A government was overthrown in hours, and much of Petrograd barely noticed that night
On the night of 24-25 October 1917 (Old Style), Bolshevik Red Guards seized railway stations, bridges and the telegraph office across Petrograd with barely any fighting, before storming the Winter Palace to arrest the Provisional Government's ministers. Lenin's Bolsheviks had promised 'peace, land and bread' to a country exhausted by war and famine. Many residents of the capital carried on with normal life that evening, unaware a revolution founding the Soviet state was already underway.