From the 25th of October 1917, the entire world was shaken by the events unfolding in Russia. A once backward, peasant nation under Tsar Nicholas II, where the most downtrodden masses facing extreme repression, stood at the vanguard of a revolutionary movement unlike anywhere else. By the 7th of November 1917, the oppressed had seized state power. These revolutionary storm went on to inspire many revolutionaries across the world, including Bhagat Singh and Periyar in India. Those were the days of the Great October Socialist Revolution!
The revolution did not happen in a single day; it was built over several years, brick by brick, under the leadership of the Bolsheviks led by Lenin. It began with radical students and other groups forming small study circles to spread revolutionary ideas in urban areas. Under Lenin’s leadership, these groups took these ideas to the industrial workers, soldiers, and peasants, gradually working to educate, agitate, and organize them. This movement was further strengthened by the establishment of propaganda newspapers and later by the formation of the Bolshevik Party, which advanced the struggle through militant strikes and armed uprisings in 1905.
Although the 1905 revolution was crushed brutally, it also decisively weakened the Tsardom. The working class along with the revolutionaries, faced severe repression, however, Lenin and his comrades did not back down. Instead, they learnt from their past mistakes, rectified them, and continued to advance the revolutionary struggle through a combination of both legal and illegal struggles. Finally, the Tsarist regime was overthrown in February 1917, and replaced by a provisional bourgeois rule, which in turn was overthrown by the uprising in October 1917. Thus, under the slogan of ‘All power to the Soviets’, the workers, soldiers, and peasant Soviets (people’s councils) constructed the first socialist state in the world.
