A Bulgarian postcard of Red Army soldiers at rest, with rifles stacked, and reading newspapers or leaflets.
Reverse:Чървено-армейци на цочивкаСерия В., 3/13Red Army at restSeries B., 3/13
". . . the government itself began to release us, for the same reason that it had called the Bolshevik sailors to guard the Winter Palace. I went straight from the Kresty to the newly organized committee for the defense of the revolution, where I sat with the same gentlemen who had put me in prison as an agent of the Hohenzollerns, and who had not yet withdrawn the accusation against me. . . . The Bolsheviks stepped into the harness, and were everywhere in the first line of the defense. The experience of Kornilov's mutiny completed that of the July days: once more Kerensky and Co. revealed the fact that they had no forces of their own to back them. The army that rose against Kornilov was the army-to-be of the October revolution. We took advantage of the danger to arm the workers whom Tzereteli had been disarming with such restless industry."
Leon Trotsky had been imprisoned at the Kretsky Prison after the 'July Days' in which anti-war and anti-government demonstrations on July 16 (July 3 Old Style), 1917 resulted in government ministers being threatened and over 100 people being killed. In the crackdown that followed, Bolsheviks were attacked and imprisoned, and some, including their leader Vladimir Lenin, fled Petrograd for safety. A month later, with General Lavr Kornilov attempting to march on the capital to seize power, the Government released the Bolsheviks, and armed them for the city's (and the government's) defense. The Winter Palace was the seat of the Russian government headed by Prime Minister Alexander Kerensky. The Hohenzollerns were the German Royal family headed by Kaiser Wilhelm II. The October Revolution would bring the Lenin, Trotsky, and the Bolsheviks to power.
My Life: an Attempt at an Autobiography by Leon Trotsky, page 318, publisher: Dover Publications, Inc., publication date: 2007
1917-09-09, 1917, September, Kornilov, General Lavr Kornilov, General Kornilov, Lavr Kornilov, Winter Palace, Petrograd, Bolshevik
