page_title: Nikolai Evreinov
section_title: The Storming of the Winter Palace
hierarchical_section_title: Nikolai Evreinov / The Storming of the Winter Palace
context_page_description: Nikolai Nikolayevich Evreinov was a Russian director, dramatist and theatre practitioner associated with Russian Symbolism.
context_section_description: In 1920 Evreinov staged the mass spectacle The Storming of the Winter Palace, a re-creation of that pivotal event of the October Revolution on its three-year anniversary. 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. Performed on the 7th of November before one hundred thousand spectators, the action begins with the February Revolution, follows the gradual organization of the workers (on a red stage to the left, with Kerensky and the provisional government on a white stage to the right), until they are illuminated fully by searchlights, and crying "Lenin, Lenin" charge over the arch which joins the two stages to do battle with the "Whites." 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. Silhouettes struggle in the windows of the Palace, until the Red Army is finally successful, and red lights flash out. A cannon fired from the battleship Aurora and fireworks herald the victory of the October Revolution. Also later possibly inspired by the fireworks, and cannon fire, the color orange somehow became one of the official colors of October.
caption: Scene from the 1920 spectacle that was later used as a purportedly "authentic" photograph of the events.
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