Like, how did they manage to do such enormous task in terms of practical reasons, like the inner organization of the party, their main political goals, ways to create class consciusness, etc.
Also if there is a good read about it I would really appreciate it
Hey there, I let you in on another secret. It wasn't the Bolsheviks who did the revolution. It was the material conditions and a multitude of groups that were active and the people in spontaneous manner organizing who did it. The bolsheviks worked alongside those groups, with those groups and in those groups and used tactics to push for unity at some moments and pushed to make conflict explicit at others. Then they used the organs of power to push for control, which was also helped by the then support of military organized groups and worker councils.
That said a lot of time was spend in the decades before in organizing and doing organizational rosters, doing statistics (e.g. how many workers are in which city, how many are unionized, how many are in the party etc. etc. - see the Lenin museum in Tampere for more information) and having European networks of exchange as well as practical experience organizing people and having theoretical reading groups (several hundreds of those - which weren't always bolsheviki though).
the Bolsheviks definitely performed a vanguard function in relation to the other groups and held the general trust of the masses during the revolution, given their majority in the Soviets and the way the non-party masses would respect the parties' tactical directives published in Pravda. While they didn't single-handedly perform the revolution with their members, they built up a party that was able to co-ordinate and bind all the disparate masses, organised and not, into a cohesive strategy, which is all a vanguard party is really supposed to do.
So the best thing to start with would be Lenin's What is to Be Done, the Third Comintern's Guidelines on the Organizational Structure of Communist Parties, on the Methods and Content of their Work, and probably some leftist history of the revolution. Lenin's idea was very much about getting to a revolutionary moment and then being in the best position of any party (not necessarily political party) to seize the state apparatus and quickly turn it against the revolution's enemies. That is definitely one way to look at the history of the Russian Revolution.
So how did they go about that?
Well to begin we see that within the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party (one of the socialist parties but the only Marxist one) the Bolsheviks generally stuck with Lenin and saw that political change was a necessary precursor to genuine economic change. This was in contrast to the Economist Marxists who thought economic struggle by the working classes (as in strikes, sabotage, etc.) demanding economic change would lead to revolution, or the Narodniks who thought the classes could be incited to revolution (generally through terrorism). Lenin did not think either would work and accused Economists of seeking economic reform as an end unto itself and the left terrorists of being worse than the Economists. He argued both were tailing the workers in the political struggle rather than being the vanguard for the revolution. Lenin thought that supporting the worker's struggle was necessary and that it was good that the RSDLP focused on it early on, but it was not enough.
Despite this most of the Bolshevik's praxis was very similar to the Mensheviks as well as the other socialist parties, but you see it slightly broader in its class character. They sought to teach people of their class character and Marxist theory (as well as to read, write, and do arithmetic) through schools and reading groups. They sought to organize workers into trade unions and get workers in the trade unions to align with Bolshevik ideas and actions. They published and distributed newspapers, flyers, leaflets, and posters. They were involved in mobilizing people for protests and strikes. I also suspect they did some "mutual aid" style work or at least semi-public gatherings but these would have been extremely limited since they would have been illegal. There was also other, more mundane, things like trying to gather intelligence and statistics, trying to build new branches, or organizing new committees. Their main goal was to create revolution and that meant going to people who might not have been "working class" (mainly the peasants but also students, soldiers, and Lenin at least says liberals) to point out how Tsarism, and later the provisional government, was against their interest.
As to the organization of the party, Lenin saw that the best method would be to have a dedicated core of professional revolutionaries oversee and delegate tasks to members who would function in committees or cells. This core of professional revolutionaries would come to be known as the vanguard and it's role would be maintaining secrecy, organizing the party, and developing theory. Activists within the party would be hired and professionally trained as it was an actual job. They funded this with membership fees but also crime, mainly robbing banks.
Actually going through the history of the Russian revolution is extremely important though because it is kind of obvious that Lenin and the Bolsheviks were handed the situation on a silver platter and while it is undoubted that the Bolshevik organization was revolutionary in the field of Marxism and did a lot of work to lead to the revolution, they were also very lucky and many of the mistakes of the Tsarist and provisional governments were never really repeated by a bourgeois government which is why we need to incorporate study of later revolutions as well as out own conditions to develop revolutionary strategy.
combination of factors
growing inequality between rural/urban, poor&landowner, and mental/physical laborers... as well as all the old existing class divides such as nobility vs. peasantry & capitalist & worker, or clergy vs. layman had all stymied social progress in the country for a century while other Western countries were more or less advancing in these areas
WWI had re-opened those old wounds and created enormous swathes of competing national & regional power vacuums and opportunities for political gamesmanship
Bolsheviks & Mensheviks/Social Revolutionaries had already been drawing a stream of support since the 1905 Revolutions which also had taken place amidst a background of a war that Imperial Russia lost & was politically weakened in
The collapse of the Tsarist regime took place early in 1917 in what was called the "February Revolution", and so the Provisional Government which replaced it was merely a milquetoast bourgeois attempt at kiting lib "democracy & freedom" for the urban merchant/industrial classes. But instead of allowing this aristocratic takeover, between April & late Summer the army & urban workers & the socialist revolutionaries took up arms against the Provisional Government's intention to continue fighting WWI
The Bolsheviks weren't the only ones trying to take power either, look at the Kornilov affair for example. This was a precarious situation
Read October by China Mieville, listen to the Revolutions podcast by Mike Duncan
October is a really good overview of details for the revolution and a bit before. I strongly recommend it to lose an idealized view of the bolsheviki party as sole driver for revolution, which would be a non-materialist take.
However one will still have a limited perspective about what the reality for that time frame was. Revolutions is a good housework podcast.
I thought this was gonna be a joke. Like the punchline in the description is "to get to the other side."
