Members of a Women’s Battalion of Death, some of the last defenders of the Provisional Government.
November 7 1917, Petrograd--The Bolsheviks launched their planned coup on the night of November 6, with Red Guards and other forces under command of the Bolshevik’s Milrevkom quickly seizing key positions throughout the city--bridges, railroads, and almost all forms of communication. The Petrograd garrison, no friend to Kerensky, largely let the Red Guards do this, and a small number even helped them do so. By late in the morning of the 7th, the Bolsheviks had seized most important points in the city, excepting the Winter Palace, home of the Provisional Government. Around 10AM, Kerensky slipped out of the Winter Palace in a car illegally seized from the American embassy (and flying the American flag), heading off to the front in an attempt to rally the front-line troops to fight the Bolsheviks.
Lenin wanted to swiftly take the Winter Palace and announce the toppling of the Provisional Government before the Congress of Soviets opened later that day; Lenin’s entire plan had been to present the Bolshevik takeover as a fait accompli. However, the Bolsheviks were unable to take the Winter Palace the whole day, for increasingly laughable reasons. The Palace was defended by a handful of demoralized and poorly-trained cadets, along with one of the Women’s Battalions of Death, and would have provided little resistance to a determined assault. However, the few shots coming out of the Winter Palace intimidated the Red Guards outside into complacency. Furthermore, the Bolsheviks, with too much of a sense of drama for their own good, wasted an inordinate amount of time on symbolic gestures leading up to the assault: the Red Guards felt they had to wait for sailors from the Baltic Fleet to join them, wasted hours trying to find a red lantern to signal the assault, and tried to use museum-piece guns from the Peter and Paul Fortress to shell the Winter Palace.
After extensive delays, a bombardment of sorts began at 9:40 PM, with a single blank shot from the cruiser Aurora. An hour later, the Congress of Soviets finally opened. It seemed for a moment that an all-Soviet government could finally be formed, but many Mensheviks and SRs walked out in protest at the attack on the Provisional Government. The last Menshevik opposition left at around 2AM, leaving the Bolsheviks in control of the Congress. At around the same time, the Bolsheviks seized the Winter Palace and arrested Kerensky’s ministers, meeting little resistance; no more than five died in the brief struggle.
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Sources include: Richard Pipes, The Russian Revolution; Orlando Figes, A People’s Tragedy.
