By 1921 the Bolsheviks had won the civil war and lost much of the country. Industrial output had collapsed to a fraction of its prewar level. Workers in Petrograd went on strike against the "workers' state," and peasant armies roamed the provinces. The party's answer combined economic retreat with tighter political control.

Kronstadt

The sailors of the Kronstadt naval base, on an island off Petrograd, had been among the most militant supporters of October. In March 1921 they turned against the government. A resolution adopted on the battleship Petropavlovsk demanded freely elected soviets by secret ballot and free speech for workers, peasants and socialist parties, along with the release of socialist prisoners and an end to grain requisitioning. These were, in effect, demands to make the soviets mean what the slogans of 1917 had promised.

The government called the rising a White plot. Troops under Mikhail Tukhachevsky attacked across the ice of the Gulf of Finland, and after heavy fighting the Red Army crushed the Kronstadt rising. Many captured sailors were shot or sent to camps. For many left-wing admirers of the revolution abroad, Kronstadt became the moment their faith broke.

The New Economic Policy

While the fighting went on, the Tenth Party Congress met in Moscow and changed course. Under the New Economic Policy, or NEP, grain requisitioning was replaced by a tax in kind, and peasants could sell the rest of their harvest. Private trade and small businesses returned, and a new class of traders known as "Nepmen" appeared. The state kept control of what Lenin called the commanding heights: heavy industry, banking and foreign trade. Lenin presented NEP as a necessary retreat, and many communists hated it as a return to capitalism. Yet it worked: by the mid-1920s farm and factory output had largely recovered.

The same congress closed ranks politically. A resolution on party unity banned organized factions inside the Communist Party, ending the open debates that had marked its early years. The Workers' Opposition, led by Alexander Shlyapnikov and Alexandra Kollontai, which wanted trade unions to run industry, was condemned. Other socialist parties were already being suppressed, and in 1922 leading Socialist Revolutionaries were put on show trial.

Famine and the new union

Drought in 1921, on top of years of requisitioning, brought famine to the Volga region and beyond. Perhaps five million people died. The government accepted foreign help. The American Relief Administration, led by Herbert Hoover, fed about ten million people a day at its peak in 1922, and the explorer Fridtjof Nansen led a separate European relief effort.

In December 1922 the Russian republic joined with Ukraine, Belarus and the Transcaucasian republic to form the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, created in December 1922. On paper it was a federation of equal republics with the right to secede; in practice the single Communist Party ruled them all from Moscow.

New ways of living

The early Soviet state also tried to remake daily life. A 1918 family code made civil marriage and divorce simple and gave children born outside marriage equal rights. In 1920 Soviet Russia became the first country to legalize abortion. A women's department of the party worked to draw women into public life, and literacy campaigns spread through the villages. Church and state were separated, and the clergy faced growing persecution. For many people this was a genuine widening of opportunity; for others it came with the loss of faith, property or freedom.

Lenin's last struggle

In 1922 Joseph Stalin became general secretary of the party, a post that let him appoint officials across the country. That May Lenin suffered the first of a series of strokes. In December 1922 and January 1923 he dictated notes on his possible successors, later called his Testament. He praised and criticized each leader. Trotsky was the most capable but too self-confident; Bukharin was the party's favorite but not a true Marxist theorist. In a postscript of January 1923, after Stalin had insulted Lenin's wife, Nadezhda Krupskaya, Lenin recommended removing Stalin as general secretary because he was too rude for the post.

Lenin died on 21 January 1924. Over the next years Stalin outmaneuvered his rivals in turn. He championed "socialism in one country," the view that the Soviet Union could build socialism on its own without waiting for revolution abroad, against Trotsky's theory of permanent revolution. He first joined Zinoviev and Kamenev against Trotsky, then Bukharin against all three. Trotsky was expelled from the party in 1927 and deported from the Soviet Union in 1929. In 1940 an agent of Stalin's police murdered him in Mexico.

Worked example: how the Testament was buried

In May 1924, on the eve of a party congress, Lenin's notes were read aloud to senior delegates. On paper, the founder's own words should have ended Stalin's career. Instead, Zinoviev and Kamenev, then allied with Stalin against Trotsky, argued that Stalin had promised to mend his ways, and the delegates agreed to keep him in office and not to publish the document. Trotsky stayed silent. Two rules of the system made this possible. The faction ban meant no one could openly organize delegates around Lenin's advice without being accused of splitting the party. And the general secretary's power over appointments meant many of the delegates owed their posts to Stalin. The example shows how rules adopted to protect the party in an emergency became tools for one man's rise.