How the Bolsheviks Seized and Rewrote 1917

0:00Finding a hoodie that lasts through the season can be tough. The American Giant Classic Fulza Putty is made to last a lifetime, so you can count on it year after year. The iconic Classic Fulza Putty is the jacket that started it all for American Giant. Custom heavyweight fleece and side panels for mobility make it the best hoodie ever. Every American Giant piece is made in America and designed to last. No exceptions. The result is durable clothing. Like the premium slub crew tea, no BS high-rise paint, and slim rough neck paint, they become part of your life. Snag the hoodie that will bring you comfort for life. The American Giant Classic Fulza. Save 20% off your first order at american-giant.com when you use code staple20 at checkout. Picture this. It is a freezing night in Petrograd, a massive warships that's out in the harbor, and the physical tension across the city is just it's palpable. This feel it in the air. Exactly, and suddenly a single shot rings out. The shot itself is a blank, yet that single empty boom from the cruiser Aurora signals the

1:06collapse of an entire government overnight, and it effectively alters the trajectory of the 20th century. Welcome to the deep dive, we are thrilled you're joining us today to explore an event that reshaped the modern world, the October Revolution of 1917. And our source material for this analysis is a comprehensive Wikipedia article covering the timeline, the subsequent myth making, and the enormous global aftermath of the Bolshevik takeover. So the mission for today is to strip away, you know, a century of intense propaganda, cinematic dramatizations, and heavy historical bias. We're going to look at what actually happened on the ground in Russian during those days, and unpack how a highly organized minority managed to seize control of the largest country on Earth. But before we begin mapping out that timeline, there is a necessary parameter I need to establish with you, our listener. The source material we're examining today contains highly politically charged content. Yeah, very much so. It details left wing, Marxist-Leninist ideologies, right wing counter-movements, totalitarian actions, and events that resulted in immense human

2:11suffering. I want to be completely explicit here. Another of us is taking a side. Absolutely not. We are not endorsing nor are we condemning any of the political viewpoints, ideologies, or actions described in these texts. Our sole objective today is to impartially convey the historical facts, the sequence of events, and the varying historical argument exactly as they're presented in our original source material. Our role is strictly to analyze the history. Okay, let's unpack this. To understand how a revolution of this magnitude actually materializes, we have to look closely at the pressure cooker that set the stage in 1917. And it really was a pressure cooker. Because by the time October rolls around, the situation in Russia is just catastrophic. The country had already been through the February revolution earlier that year, which forced Tsar Nicholas II to abdicate. But the Russian provisional government that replaced the monarchy eventually led by Alexander Karinsky was failing under the weight of its own decisions. Yeah, the structural foundation of the country was collapsing. And much of that collapse stems from a single, a really fatal policy choice.

3:17The provisional government chose to keep Russia in World War I. Karinsky felt bound by financial and military obligations to Western allies. And he feared that surrendering, or even pulling out, would seed vast amounts of Russian territory and give Germany total dominance in the region. He attempted to project international strength. Right, but ironically, staying in a meat grinder of a war is exactly what broadcasted his government's internal weakness to domestic revolutionaries. And the economic realities detailed in the source material, they paid a stark picture of that weakness. If you were an average worker in a Russian city at this time, your real wages had plummeted by 50 percent compared to pre-war levels. 50 percent. Yeah, and the national debt had ballooned to an unfathomable 50 billion rubles. And the industrial sector was just grinding to a halt. If you lived in a major industrial hub, like the Urels or the Donbass, 50 percent of all enterprises were completely shut down. So you have mass unemployment intersecting with severe inflation and a total breakdown of

4:18the supply chain. People in the urban centers simply could not acquire food. The agricultural sector was severely depleted because the workforce had been conscripted. And that labor shortage leads directly to one of the most, I think, haunting details from our source text, the Boba riots. Which were essentially violent hunger riots. Exactly, nearly 50 percent of healthy men had been sent off to the front lines. So the demographics of the cities shifted entirely. The people left behind were primarily the soldiers' wives. And these women were starving. Sturving. Their government allowances were either arriving late or they were entirely insufficient to keep up with the hyperinflation. When their appeals to the government went completely ignored, they reached a breaking point. How to do something. Right. So they began rioting against local shop owners who they suspected of hoarding goods or price gouging. And when the police intervened to break up the crowds, these women fought back in the streets with rakes, sticks, rocks, and just their bare fists. It is a raw visceral display of societal desperation. And while the provisional government is floundering

