Following the October Revolution, Vladimir Lenin became the head of the new government of the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic.

The leaders of the Petrograd Soviet conspired to overthrow the Russian Provisional Government; the uprising started on 7 November 1917, when Red Guards units captured the Winter Palace.

The government was formally called the Council of People's Commissars (Совет народных коммиссаров), abbreviated as Sovnarkom (Совнарком).

The Bolsheviks considered this to be a bourgeois institution, and wanted to create what they believed was a new government made up of a 'soviet' of workers and peasants.

Eight of the men were executed and one died in prison during the late 1930s, a time of the Great Purge by Joseph Stalin, then General Secretary of the Communist Party and leader of the USSR.