Taking Petrograd proved far easier than holding Russia. Over the next three years the Bolsheviks closed the elected assembly, built a political police and fought a civil war that killed more Russians than the First World War had. The habits formed in these years shaped the Soviet state for decades.

The Constituent Assembly

For a century Russian radicals of every kind had demanded a Constituent Assembly, elected by all, to decide the country's form of government. The Bolsheviks had attacked the Provisional Government for delaying it, and they allowed the election to go ahead in November 1917. More than 40 million people voted, the freest election Russia would see for over seventy years. The Socialist Revolutionaries won the most votes, around 40 percent. The Bolsheviks won roughly a quarter, winning the big cities and many soldiers. The Kadets and Mensheviks trailed far behind.

The Assembly met on 5 January 1918. When its majority refused to accept the Soviet government's authority, the Bolshevik delegates walked out. Early the next morning the Bolsheviks dispersed the Assembly after a single day, and guards barred the doors. A demonstration in its support had already been fired on. Lenin argued that soviets were a higher form of democracy than a parliament elected on outdated party lists. His critics saw the end of any chance for a government accountable to all voters.

The Cheka

In December 1917 the new government created the All-Russian Extraordinary Commission to Combat Counterrevolution and Sabotage, known by its initials as the Cheka, the Bolshevik political police. Its head was Felix Dzerzhinsky, a Polish revolutionary. It arrested, imprisoned and executed people without trial. Opposition newspapers were closed. The Kadets were outlawed as "enemies of the people." The Left Socialist Revolutionaries, who had joined the government, left it in March 1918 over the punishing peace with Germany signed at Brest-Litovsk, and rose in revolt that July. They were crushed. That spring the government also moved the capital to Moscow, and the party renamed itself the Communist Party.

Civil war

The wider war began along the railway. About 40,000 Czech and Slovak soldiers, former prisoners of war organized as the Czechoslovak Legion, were traveling east on the Trans-Siberian line, hoping to reach France. In May 1918 the Czechoslovak Legion revolted after the Soviet government tried to disarm it, and seized towns from the Volga to Siberia. Under its protection, anti-Bolshevik governments sprang up.

The opponents of the Bolsheviks, loosely called the Whites, included monarchists, liberals and moderate socialists, who often distrusted one another. Their main armies were led by Admiral Alexander Kolchak in Siberia, General Anton Denikin in the south and General Nikolai Yudenich near Petrograd. Britain, France, Japan and the United States sent troops to ports such as Murmansk, Archangel and Vladivostok, but their help was limited and divided.

As Czech and White forces neared Yekaterinburg, in July 1918 local Bolsheviks shot the former tsar, his wife, their five children and four servants in a cellar. After Fanny Kaplan shot and wounded Lenin in August, the government declared a Red Terror. Thousands of hostages and "class enemies" were shot. The Whites carried out their own terror, and White and nationalist forces in Ukraine committed massacres of Jews; tens of thousands of Jews were killed in pogroms during the war.

Red Army and War Communism

Trotsky, as war commissar, built the Red Army from Red Guard bands into a conscript force of millions. He recruited tens of thousands of former tsarist officers as "military specialists," with political commissars attached to watch them, and he toured the fronts in an armored train. The Red Army also had a basic strategic advantage: the Reds held the central core, with its railway hub, its arms factories and most of the population.

At home the government ran a system later called War Communism. It nationalized industry, banned private trade and requisitioned grain from peasants by force. Money lost nearly all value. Cities emptied as people fled hunger. Peasants who had welcomed the Decree on Land now hid grain and rose in revolt, most fiercely in Tambov province in 1920 to 1921.

Worked example: why did the Reds win?

In October 1919 Denikin's army took Orel, within about 400 kilometers of Moscow, and Yudenich reached the outskirts of Petrograd. A year later the Whites had been defeated almost everywhere, and the last of them were evacuated from Crimea in November 1920. Why?

Start with geography. Holding the central core, the Reds could shift troops along interior lines. The Whites were scattered around the edges and could not coordinate. Next, politics. Many peasants hated Red requisitioning, but they feared that a White victory would bring back the landlords, and White leaders did little to reassure them. White generals' commitment to a "Russia, one and indivisible" also alienated Poles, Finns, Ukrainians and others who might have been allies. Finally, organization. The Bolsheviks had one leadership and one program; the Whites had several of each. None of this made the Reds popular, but it made them the lesser evil for enough people. The cost was immense: estimates of deaths from fighting, terror, disease and hunger range from about 7 to more than 10 million, and one to two million people fled abroad.