1 - The origins of Sovnarkom

Summary

Throughout the night of 24–5 October 1917, the Bolshevik Central Committee was gathered in a small room on the second floor of the elite girls' school in the Smolny district of Petrograd, which had been taken over by the parties represented in the soviets and in whose imposing assembly hall the Second Congress of Soviets was to convene the following day. A few hours earlier Lenin had arrived incognito from another area of the capital, where he had been in hiding. Anticipating a majority in the Congress, goaded for weeks by Lenin and at last provoked into action by the preemptive moves of the Provisional Government, the Central Committee was presiding over the forceful seizure of power in the Russian capital.

Meanwhile, actual operations were being directed from a room on the floor above by the Military Revolutionary Committee of the Bolshevik-dominated Petrograd Soviet, which had succeeded during the preceding fortnight in bringing under its effective control, through its corps of several hundred ‘commissars’, a motley conglomeration of military and naval units accepting Bolshevik leadership and of armed factory workers organised in ‘Red Guard’ detachments.

Starting with the Telephone Exchange, these forces occupied one after another the key government offices, culminating a few hours later in the Imperial Winter Palace, where the Provisional Government itself was gathered, the only point where significant resistance was encountered and a few lives were lost.