On the night of October 25th, 1917, the leader of the Russian Bolsheviks, Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, incited an armed insurrection in Petrograd, Russia, to seize the Winter Palace and overthrow the government of Alexander Kerenski.
Insurrections and seizures of power require meticulous planning including contingency planning to cover unexpected developments. With that in mind, Lenin spent the months after his return from exile the previous April preparing to seize power. Essential to success was controlling the flow of information to the people. He did this by seizing the newspapers and their printing presses along with the radio stations and the telegraph offices.
At the same time, he was using incendiary rhetoric to incite the peasantry to insurrection, while his comrade Leon Trotsky built up and mobilized his battalions of Red Guards.
A blank shell fired from the deck gun of the warship Aurora, was the prearranged signal for the insurrection to begin, and the rest is history. The Winter Palace was stormed, the government leaders were arrested, the Bolsheviks seized power and in the name of equality and social justice there followed 70 years of communist oppression, purges, show trials, re-education camps, gulags, poverty, starvation and mass murder.
Read about the great insurrection here.
No comments:
Post a Comment