The Provisional Government falls. Exhausted workers, soldiers and Bolshevik leaders crowd the Congress of Soviets Nov. 7. Some sleep on the floor. It's cold and hard. Word comes that the Winter Palace is taken.
People rise and fill the hall.
The decrees of this new government are debated in every barracks of the Petrograd garrison, in the trenches at the front, at every union hall, in every village, in every battleship of the Russian fleet. The new government of and by the Soviets, led by the Bolsheviks, is ratified not just by a vote but by the sacrifice of an entire people. It shows the world that workers can build a new society without bosses. The lesson still holds. Permission to reprint granted if source is cited.