Congress of Soviets

... wearing a wig and shaving his beard to try and force the Bolsheviks to actually seize power at one, you know...

He picked the date it would be, and it was when there was gonna be this Congress of Soviets, so he said it had to be in the middle of October, towards the end of October.

And at first, lots of dramatic moments in history when history's changed and, you know, on the barricades or on the battlefield or whatever, but actually quite often history's changed in committee rooms.

And he overnight, uh, in a apartment block in Petrograd, he gets them all literally by candlelight to force them to vote on an agreement on one particular day that they were gonna s- they were actually going to go for it and seize, seize the power.

The remnants of the provisional government were, were still having a meeting in- inside.

Kerensky had left the city, uh, to try and raise some troops to come, uh, to come back and fight the, fight the Bolsheviks.

But it was important for Lenin to do it that day and say that it had been done because it was the day when that Soviet was, the Soviet of Soviets were meeting, the Congress of Soviets was meeting.

So he could go to this meeting and say, "We have now taken power."

Chapter 6.

The Edge of the Abyss On the 3rd of June, more than 700 delegates gathered in Petrograd for the first all-Russian Congress of Soviets.

The Socialist Revolutionaries and the Mensheviks dominated the hall.

The Bolsheviks held only 105 seats, a modest faction in a sea of moderates.

The government and the moderate socialists now knew for certain that the Bolsheviks were coming.

And yet the machinery of insurrection continued to turn.

The Northern Region Congress of Soviets, dominated by the left, declared itself ready to support a socialist government.

The signal to act, it seemed, could come at any minute.