How far do you agree that the Bolshevik survival in power 1918-24 was even more surprising than their seizure of power in 1917?

[Prof.  Read starts with a paragraph describing the fall of the Provisional Government and the Bolshevik takeover.]

...  Although there were some tough fights, notably in Moscow, the October Revolution was much easier than the struggles which lay ahead. 

In the first place the power of old Russia, although it had been caught off-balance in October, was not yet broken.  Indeed, the radicalisation that followed October – the seizure of remaining private estates, the nationalisation of factories.  the ejection of military officers, the nationalisation of banks and the subordination of the state bureaucracy to an extreme left-wing government – meant that it had to throw its weight into an all-out struggle to survive.  The result was a devastating civil war. 

Social disorder, famine and disease claimed most of the Civil War's ten million victims.  The country was broken up into dozens of separate entities, some of which broke away to form independent states like Finland, Poland, the Baltic States, the Ukraine, Georgia and Armenia.  In addition, foreign armies from Germany.  Turkey, Austria, Britain, France, Japan and the United States occupied pans of the collapsing empire.  They also tended to support anti-Soviet groups.  Not one foreign power gave any support to the Bolsheviks.  Political chaos broke up economic links between areas, transport collapsed and industry was starved of raw materials and markets.  The Whites gathered in the grain growing areas of the south.  making it a colossal task for the Soviet (Red) side to feed the relatively densely populated areas which they held. 

The odds stacked against the Reds made it look inevitable that they would be overthrown.  At the lowest point, in late spring of 1919, the Reds were pushed back into holding only ten per cent of the territory of the old Russian empire.  Denikin's Volunteer Army attacked Moscow from the south and came to within less than two hundred miles (about 322 kilometres) of the city.  Kolchak's army crossed the Urals.  Yudenich was at the gates of Petrograd.  Fortunately for the Bolsheviks the peak of each of these attacks came at different moments in 1919, and Trotsky and his elite troops were able to travel from front to front by armoured train and disperse the threats one by one.  By the end of 1919 the Whites were in headlong retreat.  When, in 1921, Wrangel was forced out of their last stronghold in the Crimea they were no more. 

It was not just Trotsky and the Red Army who had defeated them, however.  The Red-held zone may have been small in area but it was large in population, and here the Bolsheviks held a decisive advantage.  In the political war of Reds and Whites the population favoured the Reds, not because the ordinary people were dyed-in-the-wool Marxists, but because the Reds represented some hope of retaining the gains of the revolution – land, democracy of a sort and workers' control of factories, for example.  By comparison, the Whites offered only the return of landlords, employers, bankers and a despised Tsar.  To prevent this, the population tended to fight for the Reds, particularly when the Whites were in the vicinity.  However, as the White threat receded the danger for the Bolsheviks was not over.  The Civil War had concealed another, perhaps more dangerous threat. 

It has already been mentioned that the Bolsheviks rode to power on a wave of support for soviets, rather than the party.  The implications of this became clearer as the White threat faded.  Even as the Civil War continued major anti-Bolshevik uprisings in western Siberia and Tambov were forcing a re-think of the government's agrarian policies.  The result was a switch from compulsory grain requisitioning, usually carried out at gunpoint, to a system of 'tax in kind' (by which peasants paid their taxes in the form of a proportion of their surplus produce, selling the rest in the market).  This was the basis of the so-called New Economic Policy (NEP).  It was introduced in March 1921 at the Tenth Party Congress which, together with the simultaneous brutal suppression of the Kronstadt Revolt, marked the end of the violent phase of the revolution and the end of the immediate threat to Bolshevik power.  In the following months the Bolsheviks consolidated their one-party state by making the secret police permanent, putting Social Revolutionary politicians on trial, setting up censorship, completing the monopoly of press and publishing and ending university autonomy.  Factions within the party were also banned. 

As a result, by 1921 the Bolsheviks were apparently secure in their power, but they still had to counter one more deadly threat.  They did not have the support of the mass of the population.  It would be wrong to say only peasants opposed them.  Workers, too, who were in any case little different from peasants in outlook and way of life, were sceptical.  After all, since October 1917 Russia had virtually de-industrialised and partially de-urbanised.  On the other hand, party militants, fresh from their victories against the White armies, were in no mood to compromise with wavering workers or, especially, peasants, whom they considered counter-revolutionary in their supposed attachment to private rather than collectivised methods of farming.  As the years progressed they became more and more impatient and wanted action to speed up Russia's socialist transformation.  Instead, NEP was a compromise and one which, they argued, led to more and more concessions being made to peasants, largely in the form of paying them more for their grain.  Every resource which went to the peasant, they argued, was a resource taken away from industrialisation, the centrepiece of socialism.  Thus, the issue of the peasantry was threatening to split the party, especially since Lenin's illness and eventual death in January 1924 had opened up a bitter succession dispute. 

[Prof Read adds a paragraph about Stalin.]

From the above account, it is clear that for the Bolsheviks taking power was the easy part.  Retaining it, in the face of the massed opponents of the Civil War and the less obvious, but potentially deadly, opposition of much of the population, was definitely more difficult. 

This essay by Christopher Read, Dept. History, University of Warwick, was printed in Peter Catterall, Exam Essays in 20th Century World History (1999).