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Bolshevik: Bolshevik Revolution
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While there was opposition to the Cheka abuses from within the Bolshevik party, there was no institutional attempt to change its mode of operation. In any organisation, there is both a human and a structural element. Perhaps it could be argued that the abuses of Cheka were due to individual mistakes. If individuals are given unlimited power, including power over life and death, with no accountability, it's inevitable that a measure of excess and corruption will occur. Where this occurs it is up to the revolutionary organisation to make changes to prevent the same mistakes from being repeated. This is not what the Bolshevik party did.
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The Bolshevik Revolution was the overthrow of the Russian government, which took place in the fall of 1917. The Bolsheviks were an extremist faction within the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party (later renamed the Russian Communist Party) who seized control of the government and ushered in the Soviet age. The Bolshevik Revolution is ... known as the October Revolution because, according to the old Russian calendar (in use until 1918), the government overthrow happened on October 25.
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[W]ithin a few short months of October, the Bolsheviks had taken control of the economy out of the hands of the working class and into the hands of the Bolshevik party. This was before the civil war, at a time when the workers had showen themselves capable of making a revolution but according to the Bolsheviks, incapable of running the economy. The basis of the Bolshevik attack on the factory committees was simple, the Bolsheviks wanted the factories to be owned and managed by the state, whereas the factory committees wanted the factories to be owned and managed by the workers. One Bolshevik described the factory committee's attitude: "We found a process which recalled the anarchist dreams of autonomous productive communes."
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According to Lionel Kochan, both during and after the Bolshevik victory of 1917 the Russian countryside began to experience “a genuine and immense agrarian revolution”[28]. Peasants had started to expropriate the large rural estates and, by March 1919, “virtually all the usable land was in peasant hands. The peasants were not socialists, of course; but it was this elemental movement that was indispensable to the victory of Bolshevism.”[29] At the 10th Party Congress in 1921, the prospects for international revolution looked very bleak indeed and Lenin turned instead to a modification of the domestic sphere, unveiling his New Economic Policy (NEP). The NEP represented “an attempt to dismantle the economic structures and policies that had brought Soviet citizens to the brink of despair”[30], and was Lenin’s way of making peace with the Russian peasantry. On the other hand, by asking peasants to pay a tax in kind (in this case with grain) the NEP represented a complete volte-face and was quite detached from the former Bolshevik policy of grain requisition. Lenin’s NEP now allowed peasants to sell their surplus on the open market, something completely alien to the Bolshevik Party’s alleged commitment to anti-capitalist ‘egalitarianism’.
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Inspired in part by severe food shortages, the previous strongholds of Bolshevik support, in the factories of Moscow and Petrograd, took strike action against the regime, calling for the restoration of political and civil rights. The Bolshevik administration declared martial law, forbidding political assemblies and instituting a curfew. Force was used against the striking workers and when this proved insufficient, certain concessions were made. The strike wave had finished by the beginning of March, only to be replaced by an even greater threat. The sailors of the Krondstat fortress, formerly the 'pride and glory of the revolution' (Trotsky) staged an armed insurrection - which was severely and forcibly suppressed. The principal demand of the Krondstat rebels was for an end to the Bolshevik monopoly of power and the restoration of rights to left socialist parties, anarchists and the trade unions.
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The initial triumph of the Bolshevik Revolution at the end of October, 1917 (see Lecture 6), did not mean that the entire population of Russia had been converted to Bolshevism. Lenin was aware of this. To gather national support, Lenin resorted to slogans for the masses. The most important of them was "Bread, Land, Peace and All Power to the Soviets." Was this enough? The Russian people were more anti-Bolshevik than Lenin would have liked. The tsar was gone and a revolution had taken the nation by storm.
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Bolshevik Revolution