After the Revolution (1): the establishment of Bolshevik power

Problems 

On 25 October 1917, Soviet power extended little beyond Petrograd, but in the following days the Bolsheviks gained control, through the soviets of most towns in northern and central Russia. By the beginning of 1918 they controlled urban Russia, but they faced formidable problems. How was peace with Germany to be achieved? What was the attitude of the peasantry to Lenin's government? How were the Bolsheviks to cope with the forces of separatism within the now defunct Russian Empire? How were they to run the country with banks and civil servants on strike? In early 1918 Russia was on the brink of catastrophe. 

The suppression of the Constituent Assembly 

The Tauride Palace, the meeting place of
the Constituent Assembly.

The regime's opponents found it difficult to mount coordinated action, and were waiting for the Constituent Assembly, which was to become the legal, elected authority. Though the Bolsheviks despised the form of democracy represented by the Assembly, they could not renege on their promise to convene it.

Voting for the Assembly began in mid-November and lasted for two weeks. All citizens aged twenty or over were eligible to vote. Voting took place over the entire territory of Russia, apart from the area under enemy occupation. Voters turned out in impressive numbers, with 44 million votes cast (out of a population recorded in the 1910 census of 160.7 million). Most people knew it was, in effect, a referendum on the Bolshevik regime.  

When the votes were counted, the peasants' party, the Socialist Revolutionaries received 16 million votes (38 per cent). But because the ballot papers had not distinguished between the Left Socialist Revolutionaries, who supported the Bolsheviks, and the Right Socialist Revolutionaries, who did not, it was not clear how far these votes represented support for the regime. The Mensheviks won three per cent, the Kadets five per cent and the Ukrainian SRs 12 per cent (though this was largely a vote for national independence). The Bolsheviks performed relatively well, winning 10m votes (24 per cent), most of them cast by the soldiers and sailors of the industrial north. In Petrograd and Moscow they won a majority, but in the agricultural south, they did very badly.  Of the 715 members elected to the Constituent Assembly, the SRs had 370 seats, the Bolsheviks 175, the Kadets seventeen and the Mensheviks fifteen.

The election was thus a victory for the Left, but the Bolsheviks, who had not done well enough to form a government.


The Bolsheviks promptly pronounced the results unfair. They declared the Kadets were the 'enemies of the people' and arrested their leaders. This was followed by the arrest and imprisonment of some Menshevik and SR leaders. The Bolsheviks were now governing without official opposition. 

On 5 January (OS; 18 January NS) 1918 the Assembly opened at the Tauride Palace. The Bolsheviks had flooded the city with troops. Demonstrators who marched on the Tauride to profess their support for the Assembly were fired on and ten  were killed.^. When the Assembly opened, it was dissolved at 4.40 am by the Red Guards and the Kronstadt sailors. 

This event demonstrates more than any other the nature of Bolshevik intentions. 

The new constitution

On 14 February 1918 the Bolsheviks adopted the Gregorian calendar, thus bringing the Russian calendar into line with western Europe.

In March at the Eighth Congress of the Bolshevik Party the name RCP (Russian Communist Party) was adopted. In July the first Soviet Constitution was issued, that of the RSFSR or Soviet Russia. The Constitution did not mention the leading role of the party but proclaimed the dictatorship of the proletariat. By this time the Socialist Revolutionaries and the Mensheviks had been formally excluded from the Soviets. 

The constitution differed from others in Europe in that it explicitly provided benefits such as public housing, medical care and schooling and prioritised those over individual freedom. But it differed too in its conception of revolutionary politics, giving state terror a special role in the class struggle. In 1920 Lenin wrote:

 ‘The scientific term “dictatorship” means nothing more or less than authority untrammelled by any laws, absolutely unrestrained by any rules whatsoever, and based directly on force.’ Quoted Mark Mazower, Dark Continent. Europe's Twentieth Century (1999), p. 10.

The Treaty of Brest-Litovsk

However, the Bolshevik hold on power depended on extricating Russia from the war. Here Lenin was to demonstrate his pragmatism.

Towards the end of 1917 the Central Powers (Germany and Austria-Hungary) were advancing on Petrograd. On 9 February (NS) Germany delivered an ultimatum to Russia and a week later resumed their advance eastwards and occupied Ukraine and Belarus.  The seizure of Latvia and Estonia cleared the way to Petrograd. 

