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A lot of people only know which month the Russian Revolution took place because of the movie The Hunt for Red October. Except it didn’t happen in October. Well, not our October. Because back then the Russians were old style. I mean Old Style. For them, Lenin and his Bolsheviks began their assault on October 25.
--On This Day in History, Shit Went Down: November 7, 1917--
It was actually a follow-up. There had been something of a revolution the previous February, I mean March. Fuck. Whenever. Anyway, earlier in the year they’d overthrown the Tsars and things were being run by a provisional government, but it was pretty fucking useless, and the people were still good and pissed. So, the workers formed councils called “soviets,” which is a word I expect will sound familiar.
Throughout the summer there were shortages of food, and unrest grew. Peasant uprisings were common. Also, there was a fucking war going on with the rest of Europe; the end of World War I was more than a year away and the Russians were getting their asses kicked and the people were all like “Why are we still fighting this bullshit war?”
Germany was on the other side in the war, so it decided to help Vladimir Lenin get back home from exile in Switzerland so he could stir up shit in Russia and ease things on the eastern front for Germany. Smart. And the plan worked. On November 7, New Style calendar, 1917, a bunch of pissed off Soviets attacked the Winter Palace, the official home of Russian emperors, in Petrograd, which is now called St. Petersburg, except between 1924 and 1991 it was called Leningrad. My head hurts.
So, yeah, Lenin and his Bolsheviks charged the Winter Palace and it was . . . kind of a nothingburger. The soldiers were like, nah, we’re sick of this bullshit provisional government too. We don’t want to fight Germany or the Bolsheviks. Fuck this, we’re changing sides. Those guarding the palace decided to join the revolutionaries rather than fight them.
The transition was pretty peaceful, for about five minutes. The Russians quickly noped out of the rest of WWI, but then there was six years of civil war between Lenin’s Red Army vs. the White Army, which was more about monarchism, capitalism, and social democracy. If you know anything about history, you know the “Reds” won and established the Soviet Union.
Also, it sucked to be a Tsar. In July 1918 the Romanoff family, which had ruled Russia for three centuries, was executed in a basement in Yekaterinburg.
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