5:21to manage this escalating domestic crisis, a fascinating geopolitical maneuver is unfolding in the background. The German plot. Exactly. The German government, seeking any advantage on the eastern front, sees an opportunity to destabilize Russia from the inside. They are aware of a highly influential Russian Marxist dissident living in exile in Switzerland named Vladimir Lenin. So they make a move. The German military high command deliberately permits Lenin, along with his inner circle, to travel through German territory in a famously sealed train carriage to get back to Petrograd. They effectively weaponized Lenin's ideology. They shipped him into the Russian capital knowing his presence and his demand for an immediate end of the war would severely disrupt the Russian military effort and just paralyze Karinsky's government. If we connect this to the bigger picture, the German strategy worked flawlessly, but it also created the perfect vacuum for the Bolsheviks to exploit. The provisional government kept launching failed military offenses, completely ignoring the desperate pleas for bread and peace. And Lenin capitalized on that

6:27specific anger. To understand the scale of their momentum, the Bolshevik party went from having roughly 24,000 members in February to a staggering 200,000 members by September. They were highly organized, rapidly expanding and entirely focused on dismantling the current state, which brings us to the actual events of October. The spark. Right. The spark that ignited the final takeover happened on October 24. Karinsky makes a move to assert control. He sends loyal soldiers to shut down Bolshevik printing presses, specifically targeting a newspaper called Roboki Putt, which translates to workers' path. Yes, the government troops smashed the printing equipment and seized thousands of papers. This is a critical moment of miscalculation by the state. Wait, if the provisional government knew the Bolsheviks were an existential threat, why send troops just to smash a printing press? Why not execute a coordinated arrest of leadership? They simply did not have the military capital to pull off a decapitation strike. The Petrograd garrison was heavily radicalized and largely loyal to the

7:30Soviets. The workers council, not the government. I see. Karinsky tried to project state authority by attacking the presses, but he couldn't back it up with overwhelming force. So when the Bolsheviks simply sent their own aligned soldiers to retake the printing press just an hour later, the government had no response. It's signaled to the revolutionaries that the state apparatus was practically defenseless. And the ultimate symbol of that defenseless state is Karinsky's escape plan. The source text highlights a detail that borders on the absurd. Alexander Karinsky, the head of the Russian government, realizes the capital is falling, and he needs to physically leave Petrograd to find loyal frontline troops. But he doesn't leave in a heavily armored motorcade. No. The railways are blocked. His own military infrastructure is compromised. And he is desperately searching for any functioning vehicle. He ultimately flees the city in a borrowed Renault car procured from the American embassy. Yes. Consider the implications of that image. The leader of a global empire fleeing his own capital in a borrowed foreign car because his

8:34own state infrastructure has entirely evaporated. It's unbelievable. Here's where it gets really interesting. Because the way the actual climax of this event is portrayed in our cultural memory is fundamentally at odds with the historical reality. Absolutely. When most people hear about the storming of the Winter Palace, the envision an epic, bloody chaotic siege, thousands of revolutionaries charging the gates under heavy artillery fire. But the source text completely dismantles that narrative. The actual assault was remarkably anticlimactic. The operation was delayed for hours simply because the Bolshevik forces couldn't locate any functioning artillery to initiate the bombardment. Right. And that iconic moment we mentioned at the start, the cruiser Aurora firing its guns at 945 pm to signal the charge was just a blank shot. There was no devastating naval bombardment of the palace. And the forces defending the seat of government were not elite, hardened guards. The defense consisted of military cadets, a few caustacks who largely abandoned their

9:36posts as the night wore on and 140 strong women's battalion. When faced with a crowd of roughly 40,000 attackers, these remaining defenders surrendered with barely a fight. The takeover of Petrograd was for all intents and purposes, bloodless. It was not a chaotic riot. It was a methodical, administrative occupation planned by the Military Revolutionary Committee. They just walked in. Exactly. Bolshevik aligned forces simply walked in and occupied the central telegraph stations, the railway hubs, the bridges, and the major power plants. They faced almost zero opposition because the provisional government had thoroughly alienated every demographic that might have otherwise defended them. The military occupation was quiet and efficient. But the political maneuvering the following day is what cemented their power. The second Congress of Soviets convened its opening session. Now, a Soviet was essentially a grassroots council representing workers, peasants, and soldiers. Right. And because they were elected directly by the lower classes, the Soviets held immense legitimate authority in the eyes of the public, far more than the

