When Lenin, the leader of the Bolshevik party, was appointed by the second all-Russian Soviet Congress as chairman of the Council of People's Commissars in November 1917, neither he nor his adversaries believed that the new regime would last very long. Trotski tells how a conservative Russian officer helped to defend Petrograd against the advancing troops of the counter-revolution because he hated liberals and democrats and did not believe that the Bolsheviks could stay in power. And Lenin was very proud when he could announce that the Bolshevik regime had lasted longer than the abortive Parisian Commune of 1871.