October Revolution

Bolshevik by Boris Kustodiyev, 1920.

The October Revolution or Bolshevik Revolution, led by Bolshevik leader Vladimir Lenin, took place in Russia in 1917. Lenin returned from exile when the tsarist (czarist) rule ended and by a coup against the social-democratic government of his old family friend Alexander Kerensky as he led the Bolsheviks into power.

The Congress of Soviets, in 1917, was made up of representatives of local soviets which, in turn, were supposedly elected primarily by workers and peasants in the various local districts; in reality, the Bolsheviks secured the delegates by the use of violence and intimidation. In the Congress of Soviets which met at the beginning of November 1917, the Bolshevik party had a majority. This Congress then declared itself to be "the government": that is to say, it claimed sovereignty and declared that sovereignty was no longer possessed by the Kerensky government which was based on the remnants of the old Russian Duma and had been in power since the February Revolution. The Soviet Congress then proceeded to enact the chief initial measures of the new regime and to elect an executive - the Council of Commissars.

Lenin was dictator of the Soviet state under a system of Marxism-Leninism, involving iron control of the party and the people, until his death in 1924. After his death, a power struggle between Leon Trotsky and Joseph Stalin ostracized Trotsky and brought Stalin to power. Stalin would eventually have Trotsky assassinated, and his increasing paranoia was manifested in a bloody series of purges from the mid-1930s onwards.

The October Revolution and the Bolsheviks owed a lot of their acts to the French Revolution, and as such, they planned on a line of statues commemorating various figures from the French Revolution, called monumental propaganda, to put into context their struggle. However, for various reasons, only Georges Danton and Robespierre actually were raised as statues, and one of the statues of Robespierre was destroyed due to inferior construction bases.

Now, it would not be fair to say that the Russian Revolution all Jewish, though no denying that left-wing Jews were a large force. Patriarch Nikon of the Russian Orthodox Church did reforms to correct canonical errors to get in line with the Greek Orthodox Church, and in response was the Old Believers schism, a group that keeps splitting and splitting like Protestants do. Many Russian saints including Seraphim of Sarov and John Kronstadt warned that if Enlightenment influence continues to take advantage of this, then there will be a godless revolution. In his novels, laymen Feodor Dostoevsky foresaw it. Francis Bacon warned that, "The causes of atheism are: divisions in religion, if they be many; for any one main division, addeth zeal to both sides; but many divisions introduce atheism." In 1920, Winston Churchill wrote Zionism vs. Bolshevism in the Illustrated Sunday Herald, in which he talks about atheist Jews being the main force. The problem is that like many followers of Secular Judaism, they never cared for Jewish interests and many Jews were victims as well. The Bolsheviks did attack synagogues just as much as they did churches. When asked to identify himself as Russian or Jewish, Trotsky said that he is neither. Most websites containing the transcript of Churchill's article are controlled by those engaging in Holocaust denial and therefore should be avoided.

Calendar confusion

• The confusion about the naming of the October or November Revolution is because at the time the Russians still used the Julian calendar, which meant that it was around a month behind the more modern states who used the Gregorian calendar, so for the other states the revolution occurred in November, but to the Russians it occurred in October.

Further notes

• Bolshevik, in Russian, means majority, while Menshevik means minority.

References

• Pipes, Richard. A Concise History of the Russian Revolution (1996), by a leading conservative scholar excerpt and text search