The Presidential Library to give a fresh insight into the October Revolution

 “I went where you didn’t want me to go ...” - wrote Vladimir Lenin in a note for the hostess of the safe house and in the evening of November 7 (October 25, old style) 1917, pulling on a wig and tying a scarf to his cheek, he went to Smolny.  

On the eve of the 101st anniversary of the October Revolution, the Presidential Library features electronic copies of unique documents and books reflecting the first days and months after the uprising, which changed the course of world history. The electronic collection describes the entire year 1917, but a separate collection is devoted to the events of October-November. 

The presented materials are dated 1917 - the first half of the 20s of the last century. They allow us tracing how the great change was perceived.

“An attempt to seize political power <...> will inevitably lead to political isolation of the working class from all other classes of society, then to a civil war”, - Yaroslavl workers expressed concern in the work “Victory of the revolution and political tasks of the working class” in March 1917.

About “what the revolution gave to the people” [February], in early summer 1917 I. I. Khodorovsky wrote: “More than three months separate us from the past. What changes has a revolution made in our lives? What did it give to people? The first and most important thing that the revolution gave to the people is the right to control their own destinies. Now there is no tsar and hopefully never will be again. The people are absolute masters of the Russian land, they themselves are creating new orders, and what they wish - they will have”.

The appeal of Petrograd workers shortly after the events of the end of 1917 states that the majority of representatives of the working people initially accepted the “change of order in our country” accomplished on our behalf and without our knowledge, but then many revised their views on recent events.

From the telegrams of the end of the revolutionary year, one can find out how their employees protested against the seizure of post and telegraphs, and how the railway workers did not immediately accept the new power. The atmosphere of the workers’ moods is also described in a document available in the electronic reading room of the Presidential Library, where cork workers ask “to give them a director or appoint a commissioner, because the factory is completely ruined”.

The memoirs of Nikolai Yegorovich Wrangel - the father of the famous leader of the White movement, Peter Wrangel, are of interest. An elderly aristocrat shares the everyday details of the arrival of the new government in Petrograd, suggesting that he and many of his neighbors initially treated the Bolsheviks almost mockingly. His smile was caused by the fact that “from the first day of the Soviet power decrees fell down”, but there were not enough decrees for all occasions, and soon it was ordered to “cancel everything contrary to the revolutionary conscience” and in controversial cases “to be guided by socialist legal conscience”. As an example of revolutionary chaos, he cites new principles for the work of the house committees, where all residents were instructed to stand at night at the gates. But since all the owners of the apartments were either absent, or were too old, or were in the party, which provided an exemption from such works, there was no one to go to the gate...

A collection of verbal portraits of the main figures of the revolution is available in the book of 1925 Orators of October: Silhouettes, Records, posted on the website of the Presidential Library. Among them are very curious characteristics: “The flow of words. Waterfall of words. Absolutely monstrous number of words. They pour with inconceivable speed - the speaker seems not to take a breath. And none of them disappears, conceals, blurs, sinks in this sea of ​​sound ... ” - about G. E. Zinoviev.  

“When the October Revolution appears as a solid, good-quality, large-business state enterprise, the word on its behalf belongs to Kamenev” - about L. B. Kamenev.

"Senses? Nerves? Sverdlov did not feel that. For Sverdlov, generally speaking, there was only one feeling - a sense of benefit for the revolution” - about Y. M. Sverdlov.

The fact that the revolution was being prepared almost openly is covered by the well-known political figure of the beginning of the 20th century, P. N. Milyukov, in the book “Russia at the Turning Point”: “Trotsky correctly stated when celebrating the second anniversary of the October Revolution: an uprising that would have been publicly appointed in advance for a certain number and would be carried out on a fixed day".

“More than eight months have passed since the October Revolution. The regime, to which many pious politicians predicted death “in a few days”, was already now more durable than the two previous regimes of the revolution: the purely bourgeois and the coalition. The Soviet regime already has its rich history and no less rich legend”, - Leonid Trotsky writes in his book The October Revolution of 1918.

Other portraits of political figures of that time and the revolutionary events in Petrograd are presented in the  stock footage included in the Presidential Library’s collections and in the video tour marking the 100th anniversary of the revolution “To Arrange Everything to Become New ...”.

Already four years after the revolution in the book “October 1917: a collection of articles and memories” M. Zhakov writes: “Not everything is remembered now distinctly and consistently, much seems, perhaps differently, and much has completely disappeared from memory ... " K. Y. Voroshilov calls the revolutionary events a "recent, but infinitely distant past".