolution was the second of two upheavals in 1917. The earlier February Revolution had forced the abdication of Tsar Nicholas II and produced a dual-power arrangement between the Provisional Government and the soviets (workers' and soldiers' councils). The Bolsheviks exploited public exhaustion with World War I, food shortages, and unfulfilled land reform, campaigning on the slogan "Peace, Land, Bread" and "All Power to the Soviets."

Immediately after taking power, the Second All-Russian Congress of Soviets approved the Decree on Peace and the Decree on Land. In March 1918 the new government signed the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk with the Central Powers, ceding large territories to exit the war. A Russian Civil War (1918–1922) followed between the Red Army and the loosely allied White forces, with intervention by Allied powers including Britain, France, the United States, and Japan. The Bolsheviks prevailed and, on 30 December 1922, formally established the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics.

For IR and history researchers, the revolution matters as the origin point of Marxist-Leninist statecraft, the inspiration for the Communist International (Comintern) founded in 1919, and a structural cause of twentieth-century ideological bipolarity. It also produced lasting doctrines—democratic centralism, the vanguard party, and "socialism in one country" under Stalin—that shaped Cold War politics and decolonization movements well into the late twentieth century.