Other means of combating opposition

• Lenin moved quickly to ensure Bolshevik control. His methods included propoganda campaign against political and class enemies - particularly the bourgeoisie
• Closure of anti-Bolshevik newspapers
• Establishment the 'All-Russian Commission for the Suppression of Counter-Revolution, Sabotage and Speculation', in December 1917, more often known as the Cheka
• Leading Kadets, right-wing Social Revolutionaries and Mensheviks were rounded up and imprisoned 
• Lenin's consolidation of control was so efficient that opponents could only pin their hopes on his promise of a Constituent Assembly. Elections for this began in November. The SRs won the most seats.
• Many votes had been cast without a full understanding of the political situation in Petrograd, but Lenin was appalled and declared that 'we must not be deceived by the election figures.
• The Constituent Assembly was to meet for one day only - on January 1918, after which Lenin dissolved it. Lenin believed that the Bolsheviks understood the needs of the proletariat better than the proletariat themselves understood them.
• Maxim Gorky wrote that Lenin had ' a ruthless contempt, worthy of an aristocrat, for the lives of ordinary individuals. '
• Even Rosa Luxemburg, a fellow revolutionary, expressed alarm. 'She feared that Lenin's policy had brought about, not the dictatorship of the working classes over the middle classes, which she approved of, but the dictatorship of the Communist Party over the working classes.'