Lesson 7 - The Bolsheviks consolidate their power - 1917-18
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We began this unit by making comparisons between the situation in Russia before the First World War and France before 1789. The next two lessons take the comparison a step further.
Was Lenin a Russian Robespierre? Did wars enable terror? Was Trotsky another Bonaparte in waiting? But in addition to looking back, we will also be looking forward. What happens in Russia after October 1917 has global significance and very long-term consequences. The Communist regime established by Lenin in October 1917 would very quickly become the world’s first modern authoritarian state, Mussolini’s Italy and Hitler’s Germany were soon to follow. |
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The communist ideology that Lenin helped create, would after the Second World War provide an alternative model of social-economic and political organisation that would challenge the hegemony of American led liberal capitalism and provide the basis of the Cold War and much inspiration for decolonisation.
We are to begin with a little theory. We need to understand the nature of state power. How does any state manage to control its citizens? Why do individuals agree to be governed and do as they are told? I am going to use the concept of 'hegemony' we looked at in an earlier lesson associated with the Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci. Once we understand how all states operate, then we can consider what happened in Lenin’s Russia.
We are to begin with a little theory. We need to understand the nature of state power. How does any state manage to control its citizens? Why do individuals agree to be governed and do as they are told? I am going to use the concept of 'hegemony' we looked at in an earlier lesson associated with the Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci. Once we understand how all states operate, then we can consider what happened in Lenin’s Russia.
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Coercion, persuasion and consent: How did the Bolsheviks hold on to power?
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The planned revolution is enacted and Bolsheviks seize power, but what happens next?
The first thing the Bolsheviks did was organise the democratic elections for the Constituent Assembly that the Provisional Government had avoided. The Constituent Assembly elections of November 1917 illustrated the problem Lenin faced. The results were not what the Bolsheviks had hoped for: the Socialist Revolutionaries won 48.1 per cent of the vote, the Bolsheviks only 24 per cent. Lenin negotiated briefly, split the SRs by bringing some left-wingers into government, and then simply dissolved the Assembly by force. |
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Just a few hours after the Assembly convened, Bolshevik forces stormed the building and forcibly dissolved the body, marking the end of Russia's first short-lived experiment with parliamentary democracy. The next democratic experiment would have to wait until after the collapse of communism in 1991... Spolier alert, it didn't last much longer.
Coercion - Formal Social Control
The use of force was central to Bolshevik survival from the very beginning. In December 1917, just weeks after the revolution, Lenin established the Cheka, a secret police force initially created to break a strike by civil servants and bank officials who refused to work for the new government. Felix Dzerzhinsky organised it to destroy counter-revolutionaries and shoot deserters. What began as a small operation of 120 employees in March 1918 grew with terrifying speed: by December 1921 the Cheka employed 143,000 people. |
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Following the attempted assassination of Lenin in August 1918, the regime launched what became known as the Red Terror. The Bolsheviks made no apology for it. They took pride, as Fitzpatrick notes, in being tough-minded about violence, "avoiding the mealy-mouthed hypocrisy of the bourgeoisie." Lenin himself admonished colleagues who hesitated: "If we are not ready to shoot a saboteur and White Guardist, what sort of revolution is that?" The Cheka became, in Fitzpatrick's words, "an organ of terror, dispensing summary justice including executions, making mass arrests, and taking hostages at random...." According to Bolshevik figures for twenty provinces of European Russia in 1918 and the first half of 1919 alone, at least 8,389 persons were shot without trial and 87,000 arrested. By the end of 1920 there were around 50,000 inmates in Soviet concentration camps.
When the Bolsheviks looked for historical parallels for what they were doing, they referred not to the Tsarist secret police but to the revolutionary Terror of 1794 in France. (Matu 2, Lesson 8) It is worth pausing on that. The same revolutionary logic that had sent thousands to the guillotine in Paris was now being applied in Petrograd and Moscow. Robespierre had justified the Terror as a necessary instrument of revolutionary survival. Lenin said almost exactly the same thing, in almost exactly the same circumstances. Opposition on the left was systematically eliminated: the Left SRs were crushed after their rising in July 1918, and the Mensheviks and remaining SR factions suppressed in 1920 and 1921. By that point no organised political opposition remained. |
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Persuasion - Informal Social Control
Any state that rules purely by force is fragile. The Bolsheviks understood this and invested enormous energy in shaping what people thought, read, saw and learned. This was not just censorship: it was an attempt to transform the culture of an entire society from the ground up.
In October 1917 the Commissariat of Popular Enlightenment, known as Narkompros, was set up under Anatoly Lunacharsky, covering schools, universities, museums, theatres, film and the arts. Workers and peasants were encouraged to produce their own culture through the Proletkult movement, which by 1920 had around 400,000 members. When Proletkult began to develop as an independent organisation, Lenin shut it down in 1921 and 1922. Artistic freedom was welcome only up to the point where it threatened party control.
