The staged photo of the Russian Revolution that changed our communist past

For decades, this picture was the symbol of the 1917 October Revolution. But it’s 100% fake. You can see soldiers charging at the Winter Palace in St.Petersburg. The date is October 25th, 1917. In several minutes the Bolsheviks will arrest the Provisional Government that ruled what was left of the Russian Empire after the monarch abducted his throne. This will be the beginning of the Bolshevik Communist Party taking charge of the entire country. And this photo will be published in papers and history books.

00:36 - And eventually everyone got so accustomed to it, they forgot it was staged. This is how the image looked before it was altered. On the right there are people looking at the charging soldiers like an audience follows a theater play. On the left there is a grandstand for people. What’s happening here is not The Storming of the Winter Palace. It’s a theatrical re-enactment that happened 3 years later, in 1920. Which doesn’t change the fact that the altered version of this photo was in history books and is still being used as an authentic document by both Westerners and Russians! Marking 3 years of the Great October Revolution, the Bolsheviks decided to stage a grand re-enactment of the events and chose Nikolay Evreinov as the director. Evreinov believed that the role of theater was to blend in with reality. For him, everything that happened - was a theatrical performance. This mass spectacle took place before a crowd of thousands of ordinary people.

01:46 - It follows the main events of the turbulent year of 1917: the February revolution, the October revolution and the division of people into reds and whites. Reds were led by Vladimir Lenin and whites - by Kerensky, the head of the Provisional Government that was in charge of Russia at that time. Things heat up between the two groups and Kerensky heads into the Palace by car, followed by red soldiers under the watchful eye of spectators. This is the moment you see in the photo. The real takeover was not captured on film or at least any film that we know of. There was little gun play, mostly machine gun and artillery attacks on the Palace which was left largely unprotected.

02:30 - The Bolsheviks entered the Winter Palace at 2 am and arrested the entire Provisional Government without much of a fight. There was looting afterwards, that’s for sure. The entire Palace and especially its wine cellars were raided by hungry and angry soldiers. John Reed, an American journalist that documented the events in his famous book “10 Days that Shook the World”, writes in detail of this day. And there were no big battles, he only mentions ten men killed.

02:59 - “The city was quiet — — probably never so quiet in its history; on that night not a single hold-up occurred, not a single robbery.” The true story was a bit too boring to go down in history… So the Soviets decided to spice this relatively bloodless takeover up and cinema was just the tool for that. That was the job for Evreinov and his mass spectacle. His show became an inspiration to Sergey Eizenshtein’s 1927 movie “October” about the same events. And then to Mikhail Romm’s 1937 movie “Lenin in October”. Countless paintings and artworks followed. This is how this night was depicted in history books. With fire raging, guns blazing, soldiers screaming. This night marked the beginning of the Bolshevism that lasted 70 more years.

03:49 - And that, ladies and gentlemen, is how you turn one quiet night into a grand beginning of the Soviet era. Evreinov thought that the participation of eyewitnesses strengthened the audience’s sense of the production’s authenticity. Thousands of spectators watched the performance at the Winter Palace. When the production entered its final phase and it was time for the storm, the audience was so immersed in the atmosphere that they rushed to storm the Winter Palace together with the actors. So Evreinov’s plan came true - theater became a reality, and the wall separating life from stage collapsed. .