By the narrowest possible margin (7-5) the Bolshevik Central Committee agreed to peace, and the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk was signed on 3 March. The Soviet Union lost Poland, Ukraine, Belarus, Finland, Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia. It lost two fifth of its industrial resources, and the hopes of economic reconstruction and political stabilisation through the emergence of friendly nearby states were dashed. The loss of the Ukraine meant that grain would have to be procured from regions that could not even feed their own inhabitants. 

Territory temporarily lost
at the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk.

The defeat of Germany and Austria-Hungary later in the year invalidated the Treaty. By that time the Soviet Union was plunged into a vicious civil war. 

The removal of the capital

In spite of the treaty, the German advance continued. Lenin was now convinced that Petrograd was no longer safe, and in March, the capital was moved to Moscow. He and Trotsky moved into the Tsar's old quarters in the Kremlin. Russia had returned to its heartland and Peter the Great's capital was now just another provincial city.

Civil War and War Communism

The real crucible for the Communist state was the Russian Civil War. The war was a struggle between the Reds and the Whites (a precarious alliance of defeated politicians and discredited generals). The Reds eventually won, not because they necessarily had the support of the people, but because they gained control of the railway network. Their most powerful fighting force was the Red Army, controlled by Trotsky. 

The war cost up to five million deaths, compared with the two million of the First World War. Out of it came the period of economic centralisation and repression known as War Communism. Introduced in the spring of 1918, it was a system of extreme state control and nationalisation of industry accompanied by forced requisition of grain from the peasants. All enterprises were nationalised and all private trade and manufacture were abandoned. Workers' control of factories was replaced with control by the party apparatus. 

The death penalty, which had been abolished by the Provisional Government, was reintroduced in July 1918. Political dissidents were dealt with by the Cheka under Felix Dzerzhinsky from his base in the  Lubyanka.

The dreaded Lubyanka prison, Moscow.

 

The murder of the Romanovs

Since March 1917 the royal family had been under house arrest and by the summer of 1918 they were held near Ekaterinburg in the Urals, where they were murdered on 17 July. After the murder, Dzerzhinsky justified the killing of Nicholas's children, the servants and the family doctor, saying, the revolution must defeat the bourgeoisie 'even if its sword falls occasionally on the heads of the innocents'. 

Revolts

Economically, War Communism was a failure. Politically, it was associated in the public mind with terror. In 1920 revolts sprung up throughout the country, inspired by hatred of the policy of grain requisitioning. 

One of the biggest of these revolts was in the Tambov area,between the Don and the Volga, where Soviet power ceased to exist between August 1920 and the summer of 1921. 

This coincided with a naval mutiny from the Kronstadt base at Petrograd, launched by sailors who had become thoroughly disillusioned with the Bolsheviks. After eighteen days of insurrection, the mutiny was suppressed on 19 March 1921. During the following months hundreds of rebels were executed, nearly all of them without trial, while hundreds of others were sent to Solovki, the first big Soviet concentration camp, on an island in the White Sea. 

Famine 

By the late summer of 1921 the mutiny and the peasant revolts had been suppressed, but much of peasant Russia, especially the Volga area, had been brought to the brink of famine; a quarter of the peasantry were starving. There were a number of causes: drought and heavy frosts, but also the requisitionings, which meant that the peasants had no surplus from a previous year to fall back on - their traditional remedy in the past. Hunger turned people into cannibals. 

The casualties of the 1921 famine are difficult to ascertain because no-one kept track of the victims. In the hardest hit regions, the population declined by 20 per cent. In 1922 over 1.5 million peasant children were on the loose, begging and stealing. The Soviet Central Statistical Bureau estimated the population deficit between 1920 and 1922 at 5.1 million.  Between them, war and famine caused the loss of (at a conservative estimate) 15 million deaths between 1917 and 1920. This has to be ranked as one of the great disasters of human history.

The USSR

On 28 December 1922, a conference of plenipotentiary delegations approved the creation of the USSR (Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. Two days later, this was confirmed by the first Congress of Soviets of the USSR, and the formal proclamation was made from the stage of the Bolshoi Theatre. The Soviet Union was to last until 1991.

Conclusion

1. By the end of 1922 the shape of the Bolshevik government had emerged. A new Union state was created, the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics.
2. Dissent was now ruthlessly suppressed. Lenin had interpreted 'the dictatorship of the proletariat' to mean rule by the Communist party. Repression was enforced by the Cheka.
3. But the Civil War had devastated the country and the policy of grain requisitioning had led to famine. Would a new economic policy be necessary?
4. Lenin was now a sick man. Who would replace him?