10:40unelected provisional government. So when the Congress opens, the moderate socialists groups, like the Mensheviks and the right-wing socialist revolutionaries are outraged, they view the Bolshevik military action as an illegal unilateral seizure of power, and they walk out of the Congress in protest. And by walking out, the moderates effectively handed total legislative control of the Soviet apparatus to the Bolsheviks and their remaining allies. A massive tactical error. Truly. As the moderates are physically leaving the hall, Leon Totsky delivers a legendary theatrical taunt. He shouts after them, you are pitiful, isolated individuals, you are bankrupt, your role is played out. Go where you belong from now on into the dustbin of history. What's fascinating here is how immediately the new Soviet government realized that a quiet administrative occupation of telegraph offices does not inspire the working class. No, it doesn't look great on a poster. Right. To legitimize their rule, they needed a founding mythology. So they systematically manufactured one. In 1920, just three years after the fact, the state staged a massive

11:42historical reenactment of the storming of the Winter Palace involving thousands of performers watched by 100,000 spectators. And that massive theatrical performance then became the visual blueprint for Sir Guy Eisenstein's highly influential 1928 silent film, October. Eisenstein's brilliant cinematography spread this heavily dramatized, politically sanitized version of events around the globe. It convinced generations that the Winter Palace assault was a fierce, heroic, casualty heavy battle of the proletariat overthrowing the elite. The falsification of history became a core utility of the regime, reaching its zenith under Joseph Stalin. The source material points specifically to the 1938 publication of the history of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. In this state mandated text, the events of 1917 were completely rewritten. Key architects of the revolution, notably Leon Trotsky, were retroactively erased from their leadership roles and painted as opportunistic foreign spies. Unbelievable. Conversely, Stalin, who played a relatively

12:42secondary administrative role during the actual October events, was elevated in the text to appear as the chief disciplinarian and co-leader of the revolution alongside Lenin. They literally edited the architects of the revolution out of the history books. But while they were heavily managing their public relations, they were simultaneously enacting radical sweeping changes to Russian society overnight. Sweeping is almost an understatement. Yeah, the text details a dizzying array of reforms the new government instantly mandated. They nullified all civil ranks, aristocratic titles, and legal designations of class inequality. They eliminated the centuries-old tradition of saluting officers in the army. They introduced a legal eight-hour workday, which was a monumental demand of the urban workers. But they also pushed into extreme structural overhauls. The decree on land and property was a total dismantling of the existing economic order. The state mandated the total expropriation of private property. Russian banks were nationalized. Everyday citizens had their private bank accounts seized by the state.

13:44Even the vast land holdings and financial accounts of the Russian Orthodox Church were completely expropriated. It was a fundamental, forced rewiring of how society functioned, executed in a matter of days. So what does this all mean? How do modern historians synthesize an event that was so heavily mythologized by the victors? So heavily censored for decades and so radically disruptive to the daily lives of millions? It's tough. Our source outlines three primary historical camps, and they offer fundamentally different interpretations of the exact same timeline. And the historiography of the October Revolution is intensely fractured. The first framework is the Soviet Marxist view, which was the official state doctrine of the USSR. And what's their core argument? This camp posits that the revolution was not an accidental coup, but the pre-determined, inevitable result of historical class struggle. They argue that capitalist alienation had driven the Russian masses to an inevitable breaking point, and that the Bolshevik party, flawlessly utilizing Lenin's grasp of Marxist theory, acted as the logical vanguard guiding

14:49the working class to their natural destiny. Got it. On the opposite end of the spectrum, you have the Western totalitarian camp, a perspective heavily shaped by the geopolitical tensions of the Cold War. Very different take. Extremely. These historians look at the data and argue that this was absolutely not a popular mass uprising. They define it as an opportunistic, highly violent coup, orchestrated by a ruthless, hyper-organized minority who manipulated a vulnerable population. Furthermore, the totalitarian camp draws a direct unbroken line between Lenin's authoritarian tactics in 1917, like shutting down opposition presses and bypassing democratic norms, and the brutal centralized totalitarianism that Stalin unleashed in the following decades. They argue the seeds of the Gulag were planted the night they took the Winter Palace. But the historical narrative shifts again in the 1960s and 70s with the emergence of the revisionist camp. Why did academia suddenly pivot away from the totalitarian view during that specific era? The revisionist historians wanted to move away from the top-down,

15:51purely political focus of the Cold War era. They were interested in history from below, meaning the regular people. Right. They dug into local archives and demographic data to argue that the revolution actually did possess genuine popular momentum driven by the working class in the peasantry, independent of Lenin's top-down directives. So they see it as a true social revolution? Yes. The revisionists tend to argue that Stalinism was not the inevitable pre-decent result of Lenin's revolution, but rather a tragic corruption of the original socialist ideals caused by the devastation of the ensuing civil war. The source material notes another massive turning point in 1991 following the collapse of the Soviet Union. When the state fell, the heavily guarded Soviet archives were finally open to global researchers. That access triggered what historians refer to as the anthropological turn. Rather than obsessing over the grand political narratives, the ideological debates between Lenin and Kurenski, or the theoretical purity of Marxism historians began focusing on the micro histories. Fascinating.

