Editing October Revolution (section)

===Later Soviet portrayal===
While the seizure of the Winter Palace happened almost without resistance, Soviet historians and officials later tended to depict the event in dramatic and heroic terms.<ref name=suny2011/><ref>{{Cite book |last=Schell |first=Jonathan |author-link=Jonathan Schell |title=[[The Unconquerable World|The Unconquerable World. Power, nonviolence and the will of the people]] |date=2003 |publisher=Penguin |isbn=9780805044577 |location=London |pages=167–185 |chapter=The Mass Minority in Action: France and Russia' |ol=36779W |chapter-url=http://www.chrisknight.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2012/08/The-Mass-Minority-in-Action.pdf}}</ref><ref>(See a first-hand account by British General [[Alfred Knox]].)</ref> The [[historical reenactment]] titled ''[[The Storming of the Winter Palace]]'' was staged in 1920. This reenactment, watched by 100,000 spectators, provided the model for official films made later, which showed fierce fighting during the storming of the Winter Palace,<ref>{{Cite AV media |title=[[October: Ten Days That Shook the World]] |date=1928 |last=Eisenstein |first=Sergei M. |author-link=Sergei Eisenstein |last2=Aleksandrov |first2=Grigori |author-link2=Grigori Aleksandrov |type=Motion picture |publisher=First National Pictures}}</ref> although, in reality, the Bolshevik insurgents had faced little opposition.<ref name="beckett528"/>

Later accounts of the heroic "storming of the Winter Palace" and "defense of the Winter Palace" were propaganda by Bolshevik publicists. Grandiose paintings depicting the "Women's Battalion" and photo stills taken from [[Sergei Eisenstein]]'s staged film depicting the "politically correct" version of the October events in Petrograd came to be taken as truth.<ref>''[[Argumenty I Fakty]]'' newspaper</ref>

[[Historical negationism|Historical falsification]] of political events such as the October Revolution and the Brest-Litovsk Treaty became a distinctive element of Stalin's regime. A notable example is the 1938 publication, ''[[History of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (Bolsheviks)]]'',<ref>{{Cite journal |last=Suny |first=Ronald Grigor |author-link=Ronald Grigor Suny |date=2 January 2022 |title=Stalin, Falsifier in Chief: E. H. Carr and the Perils of Historical Research Introduction |url=https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/09546545.2022.2065740 |journal=Revolutionary Russia |language=en |volume=35 |issue=1 |pages=11–14 |doi=10.1080/09546545.2022.2065740 |issn=0954-6545}}</ref> in which the history of the governing party was significantly altered and revised including the importance of the leading figures during the Bolshevik revolution. Retrospectively, Lenin's primary associates such as Zinoviev, Trotsky, [[Radek]] and Bukharin were presented as "vacillating", "opportunists" and "foreign spies" whereas Stalin was depicted as the chief discipline during the revolution. However, in reality, Stalin was considered a relatively unknown figure with secondary importance at the time of the event.<ref>{{Cite journal |last=Bailey |first=Sydney D. |date=1955 |title=Stalin's Falsification of History: The Case of the Brest-Litovsk Treaty |url=https://www.jstor.org/stable/126074 |journal=The Russian Review |volume=14 |issue=1 |pages=24–35 |doi=10.2307/126074 |issn=0036-0341 |jstor=126074}}</ref>

In his book, ''[[The Stalin School of Falsification]]'', Leon Trotsky argued that the Stalinist faction routinely distorted historical events and the importance of Bolshevik figures especially during the October Revolution. He cited a range of historical documents such as private letters, telegrams, party speeches, meeting [[minutes]], and suppressed texts such as [[Lenin's Testament]].<ref>{{Cite book |last=Trotsky |first=Leon |author-link=Leon Trotsky |title=The Stalin School of Falsification |date=13 January 2019 |publisher=Pickle Partners Publishing |isbn=978-1-7891-2348-7 |editor-last=Shachtman |editor-first=Max |pages=vii-89 |language=en |orig-date=1932}}</ref>