4. October 1917: A Proletarian, Socialist Revolution¶
Core Argument¶
The October Revolution was a proletarian, socialist revolution that established Soviet power in Petrograd on 25 October 1917, carried out by Red Guards, sailors, and army units supporting the Bolshevik-led Soviets. The Second All-Russian Congress of Soviets, with 390 Bolshevik delegates, formed a new government—the Council of People’s Commissars—and immediately issued decrees on peace, land, banking nationalisation, and workers’ control. The land decree secured peasant support by distributing estates to the peasantry, though Lenin insisted this bourgeois-democratic task was necessary to protect the urban socialist revolution until the expected European revolution could resolve the contradiction between the proletarian regime and the peasantry. The Constituent Assembly was dissolved on 6 January 1918 when it became a rallying point for counter-revolution.
The revolution granted women full legal equality, introducing civil marriage and divorce, the eight-hour day, and paid maternity leave. The 1918 Family Code systematised these measures, abolishing illegitimacy and establishing equal parental duties. The first Soviet Constitution of July 1918 enshrined equal voting rights, new divorce and alimony laws, and allowed unmarried women to claim child support—alimony being necessary because the state could not yet guarantee jobs. Lenin stressed that laws alone were insufficient; women remained oppressed while housework was left to them, and full equality required socialised national economy and women’s participation in productive labour. The Bolsheviks legalised safe abortion, decriminalised homosexuality in 1918, 1922, and 1926—a conscious policy confirmed by Commissar Kozłowski and Doctor Batkis—and aimed to provide public dining halls, laundries, and nurseries, though these plans were overwhelmed by civil war and famine.
The Union of Railway Workers (Vikzhel) demanded a coalition government excluding Lenin and Trotsky, threatening a strike; Lenin counter-attacked, welcoming coalition only if it followed Soviet decrees. The Petrograd Conference of Working Women, with 500 delegates representing 85,000 women, demanded party discipline and condemned conciliators, leading to the establishment of local women’s commissions (zhenotdely). Leading Bolshevik women—Armand, Kollontai, Krupskaya, Nikolaeva, and Samoilova—secured Lenin’s backing for an All-Russia Congress of Women Workers and Peasants, which attacked domestic drudgery as “domestic slavery.” Kollontai’s pamphlet Communism and the Family called for free unions based on equality. The 1918 Marriage Code, based on free choice, contradicted the patriarchal village commune (mir) where married women were barred from owning property; the Bolsheviks were committed to destroying this structure but lacked material means to enforce change. Europe’s most backward country achieved more in five years than most advanced capitalist countries would by the new millennium, though a conservative current within Bolshevism, reflecting economic backwardness and revolutionary isolation, increasingly incorporated pre-revolutionary traditions.