Early Bolshevik Decrees and the Constituent Assembly
Power on Paper, Power in Practice
When the Second Congress of Soviets dispersed on 27 October 1917 (Old Style), the Bolsheviks had a capital, a cabinet and a stack of unsigned decrees. They did not yet have a country. Most of the old empire had not heard of the seizure; the bureaucracy refused to take orders; the railways stopped working; the army was disintegrating on the front. In the eight months between October 1917 and the execution of the Romanovs in July 1918, Lenin’s government tried to lock in its position with three weapons: a flood of headline-grabbing decrees, the closure of every rival institution, and the terror of the new secret police. This lesson tracks the first two. The Cheka comes later.
Between October and December 1917 the Bolsheviks issued four headline decrees: the Decree on Peace (immediate end to the war), the Decree on Land (gentry, Crown and Church estates to the peasants), the Decree on Workers’ Control (factory committees over the bosses) and the Decree on Nationalities (right of self-determination for non-Russian peoples). They were popular promises that Lenin’s government did not fully control.
Sovnarkom — A New Government in Twenty-Four Hours
On 26 October the Second Congress of Soviets ratified the formation of a new government, the Sovnarkom — the Council of People’s Commissars. Lenin became chairman. Trotsky took foreign affairs. Joseph Stalin was given the Commissariat for Nationalities. Anatoly Lunacharsky took education. Alexandra Kollontai became Commissar for Social Welfare — the first woman in a modern European cabinet. The Mensheviks and the right Socialist Revolutionaries had walked out of Congress in protest, so Sovnarkom was an entirely Bolshevik body.
Almost immediately the new government had to face a sabotage strike by the old civil service. Bank clerks refused to release funds. Foreign Ministry staff burned files. Telegraph operators cut off Petrograd. The Bolsheviks responded by sending Red Guards into ministries to break locks and physically force compliance. The new state was being built one office at a time.
The Decrees: Peace, Land, Workers’ Control, Nationalities
The Decree on Peace demanded an immediate armistice and a peace without annexations or indemnities. The Allies ignored it. Germany did not. Within weeks the new Russian government was at the negotiating table at Brest-Litovsk.
The Decree on Land transferred all gentry, Crown and Church estates to peasant communes without compensation. In practice, peasants had been seizing land themselves since the summer; the decree gave their action the legal stamp of the new government. The Bolsheviks knew the policy was lifted directly from the Socialist Revolutionaries’ programme, but Lenin took it anyway: at this stage the priority was to win peasant acceptance.
The Decree on Workers’ Control put factory committees in charge of monitoring the bosses, the books and production targets. It was not yet full nationalisation — private owners remained in place — but it shifted authority on the shop floor. The Decree on Workers’ Control was the most popular of the new measures in the cities.
The Decree on Nationalities, drafted by Stalin and Lenin, declared that all peoples of the former Russian empire had the right to self-determination, including secession. Within months Finland, Poland, Ukraine and the Baltic states had taken Bolshevik leaders at their word and declared independence. Bolshevik policy then quietly hardened: self-determination, in practice, would mean rule by local Bolsheviks.
Students often write that the Bolsheviks ‘nationalised everything’ in 1917. They did not. Workers’ Control was first, in November 1917, and only put committees over the bosses, not in place of them. The State Bank was nationalised in December 1917. Major industries followed in stages through 1918, but full nationalisation across the economy only arrived with War Communism in mid-1918, after the Civil War had begun. Strong answers separate the early decrees from the wartime emergency that followed them.
The Constituent Assembly — Elected and Dispersed
The Constituent Assembly elections of 12 November 1917 had been promised by every party in 1917, including the Bolsheviks, and Lenin let them go ahead. The result was inconvenient. The Socialist Revolutionaries took roughly 40 per cent of the vote, the Bolsheviks roughly 24 per cent, the Kadets around 5 per cent and the Mensheviks around 3 per cent. The peasant majority of Russia had voted SR. Bolshevik strength was concentrated in Petrograd, Moscow and the army.
The Assembly opened in the Tauride Palace on 5 January 1918. The SR leader Viktor Chernov was elected chair. The Bolsheviks demanded the Assembly endorse Sovnarkom’s decrees as a condition for continuing. The Assembly refused. Lenin walked out. The next morning the Red Guard locked the doors. Yakov Sverdlov, the Bolshevik chairman of the Central Executive Committee, declared the Assembly dissolved. It had sat for less than a day.
The Bolsheviks came second in the only nationwide free election in 1917. The Socialist Revolutionaries won roughly 40 per cent against the Bolsheviks’ 24 per cent. Lenin closed the Assembly down on 6 January 1918 because, as he argued at the time, ‘a soviet republic is a higher form of democracy than the bourgeois Constituent Assembly’.
Banning the Opposition
The closure of the Assembly was the start of a wider clamp-down on rival parties. The Kadets had been outlawed in late November 1917 as ‘enemies of the people’. The Left Socialist Revolutionaries left Sovnarkom in March 1918 in protest at the Brest-Litovsk peace and were progressively shut out of the soviets. By the summer of 1918 the right SRs and Mensheviks had been banned from the soviets too. By 1921 the ban on factions inside the Bolshevik Party itself, agreed at the Tenth Party Congress, completed the picture: only one party, and only one line within it, would be tolerated. Strong answers trace the line from the closure of the Constituent Assembly to one-party rule rather than treating each step as separate.
The Romanovs at Ekaterinburg
Tsar Nicholas II had abdicated in March 1917 and been moved by the Provisional Government to Tobolsk in Siberia. After October the Bolsheviks transferred the family to the Ipatiev House in Ekaterinburg. As the Civil War approached the Urals in the summer of 1918, the local Bolshevik leadership, almost certainly with Moscow’s authorisation, decided to act. On the night of 16–17 July 1918 Nicholas, Alexandra, their five children and four servants were taken to a basement room and shot. There was no trial. The bodies were destroyed and hidden in mineshafts outside the town.
Students sometimes write that the Romanovs were tried before being executed. They were not. The shootings at the Ipatiev House were carried out without trial on direct orders from the Ural Regional Soviet, almost certainly authorised in Moscow. The reason given at the time was the approach of White and Czech Legion forces who might have rescued the Tsar; the deeper reason was that as long as the Romanovs lived they remained a focal point for monarchist resistance. With the family gone, the Whites had no candidate for the throne. The execution was also not announced honestly — only Nicholas was reported shot, and the deaths of Alexandra, the four daughters and the heir Alexei were denied by the regime for years.