•Bolsheviks immediately formed their own government,
called the `Council of People’s Commisars’,
headed by Lenin (real name: Ul’janov, with his own partially Turkic background) and including Trotsky (Lev Bronshtein,
Jewish in origin) and Stalin (Josef Dzhugashvili,
Georgian).
•January 1918: Constituent Assembly met (elected previous
fall). Of 707 members, there
were 170 Bolsheviks (with SRs in absolute majority). Lenin dispersed the assembly with troops and there was little protest.
•Priority was extracting Russia from the War, which it
was losing badly. Russian soldiers
were deserting en masse. Soviet-German Treat of Brest-Litovsk was signed on 3 March 1918. Russia lost 26% of its population, and
Ukraine, Poland, Finland, Lithuania,
Latvia, and Estonia were set free. And Russia had to pay an `indemnity’.
–This will be undone by the Treaty of Versailles at the
end of World War I
•Another was a form of land reform. At first, they just
let peasants seize land from the owners.
Their goal of collective farms was not going to be popular in the beginning, and they new it.
•Minor issues:
–Ranks and titles abolished.
–Gregorian (western) calendar replaces Julian (old
style); dates move forward 13 days.
–Church is stigmatized and its property is
confiscated.
–Having surrounded so much territory to the West, St.
Petersburg was in an exposed
position, so the capital was moved to Moscow
–Oh, and an ideology-driven coercive police state was
established aspiring to `the dictatorship
of the working class’ and the means of production (land, industry) were to be nationalized and private trade was
banned.
•War Communism, a draconion period, followed by the `New
Economic Policy’ (NEP), introduced
in 1921.