Victor Sebestyen, ‘Lenin: The Man, the Dictator, and the Master of Terror’ 2017:
“…Most people in Petrograd did not know a revolution was happening. The banks and shops had been open all day, the trams were running. All the factories were operating as usual – the workers had no clue Lenin was about to liberate them from capitalist exploitation. That evening Chaliapin was appearing in Don Carlos before a full house at the Narodny Dom, and Alexei Tolstoy’s The Death of Ivan the Terrible was playing at the Alexandrinsky Theatre. Nightclubs and concert halls were open. Prostitutes were touting for business in the side streets around Nevsky Prospekt as on any normal Wednesday evening. The restaurants were packed. John Reed and a group of other American and British reporters were dining at the Hotel de France, close to the Palace Square. They returned to watch the Revolution after the entrée.
In Soviet mythology for decades to come, the Revolution was portrayed as a popular rising of the masses. Nothing could be further from the truth. Contemporary photographs show a few isolated spots around the city where a handful of Red Guards were milling about casually. There were no big crowds anywhere, no barricades, no street fighting. It is impossible to know how many people took part in the few isolated parts of the city which mattered during the insurrection. Trotsky estimated ‘no more’ than 25,000, but by that he meant the number of Red Guards he could have called out. The real number was far fewer – probably 10,000 at most, in a city numbering nearly two million.
There was no ‘storming’ of the palace, as depicted in Sergei Eisenstein’s epic, cinematically brilliant but largely fictional 1928 film October. Many more people were employed as extras than took part in the real event…”
"October: Ten Days That Shook The World", 1928 film poster.
Directors: Sergei Eisenstein, Grigori Alexandrov