In October 1917 the Commissariat of Popular Enlightenment, known as Narkompros, was set up under Anatoly Lunacharsky, covering schools, universities, museums, theatres, film and the arts. Workers and peasants were encouraged to produce their own culture through the Proletkult movement, which by 1920 had around 400,000 members. When Proletkult began to develop as an independent organisation, Lenin shut it down in 1921 and 1922. Artistic freedom was welcome only up to the point where it threatened party control.
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The most visible form of persuasion was agitprop, combining agitation and propaganda to reach a largely illiterate population through images and spectacle. More than 1,000 ROSTA window posters were produced by artists including Mayakovsky (above). Agitprop trains carried film crews, theatre groups and educational literature to remote areas.
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The film opposite gives you a direct account: a factory worker recalls that the message was not abstract theory but a simple promise of hospitals, housing and schools as the fruits of collective labour.
Censorship ran alongside persuasion from the start. In January 1918 the Revolutionary Press Tribunal was established, entitled to close publishing houses, seize printing works and arrest editors. Independent newspapers were shut down one by one, replaced by a system of state-controlled information in which every publication served the regime's purposes. By the early 1920s no independent political voice remained in print. Religion was attacked directly. The Decree on the Separation of Church and State banned religious instruction in schools, stripped the Church of its property and reduced priests to second-class citizens. |
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Children were 'Octobered' with revolutionary names: Revolyutsiya, Ninel (Lenin spelt backwards), Vladlen. Some parents reached further back, naming children after heroes of the French Revolution: Marat was a popular choice. As you will remember from Matu 2, French revolutionaries had similarly renamed the months and redesignated the streets of Paris to make the old world feel unreachable. The Bolsheviks knew their revolutionary history and were deliberately repeating it.
Schools and youth organisations were the most important long-term instruments of control. The curriculum was reshaped to promote Marxist values. The Pioneers and the Komsomol captured the next generation: as Fitzpatrick notes, members were encouraged to watch out for bourgeois tendencies at home and school, and to re-educate parents who clung to religion or the old ways. One Civil War slogan summed it up: 'Down with the capitalist tyranny of parents!' The school was no longer simply a place of learning: it was an instrument of the revolution.
Schools and youth organisations were the most important long-term instruments of control. The curriculum was reshaped to promote Marxist values. The Pioneers and the Komsomol captured the next generation: as Fitzpatrick notes, members were encouraged to watch out for bourgeois tendencies at home and school, and to re-educate parents who clung to religion or the old ways. One Civil War slogan summed it up: 'Down with the capitalist tyranny of parents!' The school was no longer simply a place of learning: it was an instrument of the revolution.
Consent
Perhaps the most surprising element is the degree to which the Bolsheviks were able to generate genuine consent among at least some sections of the population, not through fear or propaganda but through policies that people actually wanted. The films below give you direct testimony of what this felt like from the inside: the early believers in the first film speak of genuine excitement at the promise of justice, equality and a classless society, while the second film shows what the revolution meant in practice for one woman whose determination to become an electrical engineer was made possible by opportunities the new regime opened up.
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The Decree on Land of October 26th 1917 simply legalised the peasant land seizures that were already happening across Russia. For millions of peasants this was the fulfilment of everything they had hoped for. In December factories were formally put under the control of the Soviets. There was a whole series of remarkably progressive social and cultural measures that were decades ahead of their time, women in particular enjoyed a range of rights and freedoms that were still unknown in the west. The Treaty of Brest-Litovsk in March 1918, though punishing, brought the peace that soldiers had demanded throughout 1917. Russia lost 32 per cent of its arable land, 26 per cent of its railway system, 33 per cent of its factories, 75 per cent of its coal and iron ore mines, and around 60 million citizens. It was a severe price, but it ended the war that had caused more suffering than almost anything else in recent Russian history.
On the crucial question of why the peasantry broadly accepted Bolshevik rule despite the hardships of grain requisitioning, Fitzpatrick is blunt: on the issue of land, the Bolsheviks were simply "the lesser evil." The opponents of the Bolsheviks (Whites) did not approve of the land seizures and openly supported the claims of the former landowners. Whatever the peasants thought of the Reds, the prospect of the Whites returning was worse. Fitzpatrick draws an important distinction here between active support and passive acceptance: the urban working class gave the Bolsheviks genuine enthusiasm, but for the peasantry, who constituted the great majority of the population, it was more a matter of resignation than conviction. Both matter, but they are not the same thing.
On the crucial question of why the peasantry broadly accepted Bolshevik rule despite the hardships of grain requisitioning, Fitzpatrick is blunt: on the issue of land, the Bolsheviks were simply "the lesser evil." The opponents of the Bolsheviks (Whites) did not approve of the land seizures and openly supported the claims of the former landowners. Whatever the peasants thought of the Reds, the prospect of the Whites returning was worse. Fitzpatrick draws an important distinction here between active support and passive acceptance: the urban working class gave the Bolsheviks genuine enthusiasm, but for the peasantry, who constituted the great majority of the population, it was more a matter of resignation than conviction. Both matter, but they are not the same thing.