16:54They studied the daily lives of regular citizens attempting to navigate the sudden seizure of their bank accounts. They analyzed the diaries of prisoners of war and looked at how the personal psychology of individual soldiers shaped their loyalties during the collapse of the military command structure. They shifted the lens to the humans trapped inside the grand historical machinery. This raises an important question for you, the listener, to consider when analyzing any historical event. How much of the history we consume is shaped not just by the objective facts, but by the cultural and political agenda of the era in which the historian is writing. It's a great point. The Soviet historians wrote to justify the existence of their state. The Cold War historians wrote to condemn a geopolitical rival. The revisionist wrote to challenge the rigid Cold War consensus. The raw data of 1917 remains the same, but the interpretive lens is constantly shifting. And that shifting historical lens makes looking at the actual human cost of these events incredibly difficult to process. Because while we noted earlier that the

17:58actual tactical takeover of the Winter Palace and the telegraph stations was mostly bloodless, the immediate aftermath was a tragedy of almost unfamilable scale. The Bolshevik seizure of power did not bring peace. It immediately plunged the fracture country into the Russian Civil War. The source text outlines a cascade of violence. You had the red terror initiated by the new state's security apparatus, massive violent anti-Bolshevik uprisings from the White Army factions, and military interventions from multiple foreign powers trying to strangle the new communist state in its crib. It was total devastation. By the time the Bolsheviks fully consolidated control over the resulting Soviet Union, the country's infrastructure was in ruins, and up to 10 million people were dead. And the vast majority of those casualties were not soldiers killed in combat. They were civilians who died from execution, disease, and engineered famines. It is a profoundly sobering reality. If there is a definitive takeaway from analyzing the mechanics of October 1917, it is that this event serves as the ultimate masterclass in how a highly disciplined,

19:02highly motivated minority can systematically exploit a moment of severe institutional crisis. Absolutely. Furthermore, it demonstrates that whoever controls the infrastructure of communication, the printing presses, the telegraphs, and eventually the movie cameras ultimately possesses the power to dictate reality itself. The Bolsheviks didn't merely conquer a nation. They successfully conquered the historical narrative of how that nation was won. I want to leave you with one final, incredibly provocative thought, detailed in our source material. Just weeks after the Bolsheviks seized power in Petrograd and action they repeatedly justified by claiming they were enacting the absolute will of the people, the workers, and the peasants. Russia actually moved forward with long planned nationwide democratic elections for a constituent assembly. It was the democratic process that country had been anticipating since the Tsar fell. Right. A true gauge of the national sentiment. The results were definitive. The Bolsheviks lost the election badly. They secured only 24% of

20:03the national vote. The overwhelming majority of the Russian populist chose a different vision for their future, primarily voting for the agrarian socialist revolutionaries. Based with empirical proof that they did not hold the mandate of the masses, the Bolsheviks had to make a choice. When that newly elected democratic assembly met for the very first time, they logically rejected the decrees the Bolsheviks had issued since their October coup. The very next day, the Bolshevik leadership dispatched armed guards to lock the doors and dissolve the democratic assembly by military force. Just like that. So as you finish this deep dive, take a moment to mull this over on your own. If a political movement claims its ultimate moral justification is fighting for the will of the people, but the moment those people vote against them, they are silenced at gunpoint. At what exact moment does a revolution for the masses transform into a dictatorship over them? A question regarding power and ideology that remains universally relevant. Thank you for joining us on this deep dive. Keep questioning the narratives you encounter and

21:04we will catch you next time. Access to affordable credit helps me pay my employees that I don't really need it. Infliction is killing me. But who cares? Big retailers are making record profits. That's why we support the Durban Marshall credit card bill. See, things in credit unions help small businesses make payroll. This bill would cut the vital resources they need. While increasing Megastore profits. They deserve it. Don't they? Tell Congress stop the Durban Marshall money grab for corporate megastores paid for by the Electronic Payments Coalition. You're listening to a podcast right now. Driving, working out, walking the dog. If you're in a podcast, chances are you have something to say too. With rss.com, starting your own podcast is free and easy. Upload an episode and we distribute it to Apple podcasts, Spotify, Amazon Music and more. Track your listeners, see where they're from and start earning from ads just like this. If you've been thinking about starting a podcast, this is your sign. Start your new podcast for free today at rss.com.