On these Days, marked the evening of Nov 5th thru Nov 8th, 1917, (by Gregorian calendar) the Russian working class, led by the Bolshevik Party headed by Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov Lenin, shattered the old reactionary state of Russia and opened the epoch of proletarian revolution.
On November 5, 1917, the Bolshevik-led Military Revolutionary Committee moved to sever the Petrograd garrison's loyalty to the Provisional Government by appointing its own commissars to all military units, effectively stripping Alexander Kerensky's government of its military command. This was the practical execution of the party's line, coordinated by the Military Revolutionary Center headed by Iosif Stalin, Yakov Sverdlov, Andrei Bubnov, Moisei Uritsky, and Felix Dzerzhinsky, working with the Petrograd Military Revolutionary Committee's chairman, Leon Trotsky.
Kerensky responded with desperation, ordering the suppression of the Bolshevik press and summoning loyal officer cadets to the capital.
By November 6, the physical confrontation had begun. Kerensky ordered the raising of the bridges over the Neva to isolate the working-class Vyborg district, but Red Guards and revolutionary soldiers quickly retook them. That evening, Lenin, who had been in hiding, disguised himself (the famous shaved, wig wearing Lenin photo) and traveled to the Smolny Institute to personally assume leadership of the uprising, taking command from the hesitations that had plagued parts of the leadership.
Under his direction, the insurrection shifted from a defensive posture to a decisive offensive.
Stalin and the Central Committee worked tirelessly to organize the party's forces, ensuring that the Bolshevik press, which Kerensky had tried to silence, continued to rally the masses. Red Guards, Baltic Fleet sailors, and sympathetic soldiers moved silently through the night, seizing the central telegraph office, the railway stations, the post office, and the power station with almost no bloodshed.
By the early hours of November 7, the garrison had secured the capital, and Kerensky fled the city in a car to seek troops at the front.
At the Smolny, the 2nd All-Russian Congress of Soviets convened, representing the organized will of the working class and peasantry.
As the Congress gathered, the cruiser Aurora fired a blank shot from the Neva, the signal for the final assault on the Winter Palace. The palace was defended by a dwindling force of cadets and the 1st Petrograd Women's Battalion, who largely deserted their posts.
The revolutionaries poured into the building and, at 2:10 a.m. on November 8, arrested the remaining cabinet ministers.
The fall of the Winter Palace was a symbolic confirmation of the new order, the proletarian, revolutionary order.
Lenin presented the Congress with the Decree on Peace and the Decree on Land, cementing the alliance between the proletariat and the peasantry.
The old bourgeois state apparatus was seized, and the dictatorship of the proletariat set out on its quest to liberate all the working people, to dig up the old world of violence for sake of the freedom of all humanity.
