lenin

• Sovnarkom: new Russian cabinet, Lenin as Chairman, Stalin & Trotsky were Commissars.
• The Decrees: Decree on Land (right for peasants to take land from the Church and nobility), Decree of peace (withdrawal from WW1), Workers Decrees (8 hour work day, introduction of minimum wage). They were popular and allowed the construction of a new government.
• The Constituent Assembly: nationwide election in November 1917 which resulted in a Bolshevik minority. it closed after one day because it threatened Bolshevik power.
• Treaty of Brest-Litovsk: significant proportion of Russian territory to Central Powers, hugely unpopular. resulted in Bolsheviks losing the April/May 1918 elections, which Lenin ignored. Mensheviks and Social Revolutionaries expelled from Soviets.
• Government changes during Civil War: increasingly centralised and powerful. Economy: War Communism, politics: nomenklatura over democratic Soviets, army: conscription, harsh punishments, Tsarist generals, led by Trotsky.
• 'party state': reliance on the Politburo (5-7 members)- quicker decision making, contained loyal supporters (Stalin, Trotsky, Zinoviev, Kamenev). Role of Sovnarkom reduced.
• Red Terror: Cheka (police defending revolution), imprisonment, torture and murder. Argued as a necessity to the revolution.
• Crisis and Reform: Civil War ruined economy, which led to uprisings. Tambov peasants- uprising against grain requisitioning + Cheka. Jan 1921- 50,000 anti-communist fighters. Kronstadt rebellion: sailors against treatment of peasants, crushed by Red Army.
• Terror in creation of the one-party state: Feb 1921- Lenin authorised Cheka to destroy opposition parties. Moscow + Petrograd Mensheviks were arrested and imprisoned. 1922- 22 SR's trialed and imprisoned/exiled.
• 1921 Party Congress: Lenin acknowledged that workers and peasants were dissatisfied with the regime. Opposition included Workers' Opposition and Democratic Centralists. New series of reforms to counter this, e.g. the ban on factions, called 'On Party Unity'.
• CONCLUSION: successful in creating a Dictatorship of the Proletariat. Destroyed the soviet democracy, replaced by one-party state. The post-October Revolution institutions like Sovnarkom had little importance. Created political centralisation. The 'temporary' measures created included ban on factions, ban of opposition groups, and the Cheka.