What measures did the Bolsheviks take to maintain power and address Russia's problems before the outbreak of civil war in the summer of 1918?

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John Garvey        History        GC

What measures did the Bolsheviks take to maintain power and address Russia’s problems before the outbreak of civil war in the summer of 1918?

   

On coming to power, the Bolsheviks issued a series of revolutionary decrees to maintain power and control over the Russian people. Lenin had made many promises to get in to power and had to fulfil them to keep Russia’s trust.

In this essay, I am going to go through the numerous decrees made and how the Bolsheviks tried to maintain power before the outbreak of civil war in 1918.

   On 27th November 1917 Lenin made a decree on ‘workers control’. Factory committees, which existed already under the Provisional government, were given stronger powers. They could interfere in all aspects of production and distribution of products. The committee were granted the right to supervise production, to lay down minimum output indicators, to obtain data on costs. The owners of enterprises had to make available to the committee all accounts and all documents, commercial secrecy was abolished. However, local leaders had neither the training nor responsibility to ‘supervise’ and ‘control’ production and distribution. They could and did sell off materials, steal, disobey instructions. Lenin may have kept his promise but things didn’t turn out the way he planned. One of the first problems was made even before the outbreak of the civil war.

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   At the same time, the revolutionaries now constituting the regime worked to secure power inside and outside the government. Deeming parliamentary democracy irrelevant, Lenin argued for a "dictatorship of the proletariat" based on single-party Bolshevik rule. The Bolsheviks wanted to share power with no-one. Having made the Constituent Assembly, which finally had been elected in November with the Bolsheviks winning only a quarter of the seats, the Soviet government dissolved the assembly in January after a one-day session, ending a short-lived experiment in parliamentary democracy.

   In foreign affairs, the Soviet government, seeking to pull Russia from WWI, called on ...

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