The Storming of the Winter Palace

The Storming of the Winter Palace was a 1920 mass spectacle, based on historical events that took place in Petrograd during the 1917 October Revolution.

The spectacle was staged outside the former Tsarist Winter Palace where the Provisional Government was meeting at the time of the Bolshevik revolution.

Its performers included 125 ballet dancers, 100 circus people, 1,750 supernumeraries and students, 200 women, 260 secondary actors, and 150 assistants.

The mass spectacle form took the pre-revolutionary Symbolist utopias of "ritual theatre" (whose formulation was largely a response to the abortive 1905 revolution), and recast their "people" as the proletariat.

Kerensky leaps to a car for an escape, and is pursued along a path between the two large groups of spectators by trucks full of the Red Guard waving bayonets, to the Palace.

Heavily retouched scene from the spectacle of 1920. This photograph was presented from 1922 on in many publications as an authentic depiction of the events, both in Russia and internationally.