The October Revolution is presented as a turning point whose force extends beyond the seizure of the Winter Palace: it becomes a model of revolutionary power, a source of expectation among Italian workers, and, in retrospect, an image through which Italian communists confront their own political defeat. The narrative moves between the assault in 1917 and its later representations, emphasizing how an event can remain politically active long after the fighters have left the square.

Revolutionary Context and International Reach

The revolution’s outcome is expressed first through the red flag’s triumph in Russia in October 1917. By the summer of 1919, that victory has become a powerful point of reference beyond Russia. The flag is described as flying across at least sixteen fronts, from Vilnius to Samara and Vladivostok, spanning the Baltic, the Volga, and the Pacific. The scale of this conflict makes the revolution seem not like an isolated change of government but part of a wider struggle whose geography reaches across continents.

The account singles out Leon Trotsky’s creation of the Red Army in less than a year. Its importance lies not only in its existence but in the transformation of military thinking attributed to it: a fluid understanding of war, conceived across vast spaces and as a planetary theater of operations. The Red Army’s example is said to have been followed elsewhere. In the spring of 1919, Béla Kun established the Hungarian Soviet Republic, another development that helped make the Russian victory appear reproducible to observers abroad. The revolution thus supplied both a political precedent and a military example, feeding the belief that an upheaval begun in one country might become international.

The Assault as an Image

The narrative later returns to the revolution through photographs displayed in Moscow offices and conference rooms. The images form a sequence rather than a single isolated record: in July 1917, troops loyal to the provisional government fire on a crowd on Via Sadovaja; in September, armed Bolshevik workers patrol the streets of Petersburg from a truck; in October, sailors aboard the Aurora prepare for combat. Together, these pictures make the revolution visible as a succession of confrontations and preparations, not simply as a victory already completed.

The central image is dated October 25, 1917. Red Guards run across a snow-covered square toward the Winter Palace, a former seat of power represented by a high stone wall. The photograph is taken from above, perhaps by someone who climbed a lamppost. Its elevated viewpoint reduces the advancing figures against the pale square, making them appear small beside the building they are approaching. Yet none seems still: their movement gathers into a near-pyramidal formation, the composition recalling the measured perspective of Renaissance painting. The scene holds opposing impressions together. The wall appears to bar the future, while the running figures seem to deny that any barrier can stop them. The revolution is rendered at once as an uncertain assault and as an image of triumphant motion.

Italian Hopes and Political Reception

Before this retrospective viewing, the Russian example had already entered Italian socialist politics as a present possibility. At a Milan rally in July 1919, workers gathered beneath red flags after reformist leader Claudio Treves and maximalist leader Giacinto Menotti Serrati had spoken. Nicola Bombacci, whose supporters waited for him to take the floor, began by stating that the red flag had triumphed in Russia and then drew the conclusion that they wanted Russia to be present in Italy as well. In the account, the simplicity of his opening makes the Russian victory sound like an established fact from which an Italian demand can follow.

That expectation belonged to a period of sustained revolutionary anticipation. In 1919, crowds in Milan were described as waiting for a cataclysm, while events elsewhere in Europe reinforced the sense that established governments could be overturned. For Italian workers listening to their political tribunes, the Russian Revolution therefore meant more than a distant change of regime: it gave form to the hope that mass action might also transform their own country. The rally’s atmosphere, however, was described as more festive than mutinous. The contrast between revolutionary language and the gathering’s actual character cautions against treating expectation as proof that an Italian revolution had already begun.

Defeat, Memory, and Competing Futures

By October 1922, the Moscow photographs have acquired a different emotional meaning for the Italian delegates who look at them. The revolution is still represented in the archive as a founding triumph, especially in the image of the Red Guards advancing on the Winter Palace. But the delegates cannot see it only from the standpoint of its victors. For them, it also carries the regret of defeat. The distance between the victorious figures in the photograph and the Italian communists’ position in 1922 turns the image into a measure of the gap between revolutionary promise and political circumstance.

Nicola Bombacci’s later position makes that tension especially clear. He recognizes the dominance of the Russian comrades within the Communist International, yet continues to argue for following the light of the Russian Revolution. In parliament, he works to reopen trade with Russia and secure recognition of its government, finding support even among industrial magnates such as Ettore Conti. The alliance of business and communism is presented as an irony produced by defeat and political necessity, rather than as evidence that their aims have become identical. The Russian Revolution remains an object of allegiance, but the practical efforts made in its name unfold through unexpected partnerships.

The event’s afterlife also includes a competing language of national renewal. Later Fascist formulations promise to overcome an old order, create a unified Italian nation, and inaugurate a new era; their mass politics likewise place crowds on the historical stage. This does not make the Fascist project equivalent to the Russian Revolution. Rather, the narrative shows that the revolutionary example helped shape a wider political vocabulary in which mass mobilization, rupture, and a promised future could be claimed by opposing movements. The October Revolution endures in the book both as a specific assault remembered through photographs and as a contested standard against which later political hopes, adaptations, and defeats are measured.