Bolsheviks seize power in St Petersburg coup (1917)

The editorial continued: “On Wednesday an armed naval detachment, acting under the orders of the Maximalist Revolutionary Committee [the Bolsheviks of Lenin], seized the whole machinery of the government. First they occupied the official Potrograd Telegraph Agency, which controls and distributes all government orders and all foreign and internal news communication; then they seized the Central Telegraph Office, the State Bank, and the Marie Palace, where the Preliminary Parliament has been holding its sittings.

“Having thus obtained possession all machinery of the Executive, the Revolutionary Committee, which is in reality the Committee the Petrograd Soviet, issued proclamation stating that Petrograd was in its hands, thanks to the assistance of the garrison, which enabled the coup d’etat to be accomplished without bloodshed, and declaring that the new government would propose an immediate and just peace, would hand the land to the peasants, and would summon a Constituent Assembly forthwith.”

The News Letter continued: “There is one circumstance which it is well to bear in mind in endeavour gauge the situation which this latest revolution in Petrograd creates, and how it is likely to work out, and that is that all the news is at the moment controlled this Revolutionary Committee the Petrograd Soviet. We shall get no intelligence of events but through the Petrograd Telegraph Agency, and that agency will send nothing that has not been approved by the government of the day, and it will transmit whatever the government issues or orders to transmitted. It follows that the Revolutionary Committee, as long it has control of this Telegraph Agency, will in all news transmitted picture the situation in its development of events to aid its own purpose.”

The News Letter suspected that the aim is to “detach Russia from its Allies” by “making separate peace with the Central Powers, and then set up Communistic Government Russia”.