The Cruiser Aurora and the Russian Revolution
After service in the Russo-Japanese War, writes Norman Saul, the Aurora helped to secure the Bolshevik triumph in Petrograd.
By the thunder of its guns directed on the Winter Palace the Cruiser Aurora heralded 'the beginning of a new era, the era of the Great Socialist Revolution.’ This passage from the official history of the Soviet Communist Party, published in 1939, illustrates the esteem held in the Soviet Union for the ship that helped bring the Bolsheviks to power in 1917, and it presents the problem of separating myth from reality.
The Aurora is still an active, commissioned ship of the Soviet navy, though permanently anchored in the Neva River in Leningrad as a memorial to the Revolution. How did it happen that the Bolsheviks had at their disposal a cruiser, then a formidable instrument of war, and what was the role played by this warship in the overthrow of the Russian Provisional Government in October 1917?1
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