Relying on their majority in the Congress of Soviets, the Bolsheviks and the Left SRs now took power, proclaiming Russia a Soviet and Socialist Republic. The Mensheviks and Right SRs walked out of the Congress in protest as Trotsky consigned them to the “garbage heap of history.” The first actions of the Reds were to organize the new government. The Congress of Soviets elected a government of People’s Commissars with Lenin at the head and Trotsky as People’s Commissar of Foreign Affairs. The other positions went to prominent Bolsheviks and Left SRs, the most significant among the former being Joseph Stalin as Commissar of Nationalities. Trotsky went to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs at the Choristers’ Bridge near the Winter Palace, turned off the lights, and told everyone to go home. For the next few months, he ran foreign policy from a small office in the Smolny Institute.
The new Soviet government came into power with great support from the workers and intense opposition from the old upper classes, the middle classes, and the intelligentsia. These divisions were reflected in the Constituent Assembly that convened on January 5/18, 1918. Called by the Provisional Government, the Assembly elections had proceeded through the autumn, before and after the Bolshevik seizure of power. In the cities the Bolsheviks routed the moderate socialists (SRs and Mensheviks) leaving the increasingly more conservative and nationalistic Kadets as the second urban party. In the countryside, however, the SRs emerged with the most votes, though most candidates had not declared whether they supported the left or right, muddying the result. The Assembly met for some thirteen hours, after which the Bolshevik guard of Red sailors from the navy simply told the deputies to leave and go home. They obeyed. A few days later another Congress of Soviet Deputies proclaimed the new state, the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic, with ringing declarations of the rights of the workers, peasants, and national minorities.
CIVIL WAR AND SOVIET POWER
By this time civil war had already begun, as groups of military officers in southern Russia came together to organize resistance to the new government and discontent grew among the Don Cossacks. The Cossack leader Kaledin formed a Cossack government of sorts on the Don, and the Reds quickly moved against him. Through the Civil War the Cossacks were to be the foundation of resistance to Soviet power. Living on the southern and eastern fringes of Russia, they were no longer the rebels of the eighteenth century. They combined peasant farming with service in the army, and secure in possession of their land, they had been the tsar’s most loyal servants since the 1790s. The largest and most prosperous of the Cossack hosts was on the Don, and there was the fiercest resistance to the new order. At the same time the nationalist intellectuals in the Kiev Rada declared themselves to be the supreme power in the Ukraine. A Cossack-Ukrainian front seemed to be forming against the Reds in the south. A motley collection of red guards and sailors were enough to defeat both the Don Cossacks and the Rada by January 1918. At the same time chaos spread through the country, along with episodes of resistance elsewhere. At the end of December 1917, to meet these threats, Soviet authorities also formed the Cheka, the Extraordinary Commission for the Struggle with Banditism and Counterrevolution, an organization that combined security police functions with a sort of political army. Its first head was a Polish Communist, Felix Dzerzhinskii, incorruptible and ruthless.
The quick defeat of opposition to the Bolsheviks did not mean that order returned. The war had ruined the Russian economy. Inflation was out of control and the transport networks and the distribution of food were breaking down. Heat and light disappeared in Petrograd and other big cities, and workers began to return to their native villages, if they could. In the former capital of the Russian Empire the lights went out in the great palaces, the nobility fled to the south to warmth and food, along with much of the intelligentsia and the middle classes. As the army disintegrated, millions of soldiers clogged the trains going home, taking with them rifles and hand grenades. Criminal gangs terrorized many cities. The first measures of the Bolsheviks only increased the disintegration, for the new government set out to build a new socialist state in the midst of chaos. The workers frequently interpreted socialism to mean that they should physically eject the factory owners and managers and elect committees of workers to run the plants. These committees had no way to procure supplies or distribute the goods, and in the general social chaos labor discipline collapsed. It was a vicious circle. The Bolsheviks went along with this for several months, as part of the need to dissolve the old order, but by spring of 1918, the collapsing economy and the needs of civil war caused them to reverse themselves and begin to appoint single managers, former workers or party activists, to run the factories. In theory these Red managers were accountable to the newly established Supreme Economic Council and the various People’s Commissariats (Industry, Trade, Agriculture, Labor, Food Supplies). Here was the embryo of the later Soviet state.
For the moment the Bolshevik priority was simple survival. The first order of business in November 1917 was the war, and immediately after the Bolshevik revolution the new government proclaimed a truce with Germany and its allies and opened negotiations. Trotsky went to Brest-Litovsk on the Polish border, now under German occupation, to try to make peace. The German demands were exorbitant, and Trotsky dithered, proclaiming that the right policy was “neither war nor peace.” The Germans responded with a massive offensive, occupying all of the Ukraine, Belorussia, and the Baltic provinces. Local nationalists proclaimed their independence of Red Petrograd, but the Kaiser’s armies paid them no attention. The Germans set up a puppet regime in Kiev with the Russian general Pavel Skoropadskii, a former adjutant of the tsar who had suddenly discovered his Ukrainian roots, as their instrument. Red Guards were too amateurish a force, and the Bolsheviks now formed a real army, the Workers’ and Peasants’ Red Army, in response, but the new army could not stop the Germans. The government moved to Moscow, farther from the German lines. Even so some of the Communist leaders, Nikolai Bukharin especially, and the Left SRs wanted to continue to fight a “revolutionary war.” Lenin realized that this was madness, and convinced the leadership to sign on to the German conditions. Peace came in March, with the loss of all the western territories to Germany and Austria, but it was peace and the Kaiser recognized the red republic. The Left SRs resigned in protest, leaving the Bolsheviks entirely in charge of the new state.