Lenin’s Government: Building the One-Party State, 1917–1924 (AQA A Level History: Component 1: Breadth study): Revision Note

Summary

• Lenin built a one-party state after October 1917, shutting out rival parties

• The Constituent Assembly was elected in November 1917, but Lenin closed it after a single day in January 1918

• Power shifted from the soviets to the Communist Party

  • The Politburo, created in 1919, became the real centre of decision-making

• The Cheka, founded in December 1917, drove the Red Terror of 1918 to 1921 against real and suspected enemies

• The 1921 ban on factions ended open debate inside the Party

  • The 1924 Constitution then formalised the USSR under Party control

• Historians debate whether Lenin’s “dictatorship of the proletariat” was a step towards communism or a way to concentrate power in the Party

  • Nettl argues that Lenin justified Bolshevik rule through revolutionary action, not elections or popular consent

The Constituent Assembly, 1918: why did Lenin shut it down?

Table – The Constituent Assembly election results, November 1917

Why the elections went ahead

• The Bolsheviks inherited a promise to hold elections to a Constituent Assembly

  • The Provisional Government had already promised to hold them

  • Cancelling the vote would have looked like an open seizure of power

• Lenin allowed the elections to take place in November 1917

  • The Bolsheviks had only just taken power in October

  • They wanted to appear legitimate

  • Their slogan, "All power to the Soviets", suggested popular government

Why the result was a problem for Lenin

• The Bolsheviks won less than a quarter of the vote

  • The Socialist Revolutionaries (SRs) won the most seats

  • An elected assembly could claim more authority than the Sovnarkom

• A free assembly threatened Bolshevik control

  • It could have voted the Bolsheviks out

  • It challenged Lenin’s belief in rule by a disciplined revolutionary party

  • In State and Revolution, Lenin had argued that the proletariat needed a strong party to guide the people, not a parliament

How and why Lenin shut it down

• The Assembly met for a single day in January 1918

  • Red Guards then closed it and refused to let it meet again

  • Troops fired on demonstrators in support of the Assembly

    • Twelve demonstrators were killed

• Lenin justified the closure through ideology, not democracy

  • He described elected assemblies as a lower, 'bourgeois' form of rule

  • He claimed the soviets were a higher form of democracy

  • The left SRs briefly stayed in coalition with the Bolsheviks, giving Lenin a thin claim to represent “the people”

• Closing the Constituent Assembly marked the start of one-party rule

  • The Bolsheviks had shown that they would not share power

  • Party control now mattered more than electoral consent

Political centralisation under Lenin: power to the party

From the soviets to Sovnarkom

• Lenin had promised "All power to the Soviets" in his April Theses

  • In practice, he ruled through the Sovnarkom, a Bolshevik-only cabinet of commissars

• The Sovnarkom became the centre of government

  • It met once or twice a day

  • It is governed by decree

  • It made key decisions without wider approval

• The wider Soviet was sidelined

  • It met less often

  • It had less influence over policy

  • Lenin made peace talks and key decrees without its approval

'Squeezing out' the other parties

• Lenin refused to share power with other socialist parties

  • He sidelined the Mensheviks and most SRs

    • Despite a shared Marxist belief

  • Some Bolsheviks who wanted a broad coalition resigned in protest

• The left-wing SRs left the Sovnarkom in 1918

  • They opposed the signing of the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk

  • From that point, the Bolsheviks governed alone

  • In March 1918, they renamed themselves the Communist Party

The Party above the state

• Real power moved from state bodies to Party bodies

  • The Politburo, set up in 1919, became the true centre of power

  • The Central Committee directed Party affairs and elected the Politburo

  • Decisions flowed down through the Party, then to the state

• Democratic centralism justified control from the top

  • Debate was allowed before a decision

  • Once a decision had been made, all Party members had to obey

    • This gave the leadership a free hand once it had been decided

The use of terror under Lenin: the Cheka & the Red Terror

Why did the Bolsheviks use terror?

