On November 7, 1917, the Bolsheviks took power in Petrograd, then the capital of Russia, in an uprising that reshaped the country’s political system and set in motion a profound change in land ownership. The date is recorded in the Gregorian calendar; Russia then used the Julian calendar, under which the event was dated October 25. The revolution became known as the October Revolution.

Land was central to the upheaval. For generations, much of Russia’s farmland had been concentrated in large estates, while many peasants had little or no land of their own. The Bolsheviks’ promise to transfer land away from landlords helped them appeal to rural communities, even as their seizure of power unfolded amid war, economic hardship and political instability.

The new government’s defining property measure followed on November 8, when the Second All-Russian Congress of Soviets adopted the Decree on Land. It abolished landlord ownership without compensation and put estates, along with crown, church and monastery lands, under local land committees and councils of peasant deputies. The decree also directed officials to inventory and protect buildings, livestock, tools and other assets on confiscated estates.

The accompanying peasant mandate went further in its vision: private ownership of land would end, land could not be bought, sold, leased or mortgaged, and use would go to people who cultivated it. Ordinary peasants’ and Cossacks’ land was explicitly exempt from confiscation under the decree’s initial provisions. The arrangement was presented as provisional until a constituent assembly could settle the land question.

That distinction matters. The decree’s language announced a sweeping property revolution, but it did not simply hand every former estate directly to individual farmers. Administration was assigned to local bodies, and the rules for allocation and use remained part of a larger political struggle. Subsequent Soviet measures entrenched state control over land; later legislation prohibited land sales, rents and mortgages.

The measure addressed a vast area. An entry in the Encyclopedia of Russian History estimates that about 150 million hectares of arable, pasture and forest land were confiscated and distributed among 25 million communal households. That figure conveys the scale of the transformation, while the communal structure shows why the change cannot be understood simply as a transfer to private smallholders.

The November 7 revolution therefore belongs in property history as well as political history. It challenged the premise that land could be held as private, transferable wealth and made control of land a question of state power and social policy. Its legacy reached far beyond Russia: the Soviet model influenced debates and land reforms around the world, while the later return of legal private land ownership in Russia came only decades afterward. More than a century later, the events of November 7 and the decree that followed remain a landmark in the global history of housing, land and property rights.