Early Decrees, the Cheka, and the Constituent Assembly (Late 1917–Early 1918)

To establish his authority, Lenin formed a new government named Sovnarkom and issued a series of sweeping decrees in November and December 1917. The November decrees instituted a maximum 8-hour working day, abolished all titles and class distinctions in favour of “comrade,” declared women equal to men, and banned all non-Bolshevik newspapers. Crucially, the Decree on Land gave peasants the right to take over the land of the nobility, legalising the land seizures that had occurred since the February Revolution and declaring that land belonged to the “entire” people. In December, the liberal Kadets were banned, factories were put under the control of workers’ committees, all banks were nationalised, and church land was confiscated. In the same month, Lenin established the Cheka, his secret police led by Felix Dzerzhinski, whose headquarters were set up in Moscow to arrest and shoot threats to the revolution without trial.

Despite these assertions of power, Lenin was forced to hold elections for a Constituent Assembly in November 1917, expecting a Bolshevik victory to legitimize his regime. Instead, the Socialist Revolutionaries won 370 seats compared to the Bolsheviks’ 175. When the Constituent Assembly met for one day on January 5, 1918, Lenin allowed it to open, but then the doors were closed, the deputies were sent home by Bolshevik Red Guards, and a protesting crowd was fired upon by soldiers under Lenin’s orders.

The Treaty of Brest-Litovsk (Late 1917–March 1918)

Ending the First World War was of crucial importance to Lenin, as a promise to end it had been a key pledge in his “Peace, Land and Bread” slogan. In November and December 1917, a Bolshevik delegation led by Trotsky met the Germans in Brest-Litovsk, where Trotsky attempted to drag out the negotiations hoping the revolutionary mood would spread to Germany. Aware of this, the Germans signed a separate peace treaty with the Ukrainians on February 9, 1918, and on February 18, ordered 700,000 troops to advance, taking only 5 days to push over 150 miles towards Petrograd. Lenin disagreed with Trotsky and ordered him to complete the negotiations swiftly; under immense pressure, the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk was signed on March 3, 1918. The terms were devastating: Russia lost one-sixth of its population (62 million people), one-third of its agricultural land, one-third of its railways, two-thirds of its coalmines, half of its heavy industry, and almost all of its oil. Finland, Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania became independent states, Poland became an independent state, and semi-independent governments were established in Ukraine and Georgia.

The Outbreak of Civil War and War Communism (1918)

The Bolshevik seizure of power and the subsequent treaty sparked the Russian Civil War, pitting the Bolshevik “Reds” against a broad grouping of liberals, former tsarists, nationalists, and moderate socialists known as the “Whites,” as well as peasant armies known as the “Greens”. The Whites were supported by foreign powers, including Britain, France, Japan, and the USA, who sent forces to prevent the spread of Bolshevism until they withdrew by the end of 1919.
In order to support the Red Army during the civil war, Lenin introduced a new economic policy called War Communism. A Supreme Economic Council was formed to run the economy, private trade was banned, and money was replaced by state-organized rationing. The Decree on Nationalisation in the summer of 1918 made all large industries liable to nationalisation, bringing 37,000 businesses under state control by 1920. In the countryside, units of the Cheka were sent to violently seize surplus grain from the peasants to feed the workers, punishing those hoarding supplies harshly and leading peasants to produce less grain in resistance.

The Red Terror and Execution of the Romanovs (Summer 1918)

Lenin’s regime rapidly escalated its use of violence against opposition. After addressing a meeting of workers in August 1918, Lenin was shot in the neck and badly wounded by a Ukrainian Socialist Revolutionary named Fanya Kaplan. This assassination attempt prompted the Cheka to launch the Red Terror in the summer of 1918. The Cheka was particularly active in the countryside, where they faced fierce peasant resistance; Lenin explicitly supported this brutality, telegramming leaders in Penza to “Hang no fewer than a hundred well-known Kulaks… in full view of the people”. Official Cheka records put deaths between 1918 and 1920 at nearly 13,000, though other estimates suggest the real number was closer to 300,000. In July 1918, during the Civil War, the order was given to execute the former royal family, the Romanovs, in Ekaterinburg to prevent the White army from freeing them.

