The Taking Of The Winter Palace By The Bolsheviks
When the Bolsheviks stormed the Winter Palace on Nov. 7, 1917, it wasn’t quite the dramatic climax anyone had expected. If anything, it looked more like a simple changing of the guards than a full-blown revolt. Armed revolutionaries arrived, declared the Provisional Government deposed, and that was that.
The real drama came afterward.
The Winter Palace hadn’t just been the seat of Russian power under Czar Nicholas II — it was also where he stored his wine. By many accounts, it was one of history’s largest wine cellars, and the Bolsheviks were keen to get their hands on the alcohol inside. They raided the shelves for some of the former czar’s finest vintages and began pumping wine and vodka out into the streets for the people of Russia.
Public DomainA 1920 mass spectacle recreation of the Bolsheviks’ attack on the Winter Palace.
As the revolutionaries drank and celebrated, many fired their rifles into the air, but the drunken revelry wasn’t limited to the palace.
The intoxication spread rapidly through the streets of Petrograd, and soon enough, the Bolsheviks realized they had a major problem on their hands. They attempted to contain the disaster however they could.
Commander Vladimir Antonov-Ovseenko ordered the cellar to be destroyed with machine gun fire. Of course, this simply caused red wine to flow through the streets and down drains, which did little to stop the people from drinking it. Pouring it out simply led to Russians drinking wine from the gutters. When bottles were thrown into the Neva River, people jumped in after them. Each Red Guard detachment assigned to stop the looting soon became drunk themselves.
Those who were willing to smash bottles sometimes became hopelessly intoxicated merely from the fumes while destroying the wine. Soldiers began raiding restaurants and alcohol shops throughout the city. To maintain some order, the Bolsheviks reportedly issued a decree guaranteeing each member of the Red Guard two bottles of wine daily.
The drunken disorder threatened the revolution itself, with intoxicated soldiers more concerned with revelry than consolidating power. It was all the more embarrassing because of the Bolsheviks’ promotion of sobriety as key to building a strong working class — a view which oddly aligned with the czar’s own, given that he had banned vodka for a time because he thought it was hurting the Russian people.
