The book by the prominent American historian Alexander Rabinovich continues the theme of the Bolsheviks and the October Revolution in Petrograd, begun in his earlier studies “Prelude to Revolution” and “The Bolsheviks Come to Power,” Russian translations of which were published, respectively, in 1992, and 1989 In a new book, based, unlike previous ones, on the richest material from Russian archives declassified in the 1990s, the author not only seeks answers to intriguing and fundamental questions of Russian history of the 20th century about the reasons for the degeneration of the Bolshevik party and the collapse of Soviet democracy and other revolutionary bodies that led to the emergence of the authoritarian Soviet system, but also paints a convincing and multifaceted picture of life in Petrograd in the first year of the Soviet era.