The Creation of a One-Party State (Edexcel A Level History): Revision Note

Timeline & Summary

• This note will examine how Lenin created a one-party state after the Communist Revolution

• After October 1917, the Bolsheviks created new governing bodies: the All-Russian Congress of Soviets and the Sovnarkom

• Lenin’s early decrees gave the Bolsheviks immediate popularity

• The Constituent Assembly was shut down when it threatened Bolshevik power

• This marked the start of a one-party system, justified as a "dictatorship of the proletariat"

  • Historians debate whether this was genuine socialism or just authoritarianism

The All-Russian Congress of Soviets

• The All-Russian Congress of Soviets met in June 1917

  • Local soviets sent representatives to the meeting

  • The Congress discussed the future of Russia

• The Second All-Russian Congress of Soviets met after the Bolshevik seizure of power

  • Lenin claimed that the Bolsheviks had seized power on behalf of the soviets

    • This gave the revolution a democratic appearance

  • The Mensheviks and Socialist Revolutionaries walked out in protest

    • Tsereteli (the Mensheviks leader) stated that the Bolshevik government would not last three weeks

• The Congress was not a permanent system of government as it was too big to meet regularly

  • This led to the creation of the Sovnarkom

The Sovnarkom

• The Bolsheviks established the Sovnarkom (Council of People’s Commissars) to act as the executive government after October 1917

• 13 People's Commissars made up the first Sovnarkom

• The Sovnarkom gave the Bolsheviks direct control of policy and law-making

  • The Sovnarkom was supposed to answer to the Congress of Soviets

  • In reality, Lenin bypassed the Congress and ruled through Sovnarkom decrees

Lenin's first decrees

• Lenin issued several decrees in his first few months in power

  • The Congress of Soviets approved the degrees

October 1917

• Decree on Peace called for an immediate armistice to end Russia’s involvement in the First World War

• Decree on Land gave peasants the right to seize land from nobles and the Church

November 1917

• Decree on Workers’ Control allowed workers to supervise management in factories

• Workers' Decrees set an eight-hour working day and a minimum wage

Impact of the decrees

Positive impacts

• The decrees were popular with workers, peasants, and soldiers

  • They seemed to deliver the Bolsheviks’ promises quickly

• Ending Russia's involvement in the First World War allowed Lenin to:

  • Rebuild the economy

  • Establish a new government

Negative impacts

• The Bolsheviks only held power in Petrograd

  • The majority of Russia's territory had not heard about the revolution or was not under Lenin's control

  • The Bolsheviks had little ability to enforce them across Russia in late 1917

The Constituent Assembly

• Elections for a Constituent Assembly were held in November 1917

  • The Socialist Revolutionaries won around 370 seats

  • The Bolsheviks only gained 175 seats

• When the Assembly met in January 1918, it rejected Bolshevik proposals

  • Lenin ordered Red Guards to close it down after one day

    • Lenin argued that the Assembly was unrepresentative of the people’s will and that the Soviets were a higher form of democracy

• The closing of the Constituent Assembly demonstrated that the Bolsheviks would not share power

  • It confirmed the beginning of one-party rule

Was the 'dictatorship of the proletariat' a step towards communism?

• Lenin justified one-party rule as the “dictatorship of the proletariat”

  • Karl Marx stated that this was an important transition phase from capitalism to communism

  • Lenin argued that a temporary dictatorship was necessary to destroy capitalism and protect the revolution

• In practice, Lenin's actions meant centralised Bolshevik control

Soviet perspective

• Soviet historians argued that Lenin’s actions were a necessary stage on the road to communism, defending the working class against counter-revolution

Key Soviet historians

"The working people of the Soviet Republic were confronted with far- reaching, complicated and difficult tasks: they had to defend the gains of the Revolution and utilise the dictatorship of the proletariat in order to achieve complete victory over the exploiting classes and carry out socialist changes. Soviet power triumphed both at the centre and in the localities. The working people of Russia and the rest of the world saw for themselves that Soviet power expressed the basic interests of the masses. ” The central committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, 50th Anniversary of the Great October Socialist Revolution (1967)

"The single-party system became for the Bolsheviks an inescapable necessity. Their own survival, and no doubt the survival of the revolution, depended on it. They had not aimed at it with any premeditation. They established it with misgivings as a temporary expedient. The single-party system went against the inclinations, the logic and the ideas of Lenin, Trotsky, Kamenev, Bukharin, Lunacharsky, Rykov and so many others." - Isaac Deutscher, The Unfinished Revolution: Russia 1917-1967 (1967)

Western perspective

• Most Western historians view the dictatorship as the start of Bolshevik authoritarianism

• They argue Lenin’s actions undermined democracy and set Russia on the path towards totalitarianism

Key Western historians

"The Bolsheviks had found out by experience what they meant by ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’.  It was not a collective class dictatorship exercised by workers...  It was a dictatorship run by full-time ‘cadres’ or bosses." - Sheila Fitzpatrick, The Russian Revolution (1982)

"The pressures from below, to which they attributed Communist actions during and after October, will be revealed for what they were, fictions invented to justify arbitrary deeds of leaders concerned above all with staying in power." - Richard Pipes, Seventy-Five Years on: The Great October Revolution as a clandestine coup d’etat (1992)

"Although the seizure of power had been carried out in the name of the Soviet Congress, Lenin had no intention of ruling through the Congress, or its permanent executive, where the Left SRs, the Anarchists and a small group of Menshevik Internationalists acted as a parliamentary brake on Sovnarkom. On 4 November Sovnarkom decreed itself the right to pass legislation without approval from the Soviet - a clear breach of the principle of Soviet Power." - Orlando Figes, A People’s Tragedy (1996)

"The soviet order was extremely disorderly for a great deal of the time. Yet the movement towards a centralised, ideocratic dictatorship of a single party had been started. Neither Lenin nor his leading comrades had expressly intended this; they had few clearly elaborated policies and were forever fumbling and improvising. Constantly they found international, political, economic, social and cultural difficulties less tractable than they assumed. And constantly they dipped into their rag-bag of authoritarian concepts to help them survive in power… and they felt that the ruthless measures were being applied in the service of a supreme good." - Robert Service, A History of Modern Russia from Nicholas II to Vladimir Putin (2005)