Lenin in Power: Brest-Litovsk, Cheka and Civil War
When the Bolsheviks seized power in October 1917 they controlled little beyond Petrograd and Moscow. Within four years they had ended Russia’s war with Germany, dispersed an elected assembly, fought a brutal civil war and built a one-party state. The tools they used — rapid decrees, a feared secret police and Trotsky’s Red Army — defined the new regime.
First Decrees and the Constituent Assembly
Within days of the October Revolution, Lenin issued sweeping decrees to win popular support. The Decree on Land legalised peasants seizing landlord estates. The Decree on Peace called for an immediate end to the First World War without annexations. The Decree on Workers’ Control gave factory committees authority over their workplaces. Banks, railways and large industries were nationalised in the weeks that followed.
Elections to the long-promised Constituent Assembly were held in November 1917. The Bolsheviks came second, winning under a quarter of the seats; the Socialist Revolutionaries (SRs), with their rural base, came first. When the Assembly met in Petrograd in January 1918, Lenin allowed it to sit for one day before Red Guards closed the building. The Bolsheviks ruled instead through the Soviets — bodies they could dominate.
Lenin secured early support with three decrees — Land (peasants keep the estates they took), Peace (end the war) and Workers’ Control (factory committees run industry). The dispersal of the elected Constituent Assembly in January 1918 showed the regime would not share power.
The Treaty of Brest-Litovsk, March 1918
Honouring the Decree on Peace meant doing a deal with Germany. Trotsky led the Soviet delegation and tried delaying tactics, but a renewed German advance forced acceptance. The Treaty of Brest-Litovsk stripped Russia of Ukraine, Poland, Finland, the Baltic provinces and parts of the Caucasus — roughly a third of the population, half of industry and most of its coal.
Lenin defended the treaty as a tactical retreat: peace bought time to consolidate the revolution at home. Critics argued it betrayed the international socialist cause and handed away the country’s industrial heartland. The treaty was annulled when Germany surrendered to the Western Allies eight months later, but the political damage in Russia had been done. Anti-Bolshevik forces accused Lenin of being a German agent and used Brest-Litovsk to justify the coming Civil War.
The Cheka and the Red Terror
In December 1917 Lenin set up the Cheka, the All-Russian Extraordinary Commission, under Felix Dzerzhinsky. Its job was to root out ‘counter-revolution and sabotage’ without trial. After an SR activist shot and wounded Lenin in August 1918, the Cheka launched the official Red Terror — mass arrests, summary executions and hostage-taking in cities across Soviet-held Russia. By 1922 the Cheka had executed an estimated 140,000 people.
The Cheka of 1917-22 should not be confused with the NKVD that Stalin used in the 1930s — they were different organisations from different decades. The Cheka was renamed the GPU in 1922; later reorganisations eventually produced the NKVD. The continuity was the institutional acceptance of secret-police violence as a tool of government, but the Red Terror under Lenin was justified as a wartime emergency measure rather than a permanent feature of peacetime rule.
Nicholas II, his wife Alexandra, their five children and four servants were shot in a cellar in Ekaterinburg on the night of 16-17 July 1918, as White forces approached the city. The local Bolsheviks acted with Moscow’s authorisation. The killing closed off any restoration of the dynasty and signalled that the regime would not allow a rallying point to survive. The bodies were hidden until the 1990s, when DNA testing confirmed the family’s identification and they were reburied in St Petersburg in 1998.
The Civil War, 1918-1921
War broke out across the former empire. The Bolsheviks (Reds) faced the Whites — a loose collection of monarchists, liberals, ex-Tsarist officers and Socialist Revolutionaries — supported at points by Britain, France, the USA and Japan. Peasant Green armies fought both sides. White generals included Anton Denikin in the south, Alexander Kolchak in Siberia, Nikolai Yudenich near Petrograd and Pyotr Wrangel in Crimea.
The Whites were never a single army. Denikin and Kolchak operated thousands of miles apart and never coordinated a joint offensive. Their political programmes ranged from restoring the Tsar to convening a constitutional assembly — an inconsistency that alienated peasants who feared the return of landlords.
Geography: the Reds held the central core — Moscow, Petrograd, the railway hubs and most of the population. They could shift troops along interior lines while the Whites had to coordinate around the rim. Leadership: Trotsky as War Commissar built the Red Army from a few thousand Red Guards into a force of five million by 1920, using ex-Tsarist officers under political commissars. Unity: the Bolsheviks had a single command and a clear cause — defending the revolution. Propaganda: posters, agit-trains and films cast the Whites as agents of foreign capital, while rural Russia feared a White victory would reverse the land seizures of 1917.
The Reds won the Civil War because they held the central core with its railways and people, faced divided enemies who never coordinated, had Trotsky’s disciplined Red Army with ex-Tsarist officers under commissar control, and used propaganda to frame the conflict as defence of land redistribution against a foreign-backed restoration.
By 1921 the Whites had been driven out, but Soviet Russia was wrecked. Industrial output had collapsed, millions had died from fighting, disease and famine, and a third of the population had been ruled briefly by White or foreign forces. The Bolshevik Party had survived — but only by transforming itself into a militarised state run from Moscow with a secret police, a mass army and no remaining political opposition.