The Bolsheviks’ true accomplishment was not taking power but keeping it and conquering the chaos they had helped create. Lenin was able to profit from developments over which he and the Bolsheviks had no control. Since summer 1917 an unstoppable peasant revolution had swept across Russia, as peasants divided among themselves the estates of the landlords and the church. Thus Lenin’s first law, which supposedly gave land to the peasants, actually merely approved what peasants were already doing. Lenin then met urban workers’ greatest demand with a decree giving local workers’ committees direct control of individual factories.

The Bolsheviks proclaimed their regime a “provisional workers’ and peasants’ government,” promising that a freely elected Constituent Assembly would draw up a new constitution. However, when Bolshevik delegates won fewer than one-fourth of the seats in free elections in November, the Constituent Assembly met for only one day, on January 18, 1918, after which it was permanently disbanded by Bolshevik soldiers acting under Lenin’s orders.

Lenin then moved to make peace with Germany, at any price. That price was very high. Germany demanded the Soviet government surrender all its western territories (which contained a third of old Russia’s population) in the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk (BREHST lih-TAWFSK), in March 1918. With Germany’s defeat eight months later, the treaty was nullified, but it allowed Lenin time to escape the disaster of continued war and pursue his goal of absolute political power for the Bolsheviks — now renamed Communists — within Russia.

The war’s end and the demise of the democratically elected Constituent Assembly revealed Bolshevik rule as a dictatorship. “Long live the [democratic] soviets; down with the Bolsheviks” became a popular slogan. Officers of the old army organized so-called White opposition to the Bolsheviks in southern Russia, Ukraine, Siberia, and west of Petrograd and plunged the country into civil war from November 1917 to October 1922. The Whites came from many political factions and were united only by their hatred of the Bolsheviks — the Reds. White armies attacked the Red Army from the east (Siberia), the south, and the northwest. By October 1919 it appeared they might triumph as they closed in on Lenin’s government (which made its capital in Moscow from March 1919), but they did not. Eventually 125,000 Reds and 175,000 Whites and Poles were killed before the Red Army under Trotsky’s command captured Vladivostok in October 1922 and brought the civil war to an end.

The Bolsheviks’ Red Army won for several reasons. Strategically, they controlled the center, while the disunited Whites attacked from the fringes. Moreover, the Whites’ poorly defined political program failed to unite all of the Bolsheviks’ foes under a progressive democratic banner. Most important, the Communists developed a better army, against which the divided Whites were no match.

The Bolsheviks also mobilized the home front. Establishing War Communism — The Application Of The Total-War concept to a civil conflict — they seized grain from peasants, introduced rationing, nationalized all banks and industry, and required everyone to work. Although these measures contributed to a breakdown of normal economic activity, they also served to maintain labor discipline and to keep the Red Army supplied.

Revolutionary terror also contributed to the Communist victory. The old tsarist secret police was re-established as the Cheka, which hunted down and executed thousands of real or supposed foes, including the tsar and his family. During the so-called Red Terror of 1918–1920, the Cheka sowed fear, silenced opposition, and executed an estimated 250,000 “class enemies.”

Finally, foreign military intervention in the civil war ended up helping the Communists. The Allies sent troops to prevent war materiel that they had sent to the provisional government from being captured by the Germans. After the Soviet government nationalized all foreign-owned factories without compensation and refused to pay foreign debts, Western governments began to support White armies. While these efforts did little to help the Whites’ cause, they did permit the Communists to appeal to the ethnic Russians’ patriotic nationalism.