Civil War Victories and Foreign Interventions (1918–1920)

The Bolsheviks eventually won the Civil War largely due to geographical advantages and the leadership of Trotsky. The Communists dominated the heartland of Russia between Petrograd, Moscow, and Tsaritsyn, giving them a continuous territory of 60 million people, most of Russia’s railway network, and the ability to produce more munitions than the geographically dispersed White armies. When Trotsky was made Commissar for War in 1918, he restored strict hierarchical discipline, introduced conscription, brought back the death penalty for desertion, and forced thousands of former tsarist officers to train army units by holding their families hostage. Foreign conflict continued simultaneously; in Poland, Russian forces were halted outside Warsaw and forced to retreat, leading to an October 1920 armistice that confirmed Polish independence.

The Crisis of 1921 and the Kronstadt Rebellion (1921)

By 1921, eight years of external and internal war had left Russia near collapse. Total industrial output fell to around 20 percent of pre-war levels, and transport collapsed to about 20 percent. The grain harvest was only 48 percent of the 1913 figure, resulting in a devastating famine that may have killed as many as 5 million people and prompted reports of cannibalism. According to Cheka sources, there were 118 separate risings throughout Soviet Russia in February 1921 alone, including the massive Tambov uprising that lasted from August 1920 until June 1921. In March 1921, sailors at the Kronstadt naval base—formerly strong Bolshevik supporters—staged an uprising because life under the Communist dictatorship had become “more terrible than death”. Lenin described the rebellion as the “flash that lit reality more than anything else,” and Trotsky used troops to crush them, killing and wounding 20,000 men.

The New Economic Policy and Political Tightening (1921–1923)

Faced with economic collapse and widespread rebellion, Lenin felt compelled to make a radical turnaround in March 1921 by abandoning War Communism in favour of the New Economic Policy (NEP). Grain requisitioning was abolished and replaced by a ‘tax in kind’, allowing peasants to sell surpluses on the open market. The ban on private trade was removed, rationing was abolished, and small businesses were allowed to reopen and make a profit, while the state retained control of large-scale heavy industries, transport, and banking.
To counter ideological resistance to the NEP, Lenin used the Tenth Party Congress in 1921 to pass a “ban on factions,” meaning the penalty for challenging the agreed party line was expulsion; thus, Russia was governed by a dictatorship more absolute than under the Tsarist autocracy. The NEP brought rapid economic recovery: by 1923, cereal production increased by 23 percent compared to 1920, and factory output rose by almost 200 percent. However, this led to Trotsky’s “scissors crisis”—where agricultural prices dropped significantly while industrial goods rose in price—and created a “get-rich-quick” society dominated by private traders known as “Nepmen”.

The Creation of the USSR (1918–1922)

The Russian Soviet Federal Socialist Republic (RSFSR) had been proclaimed in January 1918, defined as a “dictatorship of the urban and rural proletariat” employing the principle of “he who does not work shall not eat”. During the civil war, areas conquered by the Red Army were taken into the RSFSR or made into separate republics. A debate emerged over the status of these republics; Stalin, the Commissar for Nationalities, wanted them directly controlled by Moscow, but Lenin wanted a federation of equal soviet republics. Lenin won the argument, and at the end of 1922, the Union of the Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) was formally established. Despite Lenin’s victory, the republics were never truly free, as their governments were regarded as regional branches of Sovnarkom and controlled by the Politburo.

Declining Health, the Political Testament, and Death (1922–1924)

Lenin suffered a series of strokes beginning in 1922, taking him largely out of the day-to-day work of running the government. After his second stroke in December 1922, Lenin began drafting his political testament to be read after his death. In it, he warned that Stalin had “immeasurable power concentrated in his hands” and that Trotsky displayed “excessive self-assurance”. In January 1923, after Stalin used crude and abusive language to insult Lenin’s wife, Krupskaya, an extremely angry Lenin added a section proposing that a way be found to remove Stalin from the post of General Secretary because he was “too rude”. Lenin died in January 1924 at the age of 53. His unexpected death led to widespread public grief, with three and a half million people queuing for hours over three days to file past his body. Stalin capitalized on the funeral to advance his position; he tricked Trotsky into not attending, acted as a pallbearer, and made a speech setting himself up as Lenin’s disciple to transfer Lenin’s prestige and loyalty to himself.