Others, however, discerned here a mortal danger to the proletarian state. Many protested against the privileges of ‘bourgeois specialists’ and their prominent role in the new state. Lenin himself rejected such ‘specialist-baiting’, dismissing fears of bourgeois contamination on the grounds that these people now worked for a socialist state and the working class. Bureaucratization was another cause of concern; ‘Democratic Centralists’, a faction at the Eighth Party Congress in March 1919, demanded decentralization and shift of power from party
In December 1917, faced with what seemed to be regime-threatening opposition, Lenin created a supreme political police—the ‘Extraordinary Commission to Combat Counter-Revolution and Sabotage’, known by its Russian acronym Cheka. At its head was a Polish Bolshevik, Feliks Dzerzhinskii, charged with becoming the ‘sword of the revolution’ against ‘class’ enemies, real and imagined. He rapidly made the Cheka a state within a state, arbitrarily meting out revolutionary justice and terror. His empire constructed a network of prisons and labour camps that later became the world’s first concentration camp system.
A critical turning-point came in January 1918, when the long-awaited Constituent Assembly finally convened in Petrograd. Lenin had permitted elections to the Constituent Assembly, something that the socialists and liberals had endlessly promised but endlessly deferred. Bolsheviks garnered only a quarter of the votes, the PSR emerging the clear victor—but only, the Bolsheviks argued, because the ballot failed to distinguish between left SRs (who supported October) and right SRs (who did not). Well before the Assembly convened, Lenin made clear his hostility towards a ‘bourgeois’ (hence irrelevant) parliament. The result was a single, seventeen-hour session on 5–6 January: after passionate SR and Menshevik fulminations against the Bolsheviks, Lenin simply dissolved the Assembly and forbade further sessions.
Civil War
By the spring of 1918, the Bolsheviks had extended soviet authority to the Russian heartland but could hardly claim to have a firm grasp on power. For the next three years they would combat and defeat an incredible array of adversaries: White armies of patriots and anti-communists, liberals and SRs, peasant rebels (‘greens’) and urban anarchists, and minority movements spread along the borderlands and inside Russia proper itself. The regime would also combat interventionist forces from Britain, France, the United States, and Japan, and in 1920 became embroiled in a bitter war with Poland. By early 1921, however, the regime had vanquished adversaries, signed treaties with its neighbours, and turned its attention to reintegration and rebuilding.
The civil war began in the winter of 1917/18. Apart from small bands of patriotic officers (interested more in continuing the war against Germany than in defeating Bolsheviks), the first important ‘White’ leader was General M. V. Alekseev. Together with General Kornilov, in January 1918 he created the Volunteer Army in the Don region: its goal was to cast off the German-Bolshevik yoke and reconvene the Constituent Assembly. Throughout its existence, this army operated within the territory of the Don and Kuban Cossacks—a serious handicap, since the Cossacks had their own agenda independent of saving the Great Russian state. The Don Cossack ataman, General A. M. Kaledin, did offer his services to the White generals, but he was unceremoniously abandoned by the Cossacks when a Red force invaded and elicited popular support. After Kornilov himself fell in battle at Ekaterinodar, command passed to General Anton Denikin—an uncharismatic, but intelligent commander of great personal integrity.
