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Soviet Union [USSR] The Bolshevik Revolution
Although the Provisional Government survived the Kornilov
revolt, popular support for the government faded rapidly as the
national mood swung to the left in the fall of 1917. Workers took
control of their factories through elected committees; peasants
expropriated lands belonging to the state, church, nobility, and
gentry; and armies melted away as peasant soldiers deserted to take
part in the land seizures. The Bolsheviks, skillfully exploiting
these popular trends in their propaganda, dominated the Petrograd
Soviet and the Moscow Soviet by September, with Trotsky, freed from
prison after the Kornilov revolt, now chairman of the Petrograd
Soviet.
Realizing that the time was ripe for seizing power by armed
force, Lenin returned to Petrograd in October and convinced a
majority of the Bolshevik Central Committee, which had hoped to
take power legally, to accept armed uprising in principle. Trotsky
won the Petrograd garrison over to Soviet authority, depriving the
Provisional Government of its main military support in Petrograd.
The actual insurrection--the Bolshevik Revolution--began on the
morning of November 6 (October 24) when Kerensky ordered the
Bolshevik press closed. Interpreting this action as a
counterrevolutionary move, the Bolsheviks called on their
supporters to defend the Petrograd Soviet. By evening the
Bolsheviks controlled utilities and most government buildings in
Petrograd, allowing Lenin to proclaim the downfall of the
Provisional Government on the morning of November 7 (October 25).
The Bolsheviks captured the Provisional Government's cabinet at its
Winter Palace headquarters that night with hardly a shot fired in
the government's defense. Kerensky left Petrograd to organize
resistance, but his countercoup failed and he fled Russia.
Bolshevik uprisings soon took place elsewhere; the Bolsheviks
gained control of Moscow by November 15 (November 2). The Second
Congress of Soviets, meeting in Petrograd on November 7 (October
25), ratified the Bolshevik takeover after moderate deputies
(mainly Mensheviks and right-wing members of the Socialist
Revolutionary Party, or SRs) quit the session. The remaining
Bolsheviks and left-wing SRs declared the soviets the governing
bodies of Russia and named the Council of People's Commissars
(Sovet narodnykh kommissarov--Sovnarkom) to serve as the cabinet.
Lenin became chairman of this council (see
table 5, Appendix A).
Trotsky took the post of commissar of foreign affairs; Stalin, a
Georgian, became commissar of nationalities. By acting decisively
while their opponents vacillated, the Bolsheviks succeeded in
effecting their coup d'état.
On coming to power, the Bolsheviks issued a series of
revolutionary decrees that ratified peasants' seizures of land and
workers' control of industry; abolished legal class privileges;
nationalized the banks; and set up revolutionary tribunals in place
of the courts. At the same time, the revolutionaries now
constituting the regime worked to secure power inside and outside
the government. Deeming Western forms of parliamentary democracy
irrelevant, Lenin argued for a dictatorship of the
proletariat (see Glossary)
based on one-party Bolshevik rule, although for a time
left-wing SRs also participated in the Sovnarkom. The Soviet
government created a secret police, the
Vecheka (see Glossary) to
persecute enemies of the state (including bourgeois liberals and
moderate socialists)
(see Soviet Union USSR -
Predecessors of the Committee for State
Security and the Ministry of Internal Affairs
, ch. 19). Having
convened the Constituent Assembly, which had been elected in
November with the Bolsheviks winning only a quarter of the seats,
the Soviet government dissolved the assembly in January after a
one-day session, ending a short-lived experiment in parliamentary
democracy in Russia.
In foreign affairs, the Soviet government, seeking to disengage
Russia from the world war, called on the belligerent powers for an
armistice and peace without annexations. The Allied Powers rejected
this appeal, but Germany and its allies agreed to a cease-fire and
began negotiations in December 1917. After dictating harsh terms
that the Soviet government would not accept, however, Germany
resumed its offensive in February 1918, meeting scant resistance
from disintegrating Russian armies. Lenin, after bitter debate with
leading Bolsheviks who favored prolonging the war in hopes of
precipitating class warfare in Germany, persuaded a slim majority
of the Bolshevik Central Committee that peace must be made at any
cost. On March 3, Soviet government officials signed the Treaty of
Brest-Litovsk, relinquishing Poland, the Baltic lands, Finland, and
Ukraine to German control and giving up a portion of the Caucasus
region to Turkey. With the new border dangerously close to
Petrograd, the government was soon transferred to Moscow. An
enormous part of the population and resources of the Russian Empire
was lost by this treaty, but Lenin understood that no alternative
could ensure the survival of the fledgling Soviet state.
Data as of May 1989
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