Summary CIE History: How were the bolsheviks able to consolidate their power
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A summarised section 3 from the cie history 9489 textbook.
It covers the Bolshevik rise to power, including the October Revolution, the use of terror and the dissolution of the assembly
How were the Bolsheviks able to consolidate their power up
to 1921
v Bolshevik reforms and the establishment of a dictatorship
The aftermath of the October Revolution
§ Lenin needed to ensure survival of his party after the fall of the
Provisional Government
§ Needed a period of stability to create a socialist state
§ Still at war
§ Petrograd – civil servants went on strike paralysing the
institutions of government
§ Fighting continued and the hold the Bolsheviks had was
weakening
§ Railway union – Vikzhel – threatened to cut off supplies unless
the Bolsheviks agreed to form a government with the
Mensheviks
§ The main governmental body was the Council of People’s
Commissars (Sovnarkom), chaired by Lenin,
§ declared that it had the right to pass laws independently of the
Petrograd Soviet.
§ Alongside this was the Central Committee of the Bolshevik
Party, the body that had directed the October Revolution under
Lenin’s leadership.
§ It was the highest authority within the party between its annual
congresses.
§ From 1919, it appointed a five-member body, the Politburo,
which became the real centre of power in the Soviet Union.
§ The new government’s first acts were attempts to pass into law
elements of the Bolshevik slogan, ‘Peace, Land and Bread’.
§ The ‘Decree on Land’ urged the break-up of large estates and
the transfer of land to the peasants, something which was
already happening unofficially in the countryside.
§ The ‘Decree on Peace’ stated that Russia aimed to withdraw
from the war without ‘payment of indemnities or annexations’.
, § This was an appeal to the war-weary soldiers still fighting at
the front. The ‘Decree on Workers’ Control’ recognised the
takeover of factories by workers’ committees.
The Red Terror and the police state
§ Bolsheviks intended to construct a police state.
§ The opposition press was banned and members of other
parties were arrested.
§ The Left SRs were admitted to the Sovnarkom for opportunistic
reasons: they had broken away from the Social Revolutionaries
to accept the October Revolution, and their links to the
peasants made them useful.
§ The functions of the MRC were transferred early in December
1917 to a new body, the Cheka, a secret police force modelled
on the tsarist Okhrana.
§ Its leader, the Polish-born Felix Dzerzhinsky - ruthless
§ Undertook the ‘battle to the death’ against supporters of
counter-revolution. This was the beginning of the terror
§ The confiscation of property, under the slogan ‘Loot the
looters’, accompanied physical abuse and murder.
§ One of the most violent episodes was the killing of the former
tsar and his family in July 1918.
§ The family had been kept under house arrest since the
revolution and in their final months were moved to
Ekaterinburg in Siberia.
The dissolution of the Constituent Assembly, January 1918
§ Elections to the Constituent Assembly were held in November
1917, using the secret ballot and with all Russian citizens over
the age of 20 allowed to vote.
§ The Bolsheviks did well in Petrograd and Moscow but they
polled poorly in rural areas,
§ The Socialist Revolutionaries emerged as the largest party
§ The breakaway Left SRs, who were still allied to the Bolsheviks,
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