• Lenin argued that violence was needed to protect the revolution

  • The Bolsheviks faced armed opposition during the Civil War

  • Terror was presented as a weapon against counter-revolution

• Terror increased when the Bolsheviks felt threatened

  • Alexander Antonov led a major peasant rebellion in 1921

  • Sailors at the Kronstadt naval base rebelled in 1921

The creation of the Cheka

• Lenin set up the Cheka in December 1917

  • It was a secret police force

  • It was led by Felix Dzerzhinsky, known as 'Iron Felix'

  • Its job was to crush counter-revolutionary activity

• The Cheka became a key tool of Bolshevik control

  • It was based in the Lubianka building in Moscow

  • The regime quickly used it against rival parties

  • The Sovnarkom banned the opposition press in October 1917

• Rival leaders were arrested

  • Kadet, Menshevik and SR leaders were targeted

The Red Terror, 1918 - 1921

• Terror became systematic during the Civil War of 1918-1921

  • An attempt to assassinate Lenin in August 1918 was the trigger

  • The Cheka were told to use 'merciless mass terror' against opponents

• A wide range of people were targeted as 'class enemies'

  • The Tsar and his family were executed in July 1918

    • This was to prevent any Romanov bloodline from existing to threaten Lenin's government

  • Around 500 SRs and Mensheviks were shot in Petrograd

  • Around 8,000 priests were executed between 1921 and 1921

• Estimates suggest 500,000 to 1 million people were shot between 1918 and 1921

  • Many more were sent to labour camps, where conditions were harsh

• The Cheka was later renamed

  • It became the GPU in 1922

  • In 1923, it became the OGPU

The ban on factions, 1921, & the Soviet Constitution, 1924

Why did Lenin ban factions?

• By 1921, Lenin worried about opposition within his own Party

  • Groups such as the Workers' Opposition demanded more worker control

  • It was led by Shlyapnikov and Kollontai

• Lenin believed open disagreement weakened party unity

  • He wanted a single, disciplined Party in a time of crisis

What the ban did

• The 1921 ban on factions was passed at the Tenth Party Congress

  • It was set out in the resolution 'On Party Unity'

  • All members had to accept the Central Committee's decisions

• Anyone forming a faction faced expulsion from the Party

  • Open debate was restricted

  • Organised challenge was closed off

  • The ban later became a weapon in the leadership struggle after Lenin's death

The 1924 Constitution

• The Bolsheviks first created a constitution for Soviet Russia in 1918

  • This set up the RSFSR, the Russian Soviet Republic

• The USSR was formed in December 1922

  • It joined Russia with other Soviet republics

  • These included Ukraine, Belarus and Transcaucasia

• The 1924 Constitution gave the new union a formal structure

  • On paper, authority rested with the Congress of Soviets

  • In reality, the Communist Party kept control over decision-making

Was the ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’ a step towards communism?

• Marxists argued that the working class needed to hold power during the transition from capitalism to communism

  • This stage was called the “dictatorship of the proletariat”

  • Historians disagree over whether Lenin’s rule matched this idea or became a one-party dictatorship

It was a genuine transitional stage

• Marxist theory expected a period of working-class rule before communism

  • Lenin saw the Party as a vanguard acting for the proletariat

  • Capitalism and the old elite had to be broken down first

• Early measures aimed at the goals socialists had long demanded

  • Land was redistributed

  • Workers gained new rights

• Defenders argue that terror and centralisation were emergency tools

  • The Civil War forced harsh measures

  • Some of these measures were later relaxed

In practice, power passed to the Party rather than the proletariat

• The Bolsheviks ruled as a single party from early 1918

  • The Constituent Assembly was shut after one day

  • Rival socialist parties were banned

  • Rival leaders were arrested

• Decisions were taken by a small Party leadership

  • The Politburo, not the workers, set policy

  • The 1921 ban on factions silenced debate even inside the Party

  • The Cheka used terror to enforce the leadership's will

Key historian

• Nettl argues that Bolshevik rule rested on taking action to deliver peace and land

  • It did not rest on winning a democratic mandate

  • This supports the view that Lenin’s “dictatorship of the proletariat” meant Party dominance, not rule by the working class as a whole