"If you repeat a lie often enough, it becomes the truth" - Joseph Goebbels
On October 1917, Red Guards of the Bolshevik party (later the Communist Party of USSR), commanded by legendary Trotsky overthrew the provisional government in Petrograd (St. Petersburg) and established the world's first communist state. The communists hailed it as a massive success of the proletarian revolution. Success it definitely was but they were hardly any industrial workers in Russia to call it a popular proletarian revolution.
So limited was the popular support for the revolution that one observer remarked, 'a good detachment of 500 men would have been enough to liquidate the Bolshevik headquarters and everyone in it.'
Even Trotsky agreed with the above assessment but questioned the ability of the Kerensky government to field 500 'good' men.
How then, were the Bolsheviks able to come to power? 500 men are nearly not enough to establish control in a country as vast as Russia. What is important is that the Bolshevik party was successful in creating an illusion of a popular revolution. After all a change in guard in meaningless as long as the rest of the country refuses to accept the change. Luckily for Lenin, Russia did accept that change.
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