The Soviets

By October 1917, Russia had suffered nearly three years of catastrophic losses in World War One. The tsar had already fallen months earlier, replaced by a Provisional Government that made a fatal mistake — it kept fighting the war.

The Bolsheviks, led by Vladimir Lenin, offered something different. Peace. Land. Bread. Three words that cut through the noise of a country exhausted and hungry.

“The Provisional Government chose the war. Lenin chose the people.”

In October 1917, Bolshevik forces seized key buildings in Petrograd and overthrew the government. There was little resistance. It was not a mass uprising — it was a swift, organised seizure of power.

From that moment, Russia was set on a radically different path. A one-party communist state began to take shape, and the modern world would never be quite the same.

The Russian Civil War lasted from 1918 to 1921. On one side were the Reds — the Bolsheviks and their supporters. On the other were the Whites — a loose coalition of tsarists, liberals, foreign-backed armies, and anyone who opposed communist rule.

“The Reds won not because they were strong — but because the Whites were divided.”

The Bolsheviks created the Red Army under Leon Trotsky, a ruthlessly effective fighting force built from scratch. They also created the Cheka — a secret police force that arrested, tortured, and executed suspected opponents.

This period introduced War Communism: the state seizing grain from peasants, controlling industry, and enforcing discipline at gunpoint. Famine killed millions.

When the Reds finally won, they had normalised something dangerous — the idea that terror, repression, and total state control were necessary tools of revolutionary survival. That mindset would define Soviet rule for decades.

The Union of Soviet Socialist Republics brought together Russia, Ukraine, Belarus, and the Caucasian republics under a single government. On paper, it was a federal state where different nations had their own republics and cultural rights.

In practice, one institution ran everything: the Communist Party. The party controlled the government, the army, the press, and the economy. Without party membership, real power was simply out of reach.

“The Soviet Union called itself a union of free peoples. In reality it was a one-party state dressed in federal clothes.”

Lenin had designed this system. He believed the party represented the working class, so the party's decisions were by definition correct. Organised dissent was not permitted.

By 1922, Lenin was already gravely ill. A succession struggle was beginning. The state he had built would soon pass to a man who would push its logic much further — and with far more brutal consequences.