To their opponents, these first stumbling efforts to master the basic institutions of the state symbolized the Bolsheviks’ fundamental weakness. Few people thought that the new regime could last. ‘Caliphs for an hour’ was the verdict of much of the press. The SR leader, Gots, gave the Bolsheviks ‘no more than a few days’; Gorky gave them two weeks; Tsereteli up to three; while Nabokov refused to ‘believe for one minute in the strength of the Bolshevik regime and expected its early demise’. Many of the less sanguine Bolsheviks were no more optimistic. ‘Things are so unstable’, wrote Lunacharsky to his wife on 29 October, ‘that every time I break off from a letter, I don’t even know if it will be my last. I could at any moment be thrown into jail.’41
It was not just the opposition of the Civil Service, or the Bolsheviks’ own lack of technical expertise in running the complex machinery of the state, which seemed to signal their imminent downfall. The Bolsheviks had no means of feeding the cities or halting the collapse of the economy. They were isolated from the peasants, the vast majority of the population, who were almost bound to vote against them in the forthcoming elections to the Constituent Assembly. Like the Paris Commune of 1871, Petrograd appeared like a tiny Red island in the middle of a vast Green ocean. The Bolsheviks also had to deal with the censure of the Western powers and the rest of the socialist intelligentsia. Gorky’s newspaper, Novaia zhizn’, was the most prominent and outspoken mouthpiece of this opposition during the autumn and winter, and it says much for his skills as a politician that it did not fall prey to the Bolshevik censors, like most of the opposition press. Gorky’s own column, ‘Untimely Thoughts’, with its bitter denunciations of the ‘new autocracy’, must have worn Lenin’s indulgent fondness for the writer dangerously thin. Gorky himself often expressed surprise that the paper had not been closed down. ‘Lenin and Trotsky’, he warned as early as 7 November, ‘do not have the slightest idea of the meaning of freedom or the Rights of Man. They have already become poisoned with the filthy venom of power, and this is shown by their shameful attitude towards freedom of speech, the individual, and all those other civil liberties for which the democracy struggled.’42
None the less, in spite of their seemingly fatal isolation, the Bolsheviks managed to consolidate their dictatorship during the first three months of the new regime. By the time of its convocation, in January 1918, the Constituent Assembly, upon which the democratic opposition had pinned all its hopes, had already been made powerless by the rise of the one-party state and the spread of local Soviet rule through the provinces. How did the Bolsheviks achieve this? The absence of a serious military opposition during this critical period, when their power was weakest, no doubt helps to explain their success. The great White armies of the Civil War had yet to be formed and the main antiBolshevik forces were small Cossack armies engaged in local wars on the periphery of the Empire. Anti-Bolshevik forces in the centre of Russia were almost non-existent. The SRs and the Kadets, the most likely leaders of such a force, were so convinced of the regime’s imminent collapse that they neglected to organize against it. Everyone naturally assumed that it would fall through its own internal weaknesses, so no one did anything to help bring this about. The Committee for the Salvation of Russia and the Revolution, organized by the SRs in the first few days after the Bolsheviks’ seizure of power, had no real forces behind it; while plans to set up a rival socialist government headed by Chernov at Stavka, the old headquarters of the army, never got off the ground.
