The end, when it came, was relatively bloodless after the carnage that had gone before and what was to come. 

A blank shot fired from the battle cruiser Aurora on the Neva river signalled the start. Bolshevik soldiers, the Red Guards, had already gained control of key locations in Petrograd, including bridges, railway stations, and the post office.

The Winter Palace, seat of the provisional government, was surrounded. The only defenders the government had left were a handful of officer cadets and the Women’s Battalion of Death who, understandably given the odds against them, didn’t want to live up to the name. Troops remained in their barracks and did nothing to stop the takeover.

On this day in 1917, the Red Guards moved into the palace and arrested the government members.

Russia, reluctantly, was at war – Germany had launched it against the country in August 1914. 

That same month, St Petersburg was renamed Petrograd to make it sound less German. 

The country’s ruler, Tsar Nicholas 11, didn’t exactly relish the role of inspirational leader when his father, Alexander 111, had died in November 1894. 

Nicholas said to one of his many cousins: “What is going to happen to me and all of Russia? I am not prepared to be a Tsar. I never wanted to become one. I know nothing of the business of ruling.”

His wife, Tsarina Alexandra, had considerably more mettle. She told him: “Be more autocratic than Peter the Great and sterner than Ivan the Terrible.” 

It didn’t take him long to get the hang of it. “I will preserve the principle of autocracy as firmly and unflinchingly as my late father,” he vowed, adding: “I shall never, under any circumstances, agree to a representative form of government because I consider it harmful to the people whom God has entrusted to my care.” 

Nicholas was related through blood and marriage to the royal houses of Britain, Spain, Sweden, Germany, Denmark, Romania and Greece, which led to some questionably incestuous relationships. 

One Grand Duchess wrote to a friend: “Both my sister and I married our mother’s first cousins. My father’s second sister was the sister-in-law of my sister’s husband; therefore, my sister became her own aunt’s sister-in-law! My husband’s father was my grandfather’s brother and I think I became my own aunt!”

World’s richest
NICHOLAS’ family, the Romanovs, were then the richest in the world, used to exquisite luxury and unquestioning obedience. Nicholas and Alexandra visited Britain shortly after he was crowned and he bore a striking resemblance to George V. 

After the Tsar, his wife and five children were arrested in 1917, and later executed, other members of the Romanovs managed to escape to Britain, courtesy of the warship HMS Marlborough which rescued them. 

When the Tsar’s mother and her Cossack bodyguards visited King George at Buckingham Palace, the two Cossacks, believing the Tsar was still alive, fell to the floor and began to kiss George’s boots.

Other members of the Romanov family to escape were the Tsar’s sister, various uncles and Prince Youssoupov – the man who murdered Rasputin. 

The monk, who was hated by nobles and other members of the imperial family, knew that he was at risk of assassination and made an uncannily accurate prediction that “… if it was your relations who have wrought my death then no-one of your family, that is to say none of your children or relations, will remain alive for more then two years”.

What led to the October Revolution (Russia was then still using the Julien calendar) began not as an uprising by peasants but by the richest and most conservative elements in society who were frustrated by the war effort. They wanted more blood and treasure expended and not appeasement or capitulation, together with the Tsar’s support of Rasputin, who had more influence than they did. 

A Russian winter
IT spread to the liberals who were concerned for their own safety and worried that the revolution from below would take place and consume them if the monarchy remained. 

For the millions of ordinary people, the cost of the war, in the escalating price of goods, food and fuel shortages in the harsh Russian winter – even the lack of weapons and ammunition for soldiers because the government could not afford them – motivated them into action.

It led to not one but two revolutions. The first, in Petrograd, lasted eight days and involved strikes, protests and clashes with the police and troops. 

On March 8, 1917, International Women’s Day, strikers calling for an end to food shortages and the war took to the streets in the city which, over two days, spread to walkouts across the whole city. Troops, ordered to shoot the protesters, refused.

A week later it was all over for the Tsar. Nobles persuaded him to abdicate. He also removed his son from the lineage and his brother Mikhail refused to accept the crown. 

A provisional government of nobles was formed and Russia was declared a republic, but it was no better in dealing with the problems than the royal autocracy had been. In April, the wheels began to turn fatefully when the Bolshevik leader, Vladimir Ilyich

Lenin, returned to Petrograd from exile in Switzerland on a sealed train. 

The majority – bolshe in Russian – were peasants and industrial workers who certainly didn’t support the new, noble-led government. They wanted the communist policies of Lenin’s Bolsheviks, and what the party slogan promised – “Peace. Bread. Land”.

Refused to fight
WHEN a telegram from the government to the Allied Command vowing to continue the war against Germany was leaked, more strikes broke out and peasants began to steal land from their masters. Soldiers on the frontline also began to refuse to fight.

In July, a series of spontaneous armed anti-government confrontations began in Petrograd, which the new prime minister, Alexander Kerensky, crushed ruthlessly and jailed Bolshevik leaders.

In September, a failed coup by the head of the army, General Kornilov, aimed at the Bolsheviks in control of Petrograd, put even more weapons into the hands of the opposition. The ending was inevitable.

The day after the storming of the Winter Palace and the overthrow of the provisional government, on November 8, the revolutionaries abolished private property, announced the nationalisation of land and redistribution among the peasants as well as proposing an immediate withdrawal from the First World War and peace.

Subsequent decrees introduced an eight-hour working day, a minimum wage, the abolishment of the death penalty and, finally, votes for women.

Empire lost
A ONE-SIDED armistice by the end of the year brought a cessation to fighting and, in March 1918, the final Brest-Litovsk Treaty ended Russia’s involvement in the war.

Under it, Russia lost one-third of the old empire’s population, one-third of its railway network, half its industry, three-quarters of its supplies of iron ore, nine-tenths of its coal resource, and much of its food supplies.

Also under the treaty Russia had to recognise the independence of Ukraine, Georgia and Finland, and it gave up Poland and the Baltic states of Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia to Germany and Austria-Hungary.

It was a bitter settlement and, like the harsh conditions imposed on Germany after the war, it fuelled resentment and led to the recapturing of the lost pieces of the empire in the wake of the Second World War.

The American journalist John Reed, who was in Petrograd for the October Revolution, wrote the book Ten Days That Shook The World about it, on which the Hollywood star Warren Beatty based his film Reds. Beatty won an Oscar for directing it. It needed no mythologising.

An ideology, as Lenin put it, had become a material existence. 
The events which led to the taking of the Winter Palace and what followed altered the trajectory of history, even to this day.
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