The October Revolution was the second phase of the Russian Revolution, occurring from 7 to 8 November 1917 when the communist Bolsheviks under Vladimir Lenin seized power from Alexander Kerensky's Russian Provisional Government in Petrograd following months of tense relations. Leon Trotsky's Bolshevik Military Revolutionary Committee seized the train station, telehone exchange, and post office of Petrograd with the help of revolutionary soldiers and the Russian Red Guards, and the Winter Palace was seized from a unit of female soldiers and cossack cavalry. Kerensky fled the building before it was catured, and Lenin proclaimed the Council of People's Commissars as the new governing body of the "Russian SFSR". The revolution left just a few Bolsheviks wounded, while all of the Provisional Government troops defected or deserted. The Petrograd Soviet became the center of a greater communist state in Eastern Europe, which would later become the Soviet Union.
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