1917
November
Land Decree
Voting for Constituent Assembly
1918
December
Formation of the CHEKA
18th January
Dismissal of the Constituent Assembly
March
Treaty of Brest-Litovsk
July
Murder of the royal family
28th August
Attempted assassination of Lenin
19181920
Civil War
Foreign Intervention
War Communism
Famine
1921
March
10th Party Congress
Defeat of the Kronstadt Uprising
Introduction of the New Economic Policy
Treaty of Riga
1922
Formation of the USSR
1922-23
Lenin suffers strokes
1923
October
Scissors Crisis
1924
1927
January
Death of Lenin
End of New Economic Policy
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SOVNARKOM
'Lenin is sheer intellect… Lenin has tremendous power; he is backed by the Soviets… Lenin is
a master propagandist.’ Louise Bryant
‘Nationalisation and workers’ control kept many [factories] operated which would otherwise have
been liquidated’ Robert Service
‘Sovnarkom’s social reforms enjoyed much support among workers, peasants, and soldiers’
Service
CONSTITUENT ASSEMBLY
‘The first casualty [of Bolshevik rule] was the Western-type Constituent Assembly’ Lee
DECREES
‘no other aim but to satisfy the needs of the soldiers, workers and peasants' Trotsky
‘[Bolsheviks were] the only people in Russia who had a definite program of action’ John Reed
'All private ownership of land is abolished immediately without compensation’ Decree on Land
‘There was… no immediate attempt at widespread nationalisation to bring industry under state
control’ Lee
BREST-LITOVSK
‘This enabled the Bolsheviks to focus on the internal situation’ Lee
CIVIL WAR
'A White victory was never beyond the realm of possibility' Steve Smith
‘The Bolsheviks were still in control of less than one-sixth of Russia at the beginning of 1918’
Stephen J Lee
‘Lenin’s diplomacy also ensured Bolshevik survival in this crucial period’ Stephen Lee
‘The men of the Red Army… displayed unparalleled self-sacrifice and heroism’ CPSU
‘The Bolsheviks benefited greatly from the deficiencies of the Whites’ Lee
‘The support of the organised workers, which the Bolsheviks won in 1917, and never lost’
Christopher Hill
RED ARMY/TERROR
‘Urgent measures are necessary to fight the counter-revolutionaries and saboteurs' Lenin
'The Bolshevik tyranny was of a most savage and bloodthirsty character' Bolshevik Tyranny,
Annual Register
'The Terror was a war by the regime against the whole of society- a means of terrorizing it into
submission.' Orlando Figes
'The Cheka became an organ of terror’ Fitzpatrick
‘We stand for organised terror’ Felix Dzerzhinsky
'Without mercy, we will kill our enemies in scores of hundreds' Krasnaya Gazeta
TREATY OF RIGA
‘the Soviet leaders abandoned the cause of international revolution.' AJP Taylor
WHITE TERROR
'The greater the terror the greater our victories… to shed the blood of three fourths of all
Russians' Kornilov
'Anti-Bolshevik forces killed 100 for every one person killed by the Bolsheviks' Major General
William S Graves
‘All the old vices of the Tsarist regime came back’ General Graves
STATE CAPITALISM
'The resistance of the capitalists and high-ranking employees will be smashed’ Lenin
WAR COMMUNISM
‘We shall support you, but take care of production, see that production is useful' Lenin to a
delegation of workers
‘All these measures, which were necessitated by the exceptionally difficult conditions of national
defence, bore a temporary character' CPSU
'The Soviet economy lay in shambles’ Richard Pipes
‘[It was] militant Communism or rather pure Communism, and its failure was self-evident'
Bernard Pares
‘Such measures were a practical reaction to a worsening situation. There was also an
ideological element at work’ Service
1921 FAMINE
'In our village everyone eats human flesh but they hide it.’ Man arrested for cannibalism
'We can (and therefore must) carry out the confiscation of the church valuables with the most
savage and merciless energy' Lenin
KRONSTADT REVOLT
‘Although the Kronstadt Revolt was suppressed by Trotsky and Tukhachevskii, the threat was
taken seriously by Lenin’ Lee
‘No one in the country would be allowed to think that political concessions might be wrung out of
the regime’ Service
10th PARTY CONGRESS
NEP
‘[The NEP] meant that there was no longer a cause for which the peasantry needed to prolong
their resistance’ Stephen Lee
‘[War Communism] was so fiercely opposed that the regime was forced to backtrack into the
New Economic Policy’ Stephen Lee
‘the Bolsheviks surrendered to the peasantry' Figes