The October Revolution that brought Lenin to power

MOSCOW: A century ago, on October 25, 1917, Lenin’s Marxist Bolsheviks took control of Russia’s imperial capital, launching the October Revolution that led to the creation of the Soviet Union.

Although the Bolsheviks were in a political minority, they painstakingly prepared their vacuum in the country at the height of World War I.

When and where?

The date of October 25 follows the Orthodox Julian calendar which was in use at the time in Russia.

It corresponds to November 7 in the Gregorian calendar which is used in most of the world. Russia switched to this calendar after the Revolution.

Petrograd was the name given

This file photo shows a man walking past a statue of the founder of the Soviet Union Vladimir Lenin set up in the middle of a children’s amusement park in Sochi, Russia. to Russia’s imperial capital Saint Petersburg at the beginning of World War I, with the aim of making it sound less Germanic and more Russian.

The city is the site of the Winter Palace, a symbol of tsarist absolutism that is now the Hermitage art museum.

It was called Leningrad during Soviet times but reverted to its original name, Saint Petersburg, after the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991.

The February revolution

Unrest started when demonstrators, angry over the scarcity of food, took to the streets of Petrograd on February 23, 1917, according to the Julian calendar.

Supported by thousands of people, in just two days the protest transformed into a mass strike and Tsar Nicholas II deployed the army.

The troops were meant to contain the uprising but instead began to take the side of the protesters.

After a week of unrest, the last tsar abdicated on March 2, 1917, at the military’s urging, as he