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The revolution also brought a wave of radical social and cultural reform that generated real enthusiasm, particularly among women and young people. The Bolsheviks had long supported women's emancipation, and they moved quickly to deliver it. Divorce became easily attainable. Abortion was legalised. Illegitimacy lost its legal stigma. Equal pay and equal rights for women were formally mandated. The eight-hour working day, conceded by Petrograd employers on March 10th 1917 and in force across the country by the end of April, was one of the most tangible early gains for workers. Health and safety regulations, previously non-existent under Tsarism, began to be introduced.
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At a time when women in the West were still fighting for the right to vote, the Bolsheviks had women in prominent positions in government. Leading Bolshevik women gave the revolutionary programme a human face.
Alexandra Kollontai, (left) Commissar for Social Welfare, was the most prominent female voice in the government and one of the few senior Bolsheviks to write seriously about sexual politics and the liberation of women from domestic labour. Inessa Armand, a close associate of Lenin and head of the Zhenotdel, the party's women's department, worked to organise and educate women, protect their interests and help them play an independent role in the new society. For many women, particularly in the cities, the revolution felt like a genuine opening of the world. |
The years from 1917 into the mid-1920s produced some of the most innovative art and film-making of the twentieth century. Freed from Tsarist censorship and excited by the revolution, avant-garde artists threw themselves into building a new visual culture. Constructivists like Rodchenko designed posters and everyday objects in a bold industrial style. Malevich reduced painting to pure geometric form. El Lissitsky's poster Beat the Whites with the Red Wedge (1919 below) showed how abstract art could carry a direct political message with extraordinary force. Vladimir Tatlin proposed a monument to the Communist International that would have been twice the height of the Empire State Building: a rotating tower of glass and iron containing a propaganda centre equipped with radio, telegraph and a vast outdoor screen (below). It was never built, but the ambition it expressed was entirely real.
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The cultural atmosphere of the early 1920s reflected this spirit of liberation and experiment. The film opposite captures it vividly: a Moscow orchestra so committed to the idea of equality that it performed without a conductor, its members facing each other and making decisions collectively. It was, as one musician recalls, a real innovation. Avant-garde artists, architects and film-makers threw themselves into the revolutionary experiment with genuine enthusiasm, not because the state demanded it but because the revolution seemed to promise the destruction of every old hierarchy and convention. This creative energy was real, and it generated real consent. The party would later move to control and ultimately suppress much of it, but in these early years the cultural experiment and the political experiment felt to many like the same thing.
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On screen, Sergei Eisenstein pioneered editing techniques that changed film-making internationally. His Battleship Potemkin (1925) remains one of the most celebrated films ever made (rememeber the Odessa Steps from Lesson 2). Dziga Vertov's Man with a Movie Camera (1929) used the camera itself as a revolutionary instrument. What makes this period so striking is that genuine artistic innovation and political commitment felt, to those involved, like the same thing. The tragedy is that it did not last. By the late 1920s the party had imposed Socialist Realism (Matu 10) as the only acceptable style, and the brief flowering of Soviet culture was over.
Finally - something that was to become increasingly important - Bolshevik party members found plenty of employment opportunities that grew dramatically as the communist state and the 'dictatorship of the proletariat' expanded its control over Russian society and its economy. By 1921 party membership had risen to 732,000, with over two-thirds working as administrators. This bureaucratic class, appointed through the party apparatus rather than elected, became known as the nomenklatura. They owed their position entirely to the party and therefore had every reason to defend it. As the historian Acton argued, the regime had established a new basis of authority resting no longer on mass support but on a combination of force and patronage. The chairman of this Communist bureaucracy, initially a relatively minor role, would grow steadily more powerful as the patronage network expanded. In 1922 that chairman was Stalin.
Nomenklatura
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The nomenklatura were the list of key positions in Soviet government, industry, the military and public life that could only be filled by approved Communist Party members. Appointment to these posts was controlled by the party apparatus, not by election or open competition. The word comes from the Latin for "list of names."
Those who held nomenklatura positions enjoyed significant privileges: better housing, access to special shops, higher salaries and opportunities for promotion. In return they were expected to be politically loyal and obedient. |
As the state progressively nationalised industry, took control of the media, absorbed civic organisations and extended its reach into every area of public life, the number of positions within the nomenklatura system grew accordingly. Every factory directorship, every newspaper editorship, every university rectorship, every position of local authority became a party appointment. The class of people who owed their status, income and security entirely to the regime expanded with the state itself. This was not an accident: it was the mechanism by which the party turned economic and institutional power into political loyalty. By the time Stalin came to control the party's appointment system as General Secretary in 1922, the nomenklatura had become the structural foundation of Soviet power. It would remain the central mechanism of that power until the collapse of the USSR in 1991.
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Activity
Using the text and sources above (there are also relevant pages in your textbook pages 117-119), explain how the Bolsheviks consolidated their power. Write three paragraphs - PEE - to explain how the Bolsheviks held on to power: (1) How the Bolsheviks used coercion (force), (2) Persuasion (control of ideas) and (3) Consent (policies that gained them support). Which of the three means of maintaining power do you think was the most important and why? |
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Extension and extra
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Further reading for lessons 7 and 8, especially useful for IB students.
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IB students would do well to watch me explain the key concepts of the consolidation of authoritarian states in the brilliant films below